We've booked a trip to Japan in March! F is going out a week before me, so he'll have everything sorted by the time I arrive I hope...
After I arrive we're planning to spending a week in Tokyo, followed by a few days in Osaka and Kyoto, and then we're hoping to fly to Ishigaki, which is one of the most southerly islands off the coast of mainland Japan. We still don't know what we're going to do for the week after we fly back in to Fukuoka from Ishigaki. Suggestions welcome!
Normal domestic flights (e.g. Osaka to Ishigaki) cost about £500-600, i.e. are prohibitively expensive; however you can get massive discounts if you are not Japanese and have flown in to Japan from outside. One of the things you can do is get a oneworld Japan air pass. Actually getting one of these passes is easier said than done however, as our unsuccessful 2.5 hour phone calls with various clueless British Airways operators yesterday proved. We're going to try phoning JAL tomorrow.
Ishigaki looks well worth going to though. Because it's so far south, it should be fairly warm by the end of March , although I keep reading people's blogs who turn up and say "I thought it was supposed to be nice weather here?!". It rains quite a lot it seems. There are supposed to be fantastic coral reefs, you can do snorkling, sea kayaking and mountain walking. And it's all apparently much more chilled out than mainland Japan. But we shall see if we ever manage to get there!
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My niece is living in Kobe right now and she recently posted a bunch of pix of a trip she and some friends took...I thought it might be Ishigaki (sounded very much like it from your description above, including the high cost from inside the country). Not quite, they went to the main island of Okinawa and couldn't manage to get to Ishigaki, but really would have liked to do so, so it sounds like a worthwhile place to visit.
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