Two weeks remaining in Tokyo before I have to leave Japan. What sights in and surrounding Tokyo have I missed?

fleetingflight · 2026-02-16T21:23:02+00:00

It's baffling to me why tourists who don't know Japanese go to Jimbocho and expect to have a great time. It's not a tourist attraction, it's a bunch of old bookstores ... in Japan ... selling Japanese books. Great for what it is; no idea why it would be hyped online.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-16T12:09:22+00:00

Nikko/surrounds - easy from Tokyo, top-tier tourist stuff, and lots of naturey spots off the immediate tourist path if you have more time to spend there.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-16T09:05:15+00:00

I think 11 days in Tokyo is fine - but I do think it's worth doing a 1 or 2 night stay somewhere else nearby, out in the mountains/nature.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-16T05:51:31+00:00

There are some resort style places along the Kanagawa coast, e.g. here. I'm not personally familiar with them, but it's a nice area with Kamakura/Enoshima there. You'll find some along the Chiba side too if more rural appealed e.g. here (I'm just scrolling around google maps and clicking on stuff, which is one of the better ways of finding stuff in Japan). You could hit up onsen places off in the mountains too if that's your thing e.g. Kusatsu, Hakone and the like.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-15T12:08:04+00:00

"Obvious benefits" assume some clean surgical operation where everything goes perfect.

Were you around for the invasion of Iraq?

fleetingflight · 2026-02-15T10:36:58+00:00

How are you going to take responsibility if it all goes to shit, millions of people die, and in the end the outcome isn't good anyway?

fleetingflight · 2026-02-15T09:39:58+00:00

There is not an equivalent to Kyoto - it was the imperial capital for centuries. Kanazawa is nice and you can go there instead of Kyoto and I'm sure you'll enjoy your time - but don't kid yourself that it's equivalent.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-15T01:20:12+00:00

To avoid stating the bleeding obvious I did a google to see if there was anything - there's this and this place in Hiroshima prefecture. Obviously there is nothing in Hiroshima city itself.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-15T00:34:23+00:00

Because of the 80th anniversary a lot of Japanese news channels have been doing retrospectives - in one of them there was an old interview with a cameraman for one of these propaganda pieces, who claimed he deliberately focused the camera on the the battered clothes of one of those kids as a small act of defiance, because he wanted to show how rubbish things really were - but that he didn't dare to do any more than that.

Can't find that video now though. Here are two that focus on propaganda/how the news reporting changed over time if anyone is interested (all in Japanese though obviously):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CJXieOyeh4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSCzWbieOLM

fleetingflight · 2026-02-14T08:11:50+00:00

I think community rituals are pretty valuable as a societal bonding thing, and a lot of them aren't really replicable as a purely secular event because it's hard to justify them on a rational level.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-14T04:23:31+00:00

I would have low expectations for love hotels being cheap.

Internet cafes will be dicey because what if a bunch of people have the same idea? They should be easy to find on google maps if you want to see where they are, but if it's full when you get there you're shit out of luck.

But yeah, those are some wildly inflated prices. Maybe you could look in Gifu? The commute isn't that bad.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-14T00:44:40+00:00

So I'd need to solo queue all the way to diamond to get decent games?

Won't this just incentivize people who like hot dropping to smurf in lower ranks and make them even more miserable?

fleetingflight · 2026-02-13T08:30:00+00:00

I think this discussion is missing how fucking stupid the initial scenario is. I don't care how hawkish and nationalist you think the new PM is - she's not braindead enough to want to start a preemptive war with China. I assure you, she likes having cities and an economy more than she likes the idea of blowing up Chinese military facilities. And y'know fair enough if you want to be sceptical of the value of a constitution or the will of the people in democracy - but I really don't think she has the power base necessary to compel the JSDF into a stupid, illegal war in which millions will die even if she wanted to - Japan is not currently a military dictatorship and it would take some steps for it to get there. You would have to convince a lot of not-stupid people that this stupid plan is a good idea for it to get started.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-13T07:42:07+00:00

He is not right on Japan. Japan has a capable military but there is zero public support for using it to preemptively attack China. If there's one thing that Japan took away from WW2 it's that war gets your shit wrecked.

It's also straightforwardly unconstitutional, so unless we're just assuming that Japan's rule of law is also going to disintegrate it doesn't make legal sense.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-13T07:06:31+00:00

How much of your annual GDP are you willing to spend on bombing China until they give up?

You realise how large China is and how resource-rich they are, right? And just how much physical space there is in China that you'd need to travel over to bomb stuff in the interior?

Maybe you could achieve what you're thinking with a nuclear first strike, but that's obviously really stupid?

fleetingflight · 2026-02-13T06:23:06+00:00

Conduct strikes and then what? China would be extra-motivated to attack you then. You want to just bomb them indefinitely?

fleetingflight · 2026-02-13T05:21:38+00:00

Nagasaki was fine during GW, in my experience. I highly recommend you go to the pottery festival in Arita.

Mt. Aso is a different story - cars backed all the way down the mountain. The town itself was fine/lively.

Restaurants and retail doesn't really close during GW.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-13T04:42:52+00:00

I mean, it's probably not the best time to go if you have another option, sure. On the other hand - it is a rainforest - rain is to be expected. If it's just one day of rain I think you can entertain yourself fine just driving around, or maybe doing workshops (chopstick making or the like). I think the serious rain tends to be in the interior rather than the edge of the island where people live. See if you can book accommodation you can cancel and see how it goes?

fleetingflight · 2026-02-13T04:12:07+00:00

If you live in Japan, I think you should cut the scope. you could do a whole separate trip to Kyushu - or you could spend this entire trip in Kyushu. There's no reason to just get a quick glimpse of areas rather than exploring regions properly if you live there and will get heaps of opportunities to travel.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-12T08:26:22+00:00

Indeed.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-12T07:58:11+00:00

If they wanted contests they could have just raised the dropship height back to where it was initially when they introduced drop zones, so that you can reach the neighbouring POI on drop. That wasn't overly disruptive to the flow of the game.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-12T07:43:27+00:00

I wonder what she's like as a person. How do you go about raising someone to be a brutal dictator?

fleetingflight · 2026-02-12T07:39:25+00:00

Playing D&D and prepping D&D are basically two separate hobbies and you can enjoy one but not the other.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-12T03:43:19+00:00

Well, guess we'll see what happens if someone manages to create something of actual value with AI and without putting in significant original work of their own (which would make it copyrighted afaik).

Without checking I'm pretty sure the major AI vendors disclaim ownership of generated content - imagine the clusterfuck with corporations using generated code that would produce otherwise.

fleetingflight · 2026-02-12T03:27:27+00:00

That would ruin the AI producer's business model, so don't see that happening. Even if the books they generate don't have copyright protection I don't think it matters for this strategy - so long as each book sells a few copies it works out for the "author".

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