Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 496.

And as we verge up on episode 500, for which, by the way, please do not forget to reach out, send your questions my way.

I've had a few really good ones so far.

But as a reminder, every 100 episodes, Q&A episode, any topic related to Japanese history or the show, or within reason, pretty much anything, you can ask it.

I will do my best to answer it.

So get those questions in because we are getting up on the time to do that.

But as we approach that milestone, I wanted to do something a little different today.

So this is not going to be a traditional scripted episode, and instead it's going to be something

kind of related to a question I get asked a lot.

I cannot count the number of delightful listener emails I have gotten asking me for

travel recommendations while you're in Japan. And here's the thing, everyone. I didn't really

do that much traveling in Japan when I was there in school. If you have any friends or family

who've been through graduate school, you know that you make pretty crap money doing that.

And so you don't really get to do a lot of traveling.

I was just in Tokyo doing archival research.

And pretty much my life was archives to 7-Eleven for dinner to walking around to the free shrines and temples, which were the only

entertainment I could afford, to back to my crappy hotel room. It was not the most exciting life

to live. But now, recently, I have finally gotten to take a long-awaited trip to Japan while

actually having a big-boy job

where I get real money and I can actually do things for fun.

And more importantly, I had someone coming along for whom I had to do some programming.

I say this show all the time is for interested non-experts, and I had my very own bona fide,

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