Above: Wakayama Castle
Seeing most of our travel in recent years has been in Europe and most in connection with our music tours, we thought we should next time we have the opportunity to go over seas we should go somewhere we’ve never been before.
Japan! That was an easy decision: but when I thought about it, it didn’t seem easy at all. I have always thought them an inscrutable people, polite but remote, their language incomprehensible, and their culture, both modern and ancient, very distant from ours.
How were we going to cope, both of us such conventional Westerners? Worse still we arrived in the middle of the worst typhoon to hit Tokyo in many years. The was no rain when we got off the plane – were we in the eye of the cyclone? No it was a lull in the downpour of heavy rain that dogged our first few days