When I told one of my friends in late November that I would visit Japan for a one-week holiday, he assured me I would love it. "Almost all the people who I know have visited the country enjoyed the trip," he said. He was not wrong.

My wife, who visited Kyoto 13 years ago, liked Japan's ancient capital so much that she always wanted to relive the experience. Actually, if it were not for her insistence, I might not have thought of setting foot on the soil of Japan, even though it is a "close neighbor separated only by a strip of water".

For me, Japan was psychologically too remote a country to visit, although many of its cultural aspects, from written characters to calligraphy and costumes to cuisine, can be traced back to China.