Back in June, less than 24 hours after landing at the Haneda airport in Tokyo, Will and I made it to the highest point in Japan on the top of Mount Fuji. I was attending an astronomy and telescopes conference just south of Tokyo, and luckily Will was able to join for some vacation and some quality time since I’ve been away from home so much this year.

This conference was a long time coming for me. In 2018, I published my first paper for an astronomy conference and then broke my collarbone five days before the event and couldn’t go present my work. In 2020, I published another paper but the conference was virtual. In 2022, I published yet another paper and didn’t get to go to the conference in Montreal due to being super busy in Chile. 

In 2024, I told my boss that this was the year and I was definitely going to travel to Japan to present my paper. Luckily for me, we scheduled the intercontinental shipment of the biggest digital camera in the world just a month before the conference, so I had plenty of time to work on the manuscript and submit it by the deadline. (Heavy on the sarcasm there in case that wasn’t obvious.)

In the middle of unpacking and organizing 50 metric tons of equipment at the observatory, I found some time to analyze the data logger data from the camera shipment and submit my paper the day before leaving for the conference. I was supposed to have a luxurious 24 hours at home in Tahoe between flying back from Chile and leaving for Japan, but my flight in Chile got delayed by a day and I had to fly straight to the San Francisco Bay Area and then on to Japan. 

Luckily, since Will came on the trip with me he was able to grab clothes and such from home that I was going to need. He also did all of the planning for the fun parts of the trip, such as the aforementioned Mount Fuji hike.

We decided to hire a guide for the hike to make logistics easier, especially because we were in the off-season and busses weren’t running to the base of the mountain. The guide picked us up at the hotel and drove 90 minutes to the trailhead including a stop at 7-11 for snacks, and led us confidently around some “closed” signs up the trail. He also gave us some great insight into japanese culture and ideas for what to do in Tokyo as well as where to ski when we come back to Japan some day.

The hike itself was a bit foggy and rainy, but that’s honestly preferable to sun when there are no horizontal steps in the entire 3 mile trail. We went essentially straight up 4000 vertical feet, and my calves were definitely complaining by the end of it. There are five or so huts along the way that sell snacks and drinks and that people can stay in during high season, but everything was closed since we went just before the season started, so we just had to imagine the hot chocolate we’d be drinking if it was available.

The hotel we stayed in town at was also on the fancier side, including a private onsen (hot tub) on an enclosed deck with a view of Fuji. Soaking in the tub after six hours of hiking felt incredibly luxurious.

Everyone who travels to Japan raves about the food but honestly, for me, it was just okay. Obviously the sushi is incredible, and the sushi-making class we did with chef Nobu was one of the highlights of the trip. But everything is just so fishy, all the time, and that is not my favorite vibe. Seaweed is by far the most common green, followed by cabbage. Fruits and vegetables are expensive (I accidentally spent $20 on a small bunch of grapes because I miscalculated the exchange rate), and they are used very sparingly in most dishes if at all. I’m not a vegetarian, but Will likes to call me a vegetarian sympathizer, so the lack of veggies was tough. 

The second cooking class we did was for okonomiyaki, which translates to something like “everything fried”. It’s essentially a savory batter that’s a cross between a pancake and an omelette that you can add flavors to, in our case pork belly and shellfish. It was pretty tasty until we squirted sauce all over it and added bono (dried fish) flakes that looked and smelled like the food I used to feed my beta fish back in the day who was also coincidentally named sushi. I’m not a sauce person to begin with and the extra fishyness was tough. So, although it’s perhaps sacrilegious to admit, I wasn’t a huge fan of Japanese food. To be fair, I come from a very unadventurous food family: when I told my dad I was going to Japan, he said, and this is a direct quote, “be careful of the food.”

So, while I absolutely love the occasional sushi dinner, on this trip I learned that I cannot live for an extended period of time on fish and seaweed and rice and noodles. Island life is not for me.