Woo, sorry for that little unannounced hiatus! I was getting my shit back together here at home after returning from my trip and being a panelist at International Lolita Day in NYC (welcome, to anyone who's started following me from there!) This monstrously huge article is the uber-overview of my trip to Japan, a detailed write-up of everything I felt was worth talking about (things I wish I had known before I left or that I think will be helpful to anyone planning their own trip). I'll start with the itinerary, what we did and when, before going on to general information and impressions. The next post will be all of my outfit shots from my trip, and then the final post will be a follow-up Q&A based on questions or comments I receive on the first two posts- so if you have anything to say, say it here!

(note: Any discussion of money in this post will use yen as its currency. In order to keep from confusing ourselves during the trip, Stefan and I referred to our money in yen, instead of converting everything in our minds, so that's how I've continued to think of it. Plus, that way this information is more accessible to people besides Americans! An easy way to mentally convert yen to USD is to move the decimal point over, or remove the last two digits; this isn't exact anymore, and I wouldn't plan your trip around it, but for the intents and purposes of reading this article it'll help anyone who's confused. Alternatively, use a converter, such as www.xe.com.)

Itinerary:

Day One was spent in transit. We landed in Tokyo at 2 PM, and didn't reach our hotel in Hakone until about 9 PM due to navigating the public transportation system, fighting with our luggage, and getting some technical details about our return flight sorted out. We promptly fell asleep as soon as we were in the room, which is awesome, because it meant we had almost completely conquered jet lag and gotten ourselves into a healthier sleep schedule than we have even here.

Day Two was spent around Hakone. Hakone is an absolutely lovely area, full of natural beauty that I don't think I've ever seen rivaled anywhere else in the world. It's a smaller city, much more rural than Tokyo, which I chose kind of arbitrarily based on what I read about it at Japan Guide (a really indispensable resource, in my opinion.) We walked around the area our hotel was in (Hakone-Yumoto), which had a beautiful river and a quaint downtown area.

Day Three to Ten we were in Tokyo. We took the bullet train up to Tokyo then the subway to Ikebukuro to get to our ryokan, which was a really great place to stay. My brother had recommended it because all of the staff spoke English really well, as well as Japanese and often other languages too. The room was, as I had expected, tiny, but it was also cheap and served our purpose; all we had to do was sleep and keep stuff there.

In Tokyo, we went to Ochanomizu, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro (obvi, we were living there!), Akihabara, and, of course, Harajuku, with a few really short sojourns elsewhere (Nippori and Shibuya, I think). Surprisingly, the district that we went to most often was Akihabara, also called Electric Town, once the hub of Japanese geekery and "otaku" culture and now a slightly watered-down tourist attraction, but still pretty awesome. We also spent a lot of time in Ochanomizu, which is apparently considered the guitar mecca of the world, where I translated the purchase of Stefan's new ESP Horizon III guitar and totally leveled up my Japanese language skill set (funniest thing ever! I'll have to tell you guys about it sometime- the employees totally thought we were just stupid tourists until Stefan broke out the fat stack of bills he'd be paying for the guitar with). Our next-most-frequented was Harajuku. I think we went twice: once to scope it out, see what was in which shops, and again to pick up items my friends requested as souvenirs.

Details:

Money: Good lord did I spend too much. I didn't go much over the budget I set for myself, but I ended up having an extra $400 saved up of spending money, and I charged about $100 extra onto my credit card. About $150 or so of that were requests from friends, which I am now collecting back, so some of it went to that, too. As far as food costs, I'd say my original estimate was about accurate. Some days we went out for a nicer lunch or dinner, but we still rarely went over the estimates of 1000 yen for lunch and 1500 yen for dinner. Breakfast we could have done cheaply, but we usually spent a bit more than our allowance of 500 yen (our most expensive breakfast was 800 yen or so each because we went to a cafe). Our favorite spots for food were noodle or curry shops (be warned, ladies- you'll probably be the only women eating here) and convenience stores, at both of which we could easily get a full meal for under 1000 yen. In fact, let me just tell you about the amazingness of Japanese 7-11. The back wall of all the konbini (short for "convenience store") we went to were lined with refrigerated cases of freshly-made meals- everything from sushi and riceballs to beef curry and salads. An illustration:

My lunch our first day: cold soba noodles and green apple juice, about 400-500 yen:

 

 Shopping: My favorite place to shop was, of course, Harajuku. It's not exactly the mecca it used to be when Gwen Stefani brought it into Western eyes, since many alternative fashion brands have branched out (take the Marui Young building in Shinjuku, the biggest alternative-fashion-only mall I saw there), but it's still just so much fun to clomp up and down Takeshita-Douri, if for no other reason than to be a huge tourist. You can also trek up to Meiji Jingu, which is a beautiful shrine nearby. As far as Harajuku's must-sees: For lolitas, I'd say you absolutely have to go to La Foret and Closet Child. I did a panel on lolita in Japan the day after I got home, and I really should have retitled it "An Ode to Closet Child" for all the waxing poetic I did. I bought a velvet BABY dress, a navy plaid BABY blazer, and a light blue Angelic Pretty summer cutsew for a total of 16,000 yen, which I could have easily paid for the dress alone- and am pretty sure I almost did a few months ago. On my first excursion to Harajuku (the only one in which I bought things for myself), I spent around 30,000 yen and bought this:

Red velvet BABY OP (Closet Child)
Blue plaid BABY blazer (Closet Child)
Brown Bodyline bolero (BL)
Red Bodyline perfume bottles skirt (BL ~ ended up selling this to a friend because it's a bit snug)
White and blue bow socks (BL)
Three pairs of socks from tutu*anna
Lavender Sugar Pansy socks (Angelic Pretty Laforet)
Brown Angelic Pretty pochette (AP Laforet ~ Birthday present from Stefan)
Blue Angelic Pretty summer cutsew (Closet Child)
Brown floral maxi dress (Momo by Wonder Rocket)

 Another ridiculously fun place to shop was Yodobashi Kamera in Akihabara. Akihabara is kind of the electronics and geekery district, and Yodobashi is a mall that takes everything that genre encompasses and crams them into one huge, eight-floor mall. We made the mistake of visiting on a Saturday (completely by accident- our internal clocks were still suffering jetlag, so we thought it was Friday) - absolutely DO NOT do this! It was awful. There were so many people that we couldn't do any actual shopping and basically just spent the whole time fighting off anxiety attacks, haha. The lines were long, there were lots of people and loud kids running around, and it was just not a pleasant experience. Stefan went back a few days later and said it was much better. It was also in Akihabara that we visited Don Quixote, which I think is like a duty free chain store that just sells all sorts of random stuff- everything from international foods to make-up to otaku/geeky things. It reminded me of a Christmas Tree Shop on cocaine, for anyone familiar with that company. However, it was the only place in Japan where I found prescription-free circle lenses, and their Dolly Wink lashes were cheaper than at Yodobashi, along with an impressive spread of Japanese makeup brands like Kate. They have multiple locations around Tokyo, too, not just in Akihabara. 

Lodging: In Hakone, we had a beautiful, spacious tatami room. It had a table in the middle which we pushed off to the side at night so we could roll out our futons, which we then folded up and stored in the closet every morning. This is a very traditional Japanese-style room that is available in many hotels and is often cheaper than the Western-style rooms. This room cost (I think) 9000yen per person per night; that price included both breakfast and dinner but excluded internet (WiFi doesn't seem to be super common in Japan). Here's our room in Hakone...

(yeah, also, that's the Japanese definition of a "spacious" hotel room, haha!)

The dinner was "teishoku" style: they set out for us a multiple-course meal of traditional Japanese food (mostly different preparations of seafood and meat with soup, rice, salad, and stewed vegetables, served with iced oolong tea). The first night we got there, like I said above, it was around 9 PM. We had landed in Narita at 2 PM and had been traveling through Japan for seven hours (due almost entirely to our own stupidity and the pressing need to run around like headless chickens), and this was after the 15 hour flight which was after the 5 hour flight. We had been in transit for well over 24 hours, and so when we got to the hotel we weren't interested in doing anything but sleeping. When they asked if we were ready for our meal, I made it look like we were really hungry and said "Yes, please!" only to recoil in horror when I saw that they had laid out four tables of food for us. Get ready, this is the most disgusting you will ever see me look:

And this was after putting a dent in it. It was also then that I realized that... I don't really like traditional Japanese cuisine very much! This was an awful time to realize this, when I was forcing myself to eat as much of it as possible in fear of insulting our hosts, and it's possible that I barely fought off a total breakdown from stress XD;

Hakone-Yumoto Hotel Asuka

Anyway. The point is to contrast this hotel room with the room in Tokyo, which was:

So small I couldn't even get a picture of the entire thing! As you can see, it was big enough for our suitcases and our futons, and that's basically it. Mainland Japan is a pretty cramped place anyway, where people rarely even have backyards, but in Tokyo space is a premium and as a rule you will get much, much less than you'd pay the same amount for in other places (even within Japan; when I went in high school, my hotel room in Kyoto was about the size of a standard American hotel room). We didn't have a closet in Tokyo, and the one in Hakone was tiny and more of a coat-closet than anything else.

However, the ryokan catered to foreigners, so there were plenty of people for us to chat with in the lounge as well as a staff that spoke perfect English to assist us. It was inexpensive (around 6500 yen for two people per night), and they had a kitchen for us to use as well as a pretty big flat screen to watch TV on (there was also free wifi in the lounge; there were technicians there our last few days wiring the rest of the hotel, too, so they may have expanded that by now). We met a wonderful couple from Adelaide, Australia, who said that if I'd like to take a weekend there when I study abroad in Melbourne to shoot them an e-mail. So sweet!

Kimi Ryokan Ikebukuro

Speaking of speaking English, how did we do with the language barrier? I noted that almost all of the signs in Tokyo were in English as well as Japanese (and Korean and Chinese, in a few places!), so it is totally possible to get around without speaking a word of Japanese. That being said, I cannot recommend it less. If you can, you should take a few practical Japanese classes and learn the writing system, at least hiragana, katakana, and a few simple kanji; at least enough to read some signs and ask for directions, because the information on the signs is not always translated perfectly. However, all of this is only if you are staying within Tokyo or maybe another large city, and even then only in the touristy areas of the city. The further you get to the coutryside, the fewer signs there are in English, so be wary of that when you're planning your trip.

This paragraph is probably time-sensitive for the next few months, but I feel like a few words devoted to the tragedy in Sendai are needed. Our trip at the end of May was completely uncompromised by the effects of March's tsunami and earthquake. I can't speak for anywhere besides Hakone and Tokyo, but there was no damage, no food shortages, not even that much inconvenience that we faced. The only things I noticed were: due to power shortages, the city wasn't as bright as usual, in that there were fewer street lights and neon signs lit up; for the same reason, many escalators were down; and there were fewer other tourists (or at least, there were fewer non-Asian people around. I know that sounds kind of racist, but there are very few white or black people in normal times, and that number was only a tiny fraction of what it usually is). In that same vein, I noticed something really surprising: I actually got less attention walking around in lolita than I did walking around in normal clothes. The only thing I can think of it that they assumed a white person wearing Japanese fashion is more likely to be a permanent resident, and they really had no idea why anyone would come to Japan right now for tourism (the latter half of which I was actually told, basically point-blank, by a businessman I was chatting with).

But what about lolitas in Japan? I didn't have many run-ins with Japanese lolitas; the ones I did speak to were very polite, but not terribly friendly. It wasn't like in America, where I feel like our interest in this strange, obscure fashion lends itself to a nature comradery and makes us more likely to want to be friendly with other lolitas than we probably would be with normal people (in public, at least). This could also just be a difference between Japanese people in general compared with American people in general, as in Japan friendships are seen as a much more serious relationship than I was raised to think of them as (I'd love to hear how non-American Western lolitas feel about this, especially those with experience with Japanese lolitas!) As far as Western lolitas in Japan, I used the lolitasinjapan livejournal community and arranged a meeting with three different girls, all of whom were incredibly sweet and not at all internet stalkers, so I really recommend it for anyone who wants to get together with shopping buddies. It was really awesome having someone to show Stefan and I around the areas I was unfamiliar with.

I guess I can't really think of anything else to say... I feel like there's so much more I should be talking about, but I just can't think of it! So, thank you all for waiting while I took my much-needed break, and again, please let me know in the comments section what you'd like to hear more about and I'll do my best to answer all of your questions!

(part of the Lolita on Location series)

(Part of the Lolitas on Location: San Francisco series)

The Queen Anne Hotel in San Francisco

As I write this, I sit on a satin-covered settee before a fireplace. My feet crunch the Persian-style Victorian rug, and a porcelain cup of tea sits next to me on a marble coffee table, complete with gold filigree engraving. Above the fireplace, I contemplate an oil painting of the lady of the house entertaining a papal figure with her violinist, all of them coiffed and adorned in the style of the Sun King‘s court. In the other room is a wooden grand piano, crystal chandelier, and a young blond man who looks up every time I cast my eyes in his direction.

The main stairway in the lobby - an elevator is also available

It’s hard to believe I’m still in the twenty-first century, but my fellow parlor attendant is chatting on the cell phone to our family back home, and the young man is wearing jeans and a hoodie. I’m in the Queen Anne Hotel in San Francisco, a period hotel on Sutter Street. Down the street from Japantown and only a few blocks from Fillmore Street with its shopping &Victorian rowhouses, the Queen Anne is in Pacific Heights, a prime location for tourists with a flair for shopping and dining, as well as an appreciation of historical architecture.
The Queen Anne herself is four floors, with both an intricate cherry staircase and a gold-and-burgundy elevator, and contains 48 guestrooms total. It opened as “Miss Mary Lake’s School for Girls” around the 1890’s, making it one of the oldest structures in Pacific Heights, and was restored in the 1980’s as the Queen Anne Hotel after passing hands a few times during the century between. The lobby/parlor is a grand space with burgundy walls & window hangings and mahogany wainscoting, crystal chandeliers and two ornate fireplaces. Afternoon tea with cookies &sherry is served every day from 4 - 6 PM, and a complementary breakfast is served in the ballroom every morning, 7 - 9 (though I should note, it‘s not really impressive - bagels, toast, fruit, cereal, juices). The entire hotel is an antiquer’s dream, as almost all the furniture is from the building’s time of origin or around there, and every landing and room has it treasures. The hotel staff is very friendly and eager to help, and are full of suggestions and local knowledge, and there is town car service every morning at 7:45, 8:45, and 9:45, to anywhere in the city.

A small portion of the lobby

This hotel is not trapped in the past, however. Breakfast is accompanied by a toaster oven for your bagels and microwave for your oatmeal. Each room is equipped with modern televisions and mini-fridges, and the bathroom is almost disappointingly 21st-centrury - personally, I was half-hoping for a pull-chain on the toilet. The hotel is also equipped with high-speed wifi - theoretically. More on that later.
The guest room itself is beautiful - high ceilings, a beautiful color pallet, and huge, comfortable beds. The closet is very large, and the bathroom isn’t really tiny, either, and it has a bathtub, something many modern hotels have nixed. I almost wish the bathroom was more old-fashioned - lovely marble, but the tiles on the floor also cover the walls and surround the bathtub, which is also sadly modern - in a perfect world, the tub would be a brass-and-porcelain claw-footed monster, though I don’t doubt that in some of the fancier suites this would be a possibility. It’s comfortable, though, and not unattractive, so clearly my standards are just unrealistic. There is also a small sitting area with two armchairs, a nice wooden table, and a lamp.
While there is little else I can say badly about this hotel, as with anything, there are some discomforts. The shower in our hotel was broken when we checked in, to the point of being unusable - however, this was fixed when it was brought to the front desk’s attention, and after we left for the day so we didn’t need to put up with the noise from the plumber. The biggest concern for me, however, is the internet - I don’t have it. For some reason I am entirely unable to connect on either of my laptops, and on those rare times I can, there’s no signal. However, if this problem affects you on your stay, there is a desktop in the lobby available to guests. Another slight annoyance is, due to the age of the hotel, a great lack of outlets, meaning I can’t charge my cell phone, camera battery, and laptop at the same time. I’m sure I'll survive somehow. Also, they don’t have a pool or air conditioning, though in San Francisco, where it doesn’t often get much over 80, neither of these are necessities, in my opinion - however, they do have fireplaces lit all night to stave off the chill of evening.

The parlor fireplace, in front of which I sit writing!

Lolita-specific: The closet is large &deep, perfect for petticoats & even your largest dresses. They come equipped with sturdy wooden hangers that won’t stretch or damage your clothes, however, they have no pants hangers, so if you have any delicate skirts you don’t want to drape over the bar on said hangers, you should probably bring your own. The internet is provided, through wifi (theoretically) and the lobby computer. There is also a nice vanity/dresser next to the door, so if you’re sharing your room with another lolita you can coif yourselves at the same time without squishing into the same mirror. There are many places for photos, as most of the floors have lovely benches, settees, and armchairs scattered around, as well as some lovely art.
In conclusion, I would give it about 3.5/5 stars, which kills me, as this hotel is a Taurean art-and-beauty Nirvana, and my inner bull is going into overdrive at the multitude of rich colors &fabrics. However, the inconveniences must be taken into account. While they aren’t bothering me much, they are exactly that - inconvenient, and they may bother someone else more than I, so they deserve to be taken into account during a review. Even still, I’m having a great stay, and I would definitely recommend this hotel to anyone spending any amount of time in San Francisco - especially a lolita.