Japan: independent travel video, travel photography

Japan

No matter where you are coming from, Japan, "the land of the rising sun" intrigues you like no other country. You come back overwhelmed by a remarkable civilization and the first thing you know is to get as many books about the country and read them if you did not do your homework before the trip.

Eastern mentality is known to be very different from the western one but in Japan things get on a different scale. Apparently everything that surrounds you is unexpected, the rigid social etiquette, the relations between spouses, the morale where the notion of "biblical" sin does not exist, the shyness that people have if they can not perform an act perfectly, for example like speaking English properly, and why not the fact that the trains are precisely in time no matter of what category they are. But in the same time what fascinates the traveler are the famous Japanese traditions, derived from Rinzai zen, the tea ceremony, ikebana, calligraphy and the ukyo-e, the floating world, the art of the geishas, the way of the samurai, the exquisite gardens, the quiet pavilions with immaculate ponds, etc. Japan is an interesting combination of a dynamic modern society with a strong traditional weave that they wanted badly to shed in the years after the war. The deliberate destruction of traditional city line to be replaced by, occasionally monstrous, modern buildings is an example of this fight with the past. It is a sort of exorcism of a society that dealt deftly with dictatorship and closure for 600 years, out of which the more recent 250 years being extreme in that sense.

Come with us to visit Japan aboard the Shinkansen, the bullet train, taking us from Tokyo, to Nikko, the burial place of the Tokugawa clan, to Kamakura, the capital of the first shogunate, to Kurashiki, a city untouched by the war bombs, to the magnificent gardens of Okayama, to Nagasaki, to Hagi on the shore of the sea of Japan, to the holy island of Miyajima full of temples and deers, to Kyoto and Nara the famous capitals of Japan for hundreds of years, to the gardens of Kanazawa and deep in the Japanese Alps to the wooden architecture of Takayama, and finally to Koya San, the sacred place of esoteric Buddhism, the place where is buried the man who invented the most important of the present four Japanese alphabets, Kobo Daishi.

Japan is a melange of far east exoticism and modernity of an extremity never achieved elsewhere that you'll never forget if you watch our travel video.