This is the first recount-style post of our trip to Japan in late 2023. I’m doing them out of order, when I feel like posting about a particular leg of the trip, but I’ll eventually put together a master post that you can read through chronologically 😁

Sections of this post

We decided to stay in Matsumoto for two nights on the recommendation of Craig Mod, who had written glowingly about it as an example of a mid-sized Japanese city that does everything right, in a country consolidating into megacities.

We had to go through Matsumoto to get from Magome to Takayama anyway (there used to be a direct bus before corona, but it has not recommenced), so we decided we might as well spend some time in the town, see some art, walk around.

We arrived fairly early into Matsumoto. As soon as we arrived I really liked the vibes. Matsumoto is nestled in the mountains, and it felt like what I imagine Denver to be like.

A selfie of two people smiling with a backdrop of Matsumoto city. There's a river and some mountains and some buildings on either side of the river.



Foooooood

We immediately headed to one of Craig Mod’s recommendations, cured duck ramen at a ramen shop. The owner was friendly and I felt a bit quirky; I think a bunch of teens were sitting at the counter and the owner was joking around with them? Joey ordered the spicy ramen, and the owner double checked that he would be okay with it 😆 It was not that spicy, but it was all delicious.

A photo of a bowl of ramen, with two pieces of cured duck meat and some small tofu skin balls

I also got to try pizza toast here at long last 🫨 we went to one of the older style kissaten and had a coffee and pizza toast. It was an interesting flavour profile. I don’t know if I’d buy it out again, but I like the version we make at home 😆

A photo of some pizza toast

For those (understandably) out of the loop, pizza toast is also a discovery of mine via Craig Mod, who made a photo book of his walks across Japan, eating pizza toast.

Arty vibes

We hit up the Matsumoto City Museum of Art, which was hosting an exhibit on Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto is her hometown). I was really looking forward to it, and it was okay. Just okay. I think maybe I’m not that keen on some of her works after all. The outside art that she designed was SUPER cool though, I liked that a lot:

A photo of the Matsumoto city of art gallery. There's a sculpture of many flowers twisted around.

Joey was feeling under the weather in the afternoon, so I trekked out to the Ukiyo-e Museum solo as the weather got colder and windier. The museum claimed to have the largest collection of Hokusai’s works. I did a bit of review research beforehand (the reviews were tepid at best), and my experience pretty much matches the reviews.

I wouldn’t recommend for the casual interest in ukiyo-e or for someone who is primarily interested in Hokusai 😅 you’re probably better off visiting the Osaka Ukiyo-e Museum in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, which has a much more engaging collection.

It was a real pain to get back too - the bus from the Matsumoto CBD to the museum had stopped running / doesn’t run during the season, so I had to walk quite a long way and wait for a train. I probably wouldn’t have minded but it was getting real cold and late in the day and I was getting tired / a cold slowly oncoming.

Here’s a pic from my slow jaunt home, I think this was after waiting for a highway bus that never came 😂

A photo of the outskirts of Matsumoto

Eonta, the jazz bar that lives on in my head

One of the things I was really looking forward to on our trip was the jazz bars and cafes that are fairly common throughout Japan. We visited one in Matsumoto, Eonta, also rated by Craig Mod, and it was sublime. Both nights we sat for a drink and enjoyed the music and soaked up the vibes.

The owner was lovely to us, he bopped along to the jazz as he made our drinks, and it was spacious and quiet. There’s some lounges in the corner that you can sit in as long as you don’t talk while you’re sitting there. Perfection 😌

Matsumoto, the city

  • The city centre is reasonably compact, the highlights run on either side of the Metoba river
  • I frigging loved the random frogs in a few places 🥰 I think its the city mascot?
  • Getting further outside the city centre was a bit of a drag, requiring less frequent buses or trains
  • Some online guides were suggesting that you could rent bicycles cheaply but these were hard / impossible to locate as a tourist (we really tried as well 😥)
  • It’s a super convenient hub for other destinations in the Japanese Alps! I wish we had known how convenient it was and we would’ve organised a Kamikochi trip instead of staying two nights 😭
  • Matsumoto is also pretty famous for it’s very cool castle (I’ve got some pictures of it at the end)

A photo of a person smiling in a cutout with two frogs in the cutout.

I wanted to like Matsumoto a lot. It definitely felt cool and full of little things to explore and enjoy, but I was in the wrong mindset for what it was. I think I had expected to get around with the ease of big-city transit, which Matsumoto does not have. Sadly, the weather was starting to take a turn for the worse on our trip, and Joey was still recovering from a cold. I was on the verge of a cold as well. I felt a lot of regret about not being able to spend more time here, or do more things, though I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do (and the weather turned after the first day anyway). If we come back (and I daresay we’ll have to come back to go to the magical Kamikochi), I’d also like to hit up the timepiece museum.

One of my big goals for the trip was to learn how to travel better, and become more comfortable with not being able to see or do everything. Matsumoto was probably the second-lowest point in terms of hitting that goal 😅 (Takayama was the lowest). I was a bit crestfallen about what we did see, and felt like there was so much more to see.

Other pictures from our stay