This trip was my fifth time in Japan, and my second time skiing at Hakuba. Japan during the day and Japan at night are two completely different worlds, and the stillness in the snowy areas makes the contrast even more stark.

One of my favourite restaurants in the world is this tiny shack in the centre of town in Hakuba that serves probably the best sashimi I’ve ever had. It only seats 10 people each session, with two sessions each night, and you can watch the chef prepare everything in front of you. They also have these seductive frog chopstick holders.

After about a week of skiing, we spent our final three days in Tokyo. We stayed in the Hotel Gracery aka the Godzilla Hotel, where there’s a huge Godzilla head on the side of the building that roars and moves every hour or so. The lobby is basically a shrine to the Godzilla films. Very kitsch but also kind of cool.

This was the view from our room in the Godzilla Hotel. It never really gets truly dark in Tokyo.

On one of our days in Tokyo we made the trek out to the teamLab Borderless Digital Art Museum. Billed as the world’s first digital art gallery, it’s basically a building full of light and sound installations. It’s in a pretty weird industrial area of Tokyo, and you walk through a Toyota showroom to get to the the gallery. Once you’re in, though, it’s very easy to lose track of where you are and how long you’ve been there!

Obviously the majority of people at teamLab Borderless are tourists, but there’s also a heap of attendants employed to stop people ruining the installations. This guy’s job was to make sure no one was too rough with the balloons.

One morning we went on a tour to a sumo stable, where sumo wrestlers train. We got to sit in on a training session where one of the champions (the man on the right) was training two younger wrestlers. Sumo wrestlers basically live and breathe sumo, and start training from a young age. Despite their weight, they’re all incredibly fit and live to super strict schedules.

Cat cafes are common in big cities like Tokyo and Kyoto. Even though I’m allergic to cats, my family has two at home, and so the visit to this café was brought on by a mix of novelty and homesickness. This café required us to walk into a super dodgy building and up a very dank stairwell, but it was worth it.

Each of the cats in the café have a name and a personality, which are detailed in little books around the space. While some have costumes, there were a bunch wearing little red scarves. We found out that those ones have health issues, and the scarves are to tell you not to give them the cat treats you can buy from the café.

On our final day we went to the National Museum of Modern Art before heading to the airport. While the Museum doesn’t have a huge collection, it’s a good summary of Japanese art since the 1800s. There were lots of people wandering around by themselves in the Museum, which was kind of nice.