Background to the Trip
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Who We Are

At the time of our trip (July 1999) I was a  47-year-old Software Engineer on vacation from Karma Systems in Acton, MA. Follow this link to view my home page.

My son Tony Gross was an 11-year-old student about to enter the 6th Grade at The Fessenden School in West Newton, MA.

We are residents of Winchester, MA.  This was our first trip to Japan. 

We had originally intended to participate in a guided tour of China including a cruise on the Yangtze to see the Three Gorges before they are flooded. This was Tony's idea and it was something we had been planning for nearly two years. When the riots broke-out in China this spring after the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, we took our last chance to change our frequent-flier reservations on Northwest to Japan instead.

Although we were disappointed not to go to China, I had always wanted to go to Japan, as I had studied Japanese for three years from 1975-1978, I had never been there. As it turned out, what little Japanese I could remember was quite useful on this trip.

Preparations for the trip

We had relatively little time to prepare for this trip. I bought virtually every guide book I could find, did a lot of research on the web, and asked questions on AOL and Usenet bulletin boards. One thing I noticed right away is that there is less tourist information available for Japan now than there is for China, or so it seems. Relatively few people are travelling to Japan for pleasure, apparently. I brought with me a number of guidebooks including Lonely Planet's Japan, Lonely Planet's Kyoto, Lonely Planet's Tokyo, Frommer's Japan, Frommer's Walks in Tokyo, and a Kodansha book called Gateway to Japan .

Other books I brought with me on this trip included an old copy of D.T. Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture and Timothy Ferris' recent The Whole Shebang: a State of the Universe Report which I bought in the Minneapolis airport while waiting for our flight to Osaka.

(Frommer's Japan, Gateway to Japan, Zen and Japanese Culture, and The Whole Shebang I abandoned half-way through our trip in an obscure Japanese Inn in Tamatsukura-Onsen, outside of Matsue.)