The Search For One Of Japan’s Most Mysterious & Controversial Heritage Museums

Posted on February 5, 2024 by tokyofox

Late last Summer I received an e-mail from a reader of this site who had seen a lot of my posts about sights in the Izu area of Shizuoka Prefecture. He wanted information on a very interesting heritage museum I’d never heard of, and one that the tourist information centre in Atami claims doesn’t exist.

The pagoda, which originally opened in 1970 and sits atop a mountain, supposedly features all sorts of military stuff with a basement containing some exhibits relating to history’s most controversial figures like Continue reading →

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Going Full Throttle In The Pursuit Of Money At This Only-In-Japan Motor-Sport

Posted on February 1, 2024 by tokyofox

In the wake of attending 20+ different sports in 2023, pretty much every upcoming event gets promoted on my social media or directly in my inbox. I recently caught sight of a motor-cycle event in Saitama Prefecture taking place over a long weekend in mid-January. I had never heard of the stadium so looked it up on Google Maps and saw that I would be able to cycle there in less than an hour. Scrolling down through the various ticket prices eventually took me to one for just 1000 yen so I bought it without too much thought as it’d give me something new to do on the Friday when I was off work.

After booking the ticket I began to dig a bit deeper for what I’d got myself involved in thinking I was about to see something like speedway or motorcyle racing. It soon dawned on me that I had Continue reading →

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Dining Out: The Wonderfully Coloured Gyoza Dumplings Which Are More Than Just A Gimmick

Posted on January 28, 2024 by tokyofox

Compared to the western world, Japan is still very much a land of meat and fish eaters. It is a huge part of their culture and it’s hard to see it changing anytime soon, if ever! However, with the vast increase in foreign tourism to Japan in the last year a few vegetarian restaurants have begun popping up to cater for such tastes which are far more common among westerners.

In need of some exercise I decided to cycle over to the eastern part of Tokyo to tick off a few little places I’d long had earmarked on Google Maps as wanting to visit. One of them included this vegetarian gyoza restaurant in Continue reading →

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What The Cinder Cone Mount Omuro Looks Like In Winter + 2 Trips To Ippeki Lake

Posted on January 24, 2024 by tokyofox

The east coast of Izu Peninsula is one that I have explored in great detail during numerous visits to the area over the last seven years or so. There are many great places but if I had to pick just one sight to see then it’d probably have to be Mount Omuro; the picture postcard and aesthetically-pleasing volcano. We’ve previously visited it in Autumn and Summer but never in Winter. It was time to change that on our most recent trip to that part of Shizuoka Prefecture during Continue reading →

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12 Hours In Chiba: A Quaint Rural Train Line, A Unique Fish Shrine, A Lighthouse, A River City, A Dangletrain & A Great Sphinx!!

Posted on January 20, 2024 by tokyofox

 

Usually these complete travel posts comprise activities and sights done and seen over a few days but this one to Chiba at the start of last year was just one exhaustingly long day trip. It spawned a fair few posts so here is the compilation of all of them. I would not recommend trying to replicate this in any way!

The journey to Chiba station, and then onto Choshi was uneventful but from there I got to ride on the quaintest rural line in the Greater Tokyo area; the wonderful Continue reading →

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Alphabet Dating In Japan With My Wife Who Really Was Still Completely Unaware Of The Task At Hand! (S03E05: U-Z)

Posted on January 16, 2024 by tokyofox

 

Seasons one and two (as well as the prequel season zero) of alphabet dating certainly pushed the boundaries of what a “date” is, and that continues in season three with even more tenuous examples for each letter of the alphabet. For the record, doing something together (no matter what it is!) counts as a date in this series which is not always about visiting glamorous places and doing exciting things but just getting out there and exploring locations we wouldn’t normally go to. Without further ado, lets kick off the final season of alphabet dating with what we did for the second set of letters…

U is for Continue reading →

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Return To The Tokyo Piglet Cafe Which Made My Family Squeal With Delight This Time

Posted on January 12, 2024 by tokyofox

When my wife and I went to this pig cafe in November 2022 (the post wasn’t released until April 2023!) I didn’t really envisage going back anytime soon after. Not because it was awful or anything. In fact it was a very enjoyable experience but just not one that we felt we really needed to repeat. The cost of the activity maybe also played some part in our thinking!

However, a few weeks before their arrival from Australia my eldest sister said the one thing that they all wanted to do was Continue reading →

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I Watched 15 Sports In Japan For The First Time In 2023

Posted on January 8, 2024 by tokyofox

Growing up in the UK in the 1980s as a British sports fan was a very different time. Sport on TV was fairly limited and indeed people sat down on Saturday afternoons to watch whatever Grandstand (BBC TV) and World of Sport (ITV) showed. This could sometimes be a mix of cricket, golf, athletics, speedway, horse racing, squash and wrestling which was certainly a sign of the times but the public lapped it up.

Transworld Sport (Channel 4) in the very early hours of a Saturday morning (around 6am!) was something I’d set the timer on the video recorder from time to time and was an alternative to the two programmes previously mentioned. As time moved on having a range of sports as part of a framework under a single banner became Continue reading →

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My Eldest Sister’s Family Came To Japan & Spent Christmas At Our Place

Posted on January 4, 2024 by tokyofox

When my eldest sister mailed me back in the summer saying she was thinking of coming to Japan in December I didn’t quite believe it as I had just never considered the idea of any family member actually coming to ours at Christmas time. My wife was eventually informed of this news when my parents were in town back in mid-September and thankfully had no reservations about them all staying with us for a few nights during the festive season.

Fast forward three months and they arrived from Australia. Even though I’ve Continue reading →

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TF Top 20……Tokyo Fox Hits Of 2023

Posted on January 1, 2024 by tokyofox

 

So 2024 has only just begun and already Tokyo Fox is looking back!! For just over a decade now there have been exactly ten new posts on here each and every month and these are the twenty from 2023 which got the most hits … excluding sponsored or compilation posts! Of course those entries from earlier in the year had more time to accumulate hits so don’t read too much into it all as it’s basically just another filler post to kick start the new year!

20. This Family-Owned Milk Carton Building Is Udderly Brilliant. More details here

19. This Unique Continue reading →

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