Is Japan The New Ski Capital?

This week we're talking to Jay Stevens, CEO of Wayfairer Travel, whose passion is snowboarding in Japan.

Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy 

Transcript

Peter This week we're talking to Jay Stevens, CEO of bespoke holiday specialist, Wayfairer Travel. Jay's personal passion is skiing – or rather snowboarding – in Japan, a subject that's pretty close to our hearts, Felice. It's been a while now since we last skied there. What do you think of it?

Felice I absolutely love skiing in Japan. In fact, two of my most memorable ski trips ever were in Japan. The snow conditions were fantastic. The pistes were not very crowded – then – but I hear that it's got more popular. And the off-piste, hardly anyone went in the off-piste, so it was fantastic. As you say, though, it's been a few years since we were there, and I expect the skiing in Japan has changed a lot. It'll be interesting to hear what Jay has to say about it.

Peter Jay, welcome to the show.

Jay Thank you.

Peter It's very nice to have you with us today. Now, tell us about skiing in Japan, because I think that's one of your specialties.

Jay It is. We are building it as a specialty for the company, but it's a passion, so it's become a passion project of mine personally. And obviously the team's working with me to roll this product out. So Japan became a significant destination for us.

Japan came on the map about three years ago. As of yesterday, when I checked in the morning, it's probably three to four weeks from becoming our number one destination in our business.

So we started as a safari company. Our original first destination was Tanzania. Then we added other African destinations, and then as we grew, we became global. And Japan has, in a very short cycle, a three-year cycle, gone from non-existent. And it will be number one by the conclusion of this year, and it may be as soon as three to four weeks. It is literally a single booking away. So if one booking comes in before the next Kenya booking comes in, Japan moves into top slot type of thing. So it's right up there, but it's moving into first place.

The ski product's starting to get some really good traction, and that's been developed. I'm a snowboarder, not a skier. I started snowboarding with my daughter who was a skier and has converted to snowboarding. Back in 2018 was our first trip, and that was to Niseko. That was back in the day when Niseko didn't have queues and huge crowds, and long lines for the lifts, and it was still fairly local back in 2018. When we went back again in 2023, it was ok, but it had started to get very international. It had lost a little bit of its local charm, if I'm being perfectly honest.

So since then, we've gone and found other resorts: Furano, Zao Onsen and Yamagata. We missed out on Rutsutsu because we went there in the spring skiing and it had just closed before Furano. Appi Hogan's become a favourite. We did Hakuba. We really enjoyed Hakuba. We did Nagano, did a couple of fields there and really enjoyed that as well. And what we're trying to do now because of the business, is really push ourselves out and look at some of the more unique fields with the real Japan experience. So you get the snow, the culture, the beauty of Japan.

Peter I think I'm right in saying that on Hokkaido, the North Island, there are more than a hundred resorts, in fact.

Jay Correct.

Peter We really know of about half a dozen of them on the hill.

Jay Correct, and that's a bit of a shame. For example, when we went to Furano, that's very local village, with two different ski fields in the Furano area or the Furano resort, so two completely independent fields.

One of them unfortunately closed when we arrived there in spring, but the other one was fully operational. By two o'clock, three days in a row, I was the only person on the mountain and they kept the lifts running, which was quite a unique experience in itself. You can imagine being spring skiing conditions, blue skies, and you are the only guy on the mountain doing runs up and down. Spring skiing in Japan, I would rank as good as some of the best skiing I've done in New Zealand…snowboarding...but yes, it's just the conditions are incredible.

Felice We've been to Japan. I've been twice, and Peter's been three times I think, but we haven't been since before COVID. I imagine it's full of queues and it wasn't international. They were Japanese people and then the people working there were Australians and New Zealanders, and no other nationalities were there at all.

Jay We've started seeking out the very, very local resorts now, so we don't go back to Niseko anymore, just for the simple reason I don't want to go to Japan and stand in queues when I don't have to. And the beauty of Japan, Peter asked the question, how many? A hundred resorts in Hokkaido alone, which is correct. There's 650 resorts across Japan and there are some incredible ones – the two you have heard of…the Yamagata snow monsters?

So I was snowboarding the Yamagata snow monsters in December of last year, which was a phenomenal experience. It's like being on another planet. It really is. You feel like you've literally travelled and gone into another planet or another time zone. It's incredible.

Felice Which island is that on?

Jay That's on Honshu, the main island. So you get there in about two and a half hours on the Shinkansen out of Tokyo. You need to take one train onto the local, but the local trip's only about 40 minutes. You arrive into the Yamagata station and it's about another 30 to 40 minutes up to the resort. And we stayed in an incredibly quaint ski-in, ski-out, very local, very Japanese. Probably one of the best onsens I've ever been in my entire life, and I love onsens, so I do seek them out and pay particular attention.

Felice I like the wild pools that you get on the mountainside.

Jay So this particular resort was ski-in, ski-out, and it had an indoor outdoor onsen, the traditional wooden onsen. Oh my God, it was just amazing. Absolutely stunning. And again, not crowded. I was there in December. No queues. Hardly anyone in the onsen when I went in.

Just get off the beaten track and explore and experience the real Japan, because why go to Japan and stand in a queue? You can go, you can stay home in the US to do that, or go across on a shorter trip to Europe to do that.

Peter I first went to Japan, in 1991 to ski, I think the first time.

Jay Oh, so that's before…you would've been the only foreigner on the mountain.

Peter I was the only foreigner there, just about, and I went to Sahoro, which is a very small resort, not to be confused with Sapporo, in Hokkaido, and it was very strange because there were no Westerners at all. Apart a few Aussie ski instructors, that was about it. I remember we went from Sahoro to Furano to take a look at another resort. The Club Med Chef de Village said, ‘You are never going find your way there or back because no one speaks a word of English.’

And we got on the train, myself and my friend got on the train and set off. And of course what we hadn't realised was that every single platform was only in Japanese, so we had no idea.

Jay That was when my love affair with Japan started. The people, the culture, the food, history, and, and just the politeness, the efficiency. It is a conflict as well, on certain things. The trains are so efficient, yet if you want to book a seat with luggage and they've got to go through each cabin individually to find the cabin that's got the luggage space available, it's a country in conflict in a lot of ways.

Felice Do you have a favourite resort?

Jay Historically, I probably would've said Appi Kogan. And then now I've started pushing myself to go, my favourite resort is the next resort I go to, because they all surprise you in different ways. I think the secret with Japan is to not get trapped into going to a resort because you've been there before, there was a couple of things you liked and it's the easy choice. And Japan can be a challenge, hence why Wayfairer exists, right? We are very good at managing difficult locations, but for me, part of my role is to go there and find these new locations and get things set up so our clients don't go through the frustrations or the challenges that we face, which is a long list and there's some interesting things that have happened along the way that I could talk about.

But yes, I would've said a Appi Cogan, but, and Appi Cogan is a phenomenal resort. There's a ski-in, there's actually three ski-in, ski-out hotels there, and it's all run by IHG there. So there's a Holiday Inn, which I think they're refurbishing right now. There's a Crown Plaza, which I've stayed at before, which you get very large rooms for a relatively fair price. And then there's the high end, and it is super high end, it's 25, 26 rooms, the Intercontinental – and what an incredible property. It's right on the ski field there. Proper ski-in, ski-out, and you come back to your room and you're looking up on the mountain and it's just, it ticks every single box. It is breathtaking and it's an amazing experience.

The risk is, or the temptation is to go back there because you know what you're getting. It's great. The snow conditions are amazing, but the snow conditions across Japan are amazing. So my commitment to myself and my commitment to giving back to our clients is much to my daughter's dismay because she's got her favourites and she wants to keep going back to. But we're going to keep pushing ourselves to go to new locations.

My daughter and I are actually going to be based, she's got school holidays December, January, we're going to base ourselves out of Japan for the whole of December or January, just exploring new resorts. So every two or three days moving on to a new resort.

Peter That's fascinating.

Felice Can you do that easily? You have to have a car, obviously. There's no public transport.

Jay No, look, you'd be amazed. It's with Google Maps and Google Translate and just having spent enough time in Japan, I've been going to Japan for 25 years now, and I have spent a lot of time there. You can get pretty much everywhere. You may get caught out like I did where I arrived too late and I'd missed the last bus. So I had to get a...and when I say a bus, a transfer between a train station and one of the resorts, which is very common practice in Japan...I had to catch a taxi, which I was panicking because I thought I've made mistakes in the past.

In my corporate life, I remember catching a taxi that cost me close to 200 US dollars, but as it turned out, it was, it was a 20 or $30 taxi ride at midnight up to a resort way up in the mountain, and no problem getting there. So, look, we are going to try and do it initially without a car just to see how we go. And then further down the track if needed, we will get a car. But I need to have an international license to enable that, which I do have.

But it's just a big part of the experience in Japan. And again, quoting my daughter. Her first question is, 'Daddy, can we catch the bullet train,' as soon as we arrive in Japan? And it is all part of the experience. It's just, in Japan using the train system is how people get around. It's how they commute.

Peter Apart from your personal enthusiasm, which is obviously extremely important, why is your company suddenly finding that Japan's rising through the ranks and will be number one?

Jay I think after COVID there was a lot of interest from the American market, so the US market came on in a hiss and a roar with interest in Japan. With that interest in Japan, it's now spilled over to curiosity about the ski product and the snow and culture side of things. And we did the research. There's not much in the way of the type of business model or the service that we offer, which is luxury tailor made, bespoke one trip designed per client. We don't sell a repeat client trip. There's no such thing.

Even if a family makes a recommendation to another family and they say they wanna do the same trip, we'll still go to the trouble of doing the consultation, because everyone's different. And there could be subtle nuances between two families, that if you miss the opportunity to really make it a very special experience.

And that's why we are in this and my team's in this, because of the true passion to really make special trips and these trips can quite often be life changing for some families. What we wanna create is a memory, a forever memory for that family or that couple, or even individual travellers, which we do get.

Felice So what do you think it is about that people like about Japan so much?

Jay I think there's several factors. I think there is still the mystique. It is still a very mysterious place, right? I think things like Netflix and the prolific spread of Asian dramas, Asian action films, all this type of thing has accelerated or heightened that whole mystique.

And then people are talking. And when people talk and with this momentum that's built, someone says, 'Oh, I was in Japan. You've got to go. It's a great destination.' Because we've never had people go and say, 'It wasn't a great trip.' It just doesn't happen. So you've got that positive momentum, that positive experience.

Japan's got its challenges around accommodating and we are working...I've actually got a meeting with the Japan Tourism Board next month, because we are not sending our clients into the over-touristed parts. I won't sell Niseko as a ski product because there's too much, it's just overpopulated in terms of tourists.

We are trying to work with our clients, fly them into Osaka, skip Kyoto, go to some of the other less-known locations, which are quite often more unique, can be a better experience because you're not dealing with large crowds.

Felice You've mentioned some luxury hotels you go to, but what about ryokans? Do you ever, do you recommend this?

Jay Absolutely. There're a must-do for anyone going to Japan?

Felice Can you explain what a ryokan is to people who don't know?

Jay Yes. So a ryokan is a local Japanese inn, and there are big variations on that. One of the most incredible ones, and unfortunately I didn't get to stay there, I was only visiting. It's a place called Ginzan Onson. They have what's called the tatami mats, which is the...they're a specific size, so they're a bamboo type mat. You are sitting on the floor, you're cross-legged for your dinners. Your dinner is typically a Japanese traditional meal served in your room. You're sleeping on the floor on futons. You will typically have onsens there. You'll have the meal, so there'll be the seats in the table. Then that's cleared away and they'll lay out the bedding and then you sleep on the floor, Japanese style, very traditional.

Doesn't sound comfortable, but it is surprisingly, I've woken up feeling the best I've ever felt after staying at ryokans, and I think a big part of that is they typically have onsens connected to them. And because you're in a ryokan and the onsens are part of the facility, you use it. I typically use it twice a day when I'm at a ryokan.

That is the real Japan that you're experiencing. And I would suggest to anyone going to Japan, you've got to at least do a couple of nights in a ryokan. And if you enjoy it, extend, if you don't, there's plenty of international hotel options with the usual bed and, but they're small. The ryokans, the benefit is you get a bigger room, more space. Whereas the international hotels tend to be quite small rooms, quite small beds, spaces that are premium in Japan.

Felice So in ryokens, do you get a bathroom as well or does everyone just use the onsen?

Jay So there, there are differences, so some have private bathrooms their own including a shower and a bath. Others you will use what they call the public bath system or the onsen. And some have public bath that are part of the onsen that the entire area. You are actually leaving the accommodation and going to what's a traditional public bathhouse?

Peter Yes. Water is very much a part of the whole thing in Japan and skiing in particular too, we've been to, yes, where you ski down and then you come across a little pool, a heated pool, a naturally heated pool and people don't seem to have any inhibitions.

People just strip off and jump in. So traditionally back in the day, and they, these still exist. Onsens were actually both sexes. It's very much part of Japanese culture, part of their social system, part of their social fabric. It was actually us from the West that came into Japan. We were a bit prudish. It was frowned upon, so it became males and the male on females and the female, but there is still mixed-sex onsens that still do exist.

Felice So, I've heard about the baths, hot springs, where monkeys go and bathe. Which resort is that?

Jay That's near Nagano and yes, I took my daughter there. It's a good old trek, so you can get the bus to the base of the facility there. You're going to be walking around about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes, depending on your fitness level. It's a manageable walk, but it's a good old walk. So you're an hour 15 there, the amount of time that you spend. And it's incredible, these red-faced monkeys, and they're bathing and they're fighting and brawling and some of it's chaos and some of it's serenity and it's all part of the experience that is Japan.

Peter And what about the food?

Felice Yes, so one of the reasons for us, that we love Japan is because of the food.

Jay Where do you start? You've got what we all know Japan for, which is the sushi, the sashimi, you know, the teppanyaki, the Japanese barbecues. There's beef specialty restaurants where you can get wagyu cubed beef and you can get five different grades of beef as part of your meal.

The udon and just some of their simple rice dishes with just the toppings they use. And then also the whole experience around food, the precision, the presentation – less is more – quite simplistic, but beautifully presented and the flavours are, you know, just incredible. Such a high quality of food, such a focus on food and food's everywhere. It's such a big part of Japanese culture.

Felice In Europe, for instance, it's sushi that is famous. Is that as important in Japan?

Jay Sushi and sashimi are a very big part of the Japanese diet, but they're not Japanese food. They are one type of cuisine and it represents a percentage of a very big wide range of Japanese...the kasu don curries, the pork cutlets, I'm just trying to think of all the variations. They have incredible chocolates. You go up into Hokkaido and you've got the NAMA chocolates, which are some of the best chocolates I've ever eaten in my life.

You go there and you just go to a 711 and the local options there and the donburis, the rice cakes, all these types of things, rice balls, and even the way they produce just a B-L-T, it's very Japanese. It's very precise. It's very fresh. It's incredible presentation. The whole food experience is next level. It just elevates the entire trip, and it is incredibly memorable. I think people go, get absolutely shocked by how incredible it is, and they return in part, I think, for the food alone. We do.

Felice Apart from skiing, is there anything else people can do in Japan? Places you'd recommend they go to? Obviously they would want to do a bit of a city break as well. What combination would you recommend? Which places?

Jay See, this is the thing, right? And this is why we are putting together this product because the mistake that people make right now is, and this isn't so much on the US, because you just don't get that many Americans skiing and not that many Europeans. Some but not a lot.

Mostly what we come across in Japan is the Australians they fly into the airport, they jump on a bus, they go to Niseko or one of the resorts around the Niseko area. Queue up, crowd, and really miss...

Now Sapporo just in itself, Sapporo right in the city there. You've got, you know, Sapporo Beer Museum. You've got the Sapporo Fish market, which just in itself, where you can go and get the crabs, the oysters, the mussels, the seafood. The fish markets and you go there, you pick out what you want, and they're cooking it for you. You know, the snow crab legs and having those fresh.

So go to Sapporo, but then don't go to the touristy locations. Go up to Furano. Go to the Rutsutu, or fly into Osaka, for example, and a shinkansen will get you to a ski field in three to four hours.

Felice Which would be the nearest ski fields from Osaka?

Jay Nagano. There's probably some closer that if you looked, as I said, I'm just starting to discover that how prolific the number of the ski fields are. I just found one that's 50 minutes outside of Tokyo by bullet train, and there's 12 resorts there. I've started looking at some of them because one of them's got a cable-car to the summit like, and that's a 45-minute bullet train ride from Tokyo Central Station. It's incredible.

Felice I've always thought that the resorts on the main island where the most crowded, because a friend of ours went many years ago, and said that you had to get a time slot when you could ski, and that included at night when it was flood lit, because it was so busy.  I think that was near Tokyo.

Jay So that's possible during the peak Japanese local holiday periods. So you would have to be careful of that. And again, this is why we are doing what we do. We are managing our clients so they're not being exposed to these things. If they're coming and it's during the Japan peak season, we'll get them out to the much further resorts, because people don't spread.

And in the Japan peak, holiday period, so Golden Week, those type periods, it could be quite crowded with the local. The international resorts: So you've got Nano, which is quite heavy. Can be quite heavy and crowded, but again, if you pick your timings, it can be very pleasant. Keep away from Niseko. And again, there's all these resorts, there's a hundred plus resorts in Sapporo alone. There's another 400, 500 across Honshu, and there' one that I've just recently found, I'm starting to do the research on, and we'll be there in December and we'll go and visit so I can find out what the crowds are like. If it's crowded, we'll just push on the train to the next location.

Felice When is the peak holiday time in Japan's?

Jay It's Golden Week, which isn't because it's their calendar, not our calendar. It moves a bit. I wanna double check that before I shoot my mouth off. You also get another facto:  the Chinese New Year, which is that sort of January, February period. There is a large number of Chinese that do come to Japan. Japan's become an incredibly popular destination for China. It's not only a popular destination for the west, and skiing has become a lot more popular with the Chinese. So Appi Kogen, where we go, we were there Appi Kogen, we were there in peak season, what they call their peak season, which was December into January. So two weeks. December, two weeks of January, and I think the longest queue was in the mornings first thing, three minutes ops, and that was the first morning queue.

But also they have these black passes, which are like a VIP pass, which are like 15 US dollars more than the regular $30 pass. And you bypass the queue and you can be first up the mountain, so that they do have. It's interesting with Japanese culture as an example to explain this, on the bullet train you have Green class, which we would call business class, and then there's Grand class, which is what would be first class. Now, the difference on those tickets can be 20 to 30 US dollars. The difference on the experience is literally you're in a big, massive leather seat versus a fairly standard cloth seat. You've got full service, you get a free meal, you get free alcohol, and there's only three seats across each cabin, and there's probably a total of 12 seats in the entire carriage, and it's 20 to $30 on a sort of three hour train trip more.

And this goes back to Japanese culture. Excess is frowned upon. They're very conservative and they don't like to be showy. So it would be unusual for a Japanese person going on holiday to book Gram class. They would tend to book Green class. They would book Grand class for a wedding anniversary, for a birthday celebration. It would be treating themselves, and this is even the big bosses and all that type of stuff. Very senior people like to be seen as prudent and conservative, not flashy.

So yeah, that all ties in as well to, you can buy VIP type tickets and they're not massively expensive, and you can bypass the queues, and some of these bigger resorts because the fields are so massive...you can have six, eight chair-lifts going up from the first part of the mountain, from the base, and then it can go and spread further out, and you can be covering kilometres and kilometres. At Yamagada, where we were, there were five or six different car parks that were spread around the base of the mountain, which were all starting-points to go up the mountain, up to two different summits.

Felice So which would you say are the best, the least crowded resorts with the best skiing. Can you work out which those would be?

Jay So far, and I'm still exploring, but I would put Furano up there. I would put, so the top three I would put up there, Furano. Appi Kogan, Zao Onsen and Yamagada. I would put them as the top three.

Felice Could you do them all in one trip or are they too far away from each other?

Jay I did them in April. So I arrived in Tokyo. Here's one for you. So we arrived in Tokyo in April for spring skiing and we saw the cherry blossom, which was stunning. We were there for two days.

Jay We went to the fish market, we did all the things that we liked to do in Tokyo. Jumped on the bullet train, went to Appi Kogan. We were there with in under three hours. We skied there for three, four days. We then went on to Kororo, which is the club med facility in Honshu, and then we carried on to Sapporo and went up further north up into Furano. And we could have even done Rusutsu if it was still open. And that was a two-week trip.

Peter So tell us about the back country skiing, the off-piste? When I first went to Japan. It was absolutely forbidden. You really could not do it at all. It was considered unfriendly and irreligious. You were offending the gods of the mountain. But that's, I gather, it's all changed now.

Jay Yes, back country. This is an interesting one, because I'm right into this. It was much the same, it was all a bit taped off and I'd duck under the tape and blast down through the trees and I never ever really got told off. But apparently I was being frowned upon because I was a badly-behaved tourist going off trail and I shouldn't have been.

Now it's much more established. You can get some incredible backcountry off-piste guides. There's even cat tours now and you can actually do night cat tours where they'll take you up and you can ski down in the evening with the cats doing the floodlighting for you. It’s really become a big part of the ski industry over there.

And the conditions – when you're going back country. I've got pictures, even the trip in December, I got myself a little bit of off trail and I ran out of speed and ended up having to walk back in. It was a good 45-minute walk in powder that was at the minimum at my waist, sometimes coming up to my chest, and that is standard snow conditions in Japan.

Felice We found the snow conditions amazing. In fact, when, whenever we've been, we haven't seen much sunshine. It's just been constantly snowing, just a little bit, but constantly.

Jay We got lucky in the December trip, we had a mixture of snow and a mixture of blue skies. The spring skiing, we had a couple of days of sleet cum rain, but some of it was snow. So were at Appi Kogen, we got a couple of days of snow, but we got blue skies as well. So, yes, I think if you're there for sort of seven to ten days, you're guaranteed a mix, unless you get a whole storm system coming through and then it's just snowing heavily.

Peter What about language? Now, when I first went there, as I said earlier, everybody spoke just Japanese and there was no chance of finding an English speaker. But these days, of course, there's a number of Australians who developed Niseko and I guess a lot of New Zealanders as well. So is it a problem, language?

Jay It's a problem. So if you want to go to the main international resorts, no problem at all, but you might as well go to one of the Swiss resorts or one of the French resorts, or one of the Austrian resorts, because you're not really experiencing Japan and they're almost like a European ski experience. Very similar and not that many Japanese staff. Korora I went to, just to check it out, there was a Club Med there. We weren't at the Club Med, we're at another hotel that was ski-in, ski-out, and all of the staff were international. We didn't come, we weren't exposed to Japanese. In the resort: yes, there was Japanese staff up there, but to me you are not really experiencing Japan.

And the good thing, so with language, Google Translate works. It absolutely works English to Japanese or any language to Japanese. Quite a few of the less known places, they carry the translate devices, so they'll speak into them. It speaks to you in English, you speak into it and it translates back to them in Japanese. And the thing I've found with Japan over the last three to four years, there is a real focus on tourism, and the Japanese are some of the politest people in the world, they're always willing to try and help, and it's just being a little bit courteous, learning a few words in Japanese to be courteous and show a bit of respect and they'll fall over themselves trying to help you, honestly.

Peter That's brilliant. And what about the cost of getting there? In time gone by, the flights have been very expensive from Europe.

Felice ...and America.

Jay They have, I think it's like anywhere, right? If you are willing to be a bit flexible in the way that you fly, you can always find good flight deals. They exist. If you wanna fly point-to-point and you are on a major airport to a major airport, you're going pay. But if you've got a little bit of flexibility and you are prepared to fly to from a secondary or to a secondary. You're going to be able to fly to Japan, return on an economy seat for under a thousand pounds.

Felice And once you're there, Japan has a reputation of being expensive. Is that correct?

Jay No, it's a misconception. If you want to go and eat international food at international locations with international flavour, sure, it's expensive as it should be. But if you want to step off the beaten track even a little bit and go a little bit local, use the train system, don't jump in cabs like you would in New York or other major cities, London, be a little bit sensible and try localise a little bit and step into the local way of doing things. It's actually very reasonable.

Your ski passes my ski rental, so I never carry my equipment to Japan because of the travelling round, but the executive rental, I think I was paying $40 a day for boots, snowboard boots, and a high quality high-end board that was that season's board. So it is a misconception that it's expensive. It really is.

Felice So how much would a lift pass cost for a week, would you say?

Jay As soon as you start buying multi-day, the price comes down. It's not going to get much below that $20, $22, $23 mark for multi-day, per day. Yeah, per day.

Peter That's pretty good. That's very good.

Felice So we're under misconception then.

Jay Tokyo is expensive. The big cities are expensive. You can buy, park, don't even land at Tokyo or Narita Airport and get to Tokyo Station and get on a bullet train and get outside the big city straight away. And for me, I don't know if you are going to Japan for skiing, what the attraction is to go to Tokyo other than saying 'I've been to Tokyo.'

Felice So when you've been on your many trips to Japan, has anything ever gone wrong or anything funny happened?

Jay The list is long. The list's incredibly long. I don’t know if I should share this one or not. Especially as the owner of a travel company, right? So I decided I was going to test out how good AI is, how much risk I've got to my business. Is AI coming? Is it going to take over my world? Am I going to be laying off staff? Am I going to be looking or licking my wounds and working out, woe is me in a year and two years and 10 years?

So I decided to do an entire 10-day trip only using AI. The list of disasters is too long for this session, so I'll give you some highlights. The reason I called a taxi that night I told you, was because AI told me go to a bus stop. The bus stop existed, but it was the bus stop for the local bus, going on the local bus route, not going anywhere near a mountain resort. The actual mountain resort bus stop was miles away from where AI sent me, and I'm quite experienced on AI. We use it a lot in our business. So I didn't just take its first answer. I asked it specifics and I said, 'What shops in nearby?' And it gave me very convincing answers to go to the wrong place.

That that was one. The next one's the icing on the cake. The next one I was staying in Yamagata in the city because I was heading off the next day and I decided I wanted an onsen and I was staying at one of the railway hotels on the railway, at the station. Great hotels, great price, but they don't have onsen and I really wanted an onsen, so asked at the front desk. They couldn't really make, so back into my AI, AI took me to an incredible local onsen – amazing experience. Told me that I'd be able to get a taxi back and I couldn't. You couldn't get taxis to come out there. So the taxi was willing to take me there, but taxis won't come there for a pickup. And I managed to go through Google Translate. The owners told me to walk back to the hotel, which was a two hour walk, heavy snow through the rice paddies of Yamagata.

And fortunately, the sweet lady at the onsen must have taken pity on me, and somehow found someone who spoke a bit of English. Who came and picked me up, he'd put his kids in his car. He must have woken them up because it was fairly late in the evening. So, I'm sitting beside, this guy's probably less than one-year-old baby. His daughter's in the front seat and he's talking to me in not bad English saying, 'You can't get taxied out here. I feel so sorry for you.' And then I tried to say, 'How do I repay you?'

Because you know it was a good. 15, 20 minute ride to take me to the hotel and he had to come out, get me, and he wouldn't take anything for it. So I gave him my business card and I said, 'Look, if you ever need to go on holiday, please look me up and we'll do something for you, to take care of you and show my gratitude.'

So yes, that's one of them. I'll give you one more. So spring skiing in Japan is phenomenal. There's one thing they probably should warn you about before you go up the mountain in spring. What do bears do when spring comes?

Felice They come out of their caves.

Jay They come out of hibernation. So my daughter and I had gone to the summit and she was learning to snowboard, picked it up really quickly. So she's up the summit day two, but she wanted to go down a slightly slower path. I wanted to go straight down the middle. Fortunately I said to her, 'If anything happens, ring my phone twice, I'll pick it up on the second ring and I'll get back to you. I'll find you. Whatever needs to happen.' She's on the phone and she's not hysterical because she's a well-travelled kid, but she was...there was some panic in her voice.

The phone call went, ‘Daddy, there's a bear. There's a bear, there's a bear!’

I said, ‘What do you mean there's a bear?’ Because I hadn't thought of any of this, right? So there's a bear. I said, ‘OK. What have you done? What have you done?’

‘I took my snowboard off. I'm crouching behind my snowboard, and I've dug down into the snow. It can't see me. I'm sure it can't see me.’

I said, ‘What's the bear doing?’

‘It's heading down the mountain.’

I said, ‘So you're up the mountain. It's going down. It's going away from you?'

'It's going away. It's going away.’

So I got down to one of the ski stations and of course no one speaks English, so I'm like doing 'Grr, grr.'

And they're like, 'Crazy guy making funny noises. What the hell's going on?'

Next minute I've got Google Translate out and I got the bear. 'Oh, bear! Bear! Wow.'

So I sent them off. They blasted off on the snowmobile, found my daughter. But fortunately, a American-Japanese lady had stopped and kept my daughter company by this stage.

And here's the good news: this was in Honshu. Honshu has the black bear, which is the smallest bear. It grazes on roots, it eats a bit of honey, and they're only known to be aggressive if you come onto their territory or disturb their cubs. So I don't think there's a fortunate version of catching a bear sighting on a Japan ski field. It's probably something that you, your listeners wanna be aware of if they're planning a spring ski trip to Japan.

Felice So if someone was going, wanted to do a long stay, like a month, would you be able to organise that? What sort of thing would you recommend they did? Travel around to different islands?

Jay  Yes, absolutely. If you're going to Japan for a month, I would move you around. I'd probably put you in most locations for between two and three days, depending on what the specificities of the location were. And Japan has such an incredible amount to offer both winter, summer, all year round, all the seasons – cherry blossom in the spring, phenomenal skiing, world class, the cultural aspects, the sumos, the food, the baseball games, the tea ceremonies. We've had clients shape and make their own katana swords to take back with them. The stuff that you can do in Japan. Yes, the cat tours, the list is endless, there's ninja shows, dress up in traditional Japanese, old traditional, or the whole geisha, the ceremonial clothing, and some of the sites as well.

Mount Fuji. Going up Mount Fuji on its own is just an experience in itself. Catching the Shinkansen, the Japanese railway system. The markets, the fish markets are, again, a whole experience in themselves. The list is so long. Even in a month, we couldn't cover everything. In a month, you get people and they'd repeat. If someone went to Japan for a month and we did a trip for them, I can guarantee you they're going back.

Felice Another question, when I was in Japan, I fell over on an icy street, and so I wanted to have a massage, and we arrived in Tokyo at a hotel, late at night. Late at night, almost midnight. I asked at the reception, ‘Can I book a massage for tomorrow?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘you can have one now.’

And someone came to my room, a little old man in a kimono, and massaged me there and then, and it was the most painful experience ever, because he was so strong. So is this typical? It did the trick, but is this typical of the sort of massages you get?

Jay Yes, they're much more therapeutic style massages. They're not the relaxing zen meditation type massages that we think of in the West. They're much more focused on repairing or getting circulation working, looking for knots and repairing knots, getting everything in alignment.

Felice So if people want to find out more, what is your website that people can go to?

Jay So look us up at Wayfairer Travel and you'll find us there. And there's multiple ways, you can contact us by phone. You can submit an inquiry, you can just sign up to our newsletter. See what's going on in terms of what we're offering, great times to travel, anything that's special coming up, or new product offers. We have regular communications with our mailing list.

Peter Jason, thank you very much indeed for coming on the show and maybe we'll. Run into you on a ski field somewhere in Japan.

Jay I'll be there. I'll be there all December and January. So if you're heading that way, give me a shout.

Felice Well, thank you very much for talking to us.

Jay Thank you for having me on.

Felice That's all for now. If you've enjoyed the show, please share this episode with at least one other person! Do also subscribe on Spotify, i-Tunes or any of the many podcast providers – where you can give us a rating. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram. We'd love you to sign up for our regular emails. By the way, we're no 7 in the Top 20 Midlife Travel Podcasts.

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