Japanese Jaunt with a rugby ball. The plan.

Let's put you on the map, first of all. My apologies for both the clarity and quality of this map. It is an image that I have downloaded then embellished and finally photographed to get it on this platform.
Japan was not designed to fit onto an A4 sheet. If you tilt the image by about 60°, right up and consequently left down you now have a better idea of its orientation with respect to the equator. So the right side of the map is a lot further north than the left side. Second confusion is the island that looks like an upside down map of India is in fact geographically displaced and should really be tacked on to the top right hand corner where you can see a little bit of the extreme south west coast. This island is called Hokkaido with its capital being Sapporo and it sits off the coast of Russia. Sapporo is, of course, famous for being the venue for the Winter Olympics in 1972 so it's cold and hilly. It is also nearer to Vladivostok than Tokyo.
Just a few comparisons between Japan and the UK to get things into perspective. Japan is a bit less than twice the size of the UK (145 million sq miles/93 million sq miles) with a population of 126 million (66 for UK) people. Most of the population live in large cities and most of the land is mountainous and wooded.  Japan lies in 19th place in the Human Development Index (UK is14th), and Japan's economy ranks 3rd in the world whereas UK is 6th.

We are landing at one of the two International Airports at Tokyo called Hadeda from where we will travel to our apartment in the Matsudo-shi area of Tokyo. We have four nights in a self catering apartment before following the hi-lighted route around the islands, if you can make that out.  Hopefully you might also be able to make out the dates of our accommodation and their locations.

As well as seeing the country, the other reason that we are here is to see Wales win the above. Actually if you ask Helen, she would tell you that it is to see England win!

All long distance travel will be by the much vaunted Japanese railway system. We have purchased in advance a JR pass for £450 a head. This gives us 21 days unrestricted access to the best rail network in the world. Local travel will also be by train or bus, much of which is also covered by the JR pass.

Above you can see the details of our itinerary. Firstly apologies for the quality of the image. Converting a spreadsheet to a jpeg file proved to be beyond my IT skills so I went a rather circuitous route and this is the result. All the accommodation is pre booked and in most cases fully or partially paid for. We will be fanzoning rather than grandstanding, I don't think the match experience will be lessened, but the weight on the pocket certainly will. We were kindly offered 3 semi final tickets, but at £600 a ticket it rather put things in perspective. As the Japanese say, "a bird in your blossom beats a bee in your bonsai ".
From next weekend onwards I hope to be publishing a blog every 3 or 4 days which will contain pictures, anecdotes, opinions and observations from the land of the rising sun. If you have any comments or questions, please state them in the space provided at the end of each blog. I do really appreciate any feedback from anybody.