Whenever I see that a place has a castle I kind of get excited and always make an effort to see it. Why I do this, I really don’t know as I rarely bother going inside them anymore and I have begun to think they’re not all that different from each other.
Back in October last year I went on a very busy solo mini-trip for four days taking in quite a few different prefectures with many of them possessing some castles I’d never seen. First up was Continue reading
The Keio Line principally connects Shinjuku to the western side of Tokyo with seven different lines running through to the likes of suburban city Hachiōji and the mountainous area at Takaosanguchi. All of it’s stations actually lie within the boundaries of Tokyo and, thanks to regular free tickets, Tokyo Fox has dug deep to come up with a few places worthy of visit beyond perennial favourites like Mount Takao and Tama Zoo……
#9 – No. 6 Tashiro Building @ 569-9 Continue reading
#19. Arakawa
Cycling may be something that I love to do but I’m not really one who goes for a ride without some kind of aim whether it be to a restaurant, a sight or just my workplace. With that in mind, and desperate to get out on my new bike, I decided to cycle round ALL the Inari Shrines in Tokyo taking each of the 23 wards one at a time.
Inspired by recent interest in tiny shrines, this idea seemed like a good way of Continue reading
When I saw this building on the cover of a Japanese magazine last Summer I assumed it was some abandoned building off the coast of Japan somewhere. I just thought it looked so cool in its appearance but I had no idea what it was, or where it was exactly but when I did find out I was quite surprised.
This offshore structure’s appearance is reminiscent of a maritime base due to its location but it has no military connection. It is in fact known as Osaka Prefectural Continue reading
This American martial-arts thriller film starring Christopher Lambert was mostly shot in Nagoya city with such locales including it’s castle, City Hall (below) and main Station. However, the action does eventually move to “an island several hundred miles away” which in reality is just 75 kilometres west of Japan’s fourth most populated city.
Around the 67 minute mark, a castle appears and when I first watched the film many years ago I just Continue reading
It may have been three years since I was last in Hiroshima but fact is that it’s actually been over four years since I spent any time of significance in the city. That last visit was very much an in-and-out job as I was kind of just passing through on some local train travels in the western region of Japan.
Taking a dog on the Shinkansen (bullet train), or any train for that matter, is not easy so I was initially a little reluctant to travel all the way over to Hiroshima for the New Years period but Continue reading
It’s not all okonomiyaki and oysters when in Hiroshima! Sometimes (well quite often actually!) you’ve got to take a break from food starting with the letter ‘o’ and try other things. This meat shop and restaurant in the city centre has a range of Japanese dishes including pork chops, sukiyaki, shabu shabu, and hamburg steaks but I was there for something else.
Any dish that can be bought with one coin (500 yen is the biggest denomination of coin in Japan) is a great deal in my book, but this one is even less than Continue reading
Way back in 1997 I remember watching the BBC documentary show ‘Full Circle with Michael Palin’ which was a series following the English actor/comedian/writer/TV presenter on a full anti-clockwise trip around the Pacific Rim. The second episode featured Japan and Korea, and Palin was blocked from entering North Korea so the only possibility was to go with a group of foreign tourists to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea, and “cross” the border in the Joint Security Area (JSA) at Panmunjeom.
It was an episode that stuck with me as just over eight years later it was one of the first ideas that came to my mind when I knew I was going to be visiting South Korea. Asif and I signed up for a JSA full day tour from Seoul on our first day, and Continue reading
So 2022 has only just begun and already Tokyo Fox is looking back!! For a decade now there have been exactly ten new posts on here each and every month and these are the twenty from 2021 which got the most hits…excluding sponsored or TF Top 10 list 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. Dining Out: The Happy Rainbow Cheese Continue reading
This lame and lazy half-assed compilation post idea was ushered in at the end of 2018 with an eye on permanently replacing the ‘TF Top 10……Filming Location Trips For (year)’ series which has long been running out of steam and will not feature at all this year as I only managed to cover two ‘Fast & The Furious‘ movies this year. However, I am confident that will return next year as the majority of them have already been drafted!
2021 has not been an easy year for travel due to the constant State of Emergency restrictions for people in Tokyo especially not that many people took too much notice of it when it was in place for the majority of the first ten months. They say a picture paints a thousand words so rather than write a load of words about these photos, I’ll just let the pictures speak for themselves.
1. Chogonji, Gunma Prefecture. More details here
Tokyo Fox (東京狐) 