We are Anne and Tony Sutherland-Smith from Australia, travel bloggers at Japan Travel Planning. We love visiting Japan as a family, and write articles to help others plan their trips to Japan. 

We look forward to helping you plan your visit to Japan. We'll help you visit all the sights, have unique experiences and have a great visit!

Please subscribe below to join our email list and receive your FREE Japan Travel Checklist 🙂

You will receive our free Japan Travel Checklist to help plan your trip, also weekly inspiration, deals, itinerary planning and our pre-departure checklist. We won't spam you.

Arigato, Anne and Tony.

Anne and Tony driving in the Tokyo Street Karting Experience

Join the Japan Travel Planning Email list to get your FREE Japan Travel Checklist

Check out our step by step checklist to plan your trip

You will receive our free Japan Travel Checklist to help plan your trip, also weekly inspiration, deals, itinerary planning and our pre-departure checklist. We won't spam you.

Challenges Travelling in Japan

Even with being experienced travellers and all of the research we had done for our first visit we were still caught out by many aspects of travelling in Japan.

We personally had issues with:

  • Learning how to use the public transport system (lesson learned - choose an easy transport option when you first arrive!)
  • Making the grave mistake of not pre-purchasing our tickets and Express Passes for Universal Studios Japan - and as a result, while we still had fun, we definitely regretted not realising that Express Passes existed - by the time we learned about them, they were already sold out :(

We also managed to do some things right!

  • Our decision to get off the beaten tourist track and visit the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, Nagano and the snow monkeys near Shibu Onsen was a fantastic decision - we managed to get away from the crowds.
  • We really loved seeing the sumo wrestling and baseball while in Tokyo
  • And many more great experiences, big and small!

We subsequently decided to start writing articles to help other people plan their trips to Japan as well as setting up this email list, as a great way to help people

Anne and Tony at the Torii Gate on Miyajima Island in Japan