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The last few years, we took some new students to Japan and started to enjoy our role as travel guide. However, someone who visits Japan for the first time …

The Japan travel guide pages for budokas (by Guy Buyens)

Introduction Why this document when there are already so many good guidebooks? Well, the reason could be simple, none of the official guidebooks are written by bu"DO"kas, or fanatics of the "way". After numerous visits to Japan, and even having lived there for some time, I not only improved my skills in martial arts (at least I hope I did), but also developed myself into a more advanced traveler. The year I lived in Japan (in the Osaka area), I decided to choose a family stay (probably the only viable option for economical reasons), which allowed me to get trained in daily Japanese behavior and decent survival Japanese. That year my new Japanese friends took me to numerous places in the Kansai area but my appetite to explore the bigger Japan started to grow and I decided to return regularly for more training and travel. Fortunately, already very early in the process (upon my first return from Japan in 1990, to be precise), I got company and a few friends started to share my passion for the traditional Japanese martial arts (Kobudo) and curiosity for Japan. Alain Berckmans, Frederic Roncioni, Roger Bissot and Alain Missorten were the first to join me in this Japanese adventure. Over the years, we have been regularly going to Japan, mainly to train Hontai Yoshin Ryu in the SoHonbu dojo (main dojo of the school) in Nishinomiya (between Kobe and Osaka). On each occasion, we also took some time to travel. Most of our travels where done in the weekend and started from the Kansai area. We also had the chance to participate in enbu (an enbu is a demonstration of Japanese martial arts) in places like Nishinomiya, Himeji, Miyajima, Kumamoto, Nara and Tokyo. When we travelled for an enbu, most of the time we took a few days after the meeting to visit interesting places on our way back to Nishinomiya. Several times, we bought a Japan Rail Pass for 1 week, that allowed us to make interesting travels in the weekends but also to cover distance during a day-trip in the week, since it was of course necessary to be back for the evening training. The last few years, we took some new students to Japan and started to enjoy our role as travel guide. However, someone who visits Japan for the first time should see the usual highlights that are very well covered in the traditional guidebooks, so we made sure to balance our need to search for interesting "budo" places with traditional sightseeing. This document is not to be taken too seriously. We are no professional travel agents and we don’t have the ambition to become one of them. We do have some useful information that we want to share and we still have enough appetite to discover more interesting places, so who knows, maybe there will be another edition in the future.

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