A on and off sordid love affair with lady Japan

A  lot of people ask why Japan ? what's your fascination with Japan? the simple answer is I don't have any more interest then the average Joe.
In terms of passions the order of interests for me are music, strength training, travelling and food so on and so forth. I guess Japan is one of those places if you love dining out and travelling to far flung places then you have to visit it at least once. After travelling to all of Europe for 15 years now its time to give Europe a miss.
My on and off sordid love affair with lady Japan started a while back, unbeknownst to me. hmmm... my first encounter with something Japanese was probably a French cartoon called 'Mysterious Cities D'or' about Spanish conquistadors travelling through the Americas looking for the fables cities of gold. This program in essence was my first encounter with Japanese style animation, as this was jointly developed by the French with a Japanese animation company called Studio Pierrot.
Later on in my teenage years I had brief encounters with Akira Kurosawa here and there with movies like 'Yojimbo', 'Seven Samurais' on late night TV on Channel 4.
More recently I picked up a second hand book called 'I am a Cat' by Natsume Soseki. Which I thought was a brilliant book and thus I decided to explore Japanese literature a bit more and as such ended deciding to learn to the Japanese language and not soon after here I am rambling on about a crazy trip to Japan.
I guess my intention in this blog is to describe my experience in the culinary delights of Japan and explore the music scene and the weird and wonderful mix of Japanese culture which manages to combine the traditional and modern and make it seem to work, where as others countries seem to fail miserably. Anyway I thinks that’s enough for now I need to get back to work…matane