I didn’t go to Japan looking for peace. I went because I’d never travelled alone for this long and I thought Japan might be a good place to start. But somewhere between the neon buzz of Shinjuku and the sacred stillness of Mount Koya, I found something else: a kind of quiet that wasn’t just around me, but inside me.

Tokyo hits you hard and fast. It’s a city of systems and surprises, where vending machines offer everything from hot coffee to canned soup, and a quiet residential street can suddenly bloom into a Pokémon Center.

My first few days were a heady mix of overstimulation and euphoria. I saw the Big Buddha in Kamakura on a blue-skied day, towering and calm among the turning leaves. I wandered Harajuku in a daze, tried not to get lost in the crush of Takeshita Street. Every crossing, every ramen bar, every 7-Eleven snack was an experience.

Before long it was over, heading out on my first Shinkansen followed a much slower local train toward the north-west town of Takayama.

Takayama is beautiful. Tucked into the mountains, its old town is full of wooden houses, sake breweries and streams trickling under stone bridges. It’s exactly the kind of place you want to be when you need a break from the Tokyo pace. But it was also the first time I truly felt the weight of solo travel.

English wasn’t common and I quickly realised how much I’d been relying on signage, menus and Google Maps back in Tokyo. In Takayama, everything slowed. I wandered the morning markets without understanding what I was buying. I ordered meals by pointing at pictures or miming things awkwardly. I went hours, whole days, even, without really talking to anyone.

The isolation was real. It wasn’t bad, just loud. And without distraction, all the little doubts I’d been pushing down bubbled up: Why did I come here alone? Am I wasting this trip? Would this be better if I had someone to share it with?

But then, something shifted. I started noticing things I hadn’t before… the faint music of wind chimes, the way light slipped through the wooden slats of an old ryokan, the joy of a perfect beef skewer eaten slowly in the afternoon sun. The quiet wasn’t punishment. It was an invitation.

Recharged, it was time to head further west to Hiroshima. However, it was head right into the path of Typhoon Chaba. Nothing makes you realise the reality of solo travel like barrelling toward a Typhoon. By the time I had arrived, the city was bracing for a storm but waking up on the first day – it was clear the worst of it was over.

I spent hours in the Peace Memorial Museum, reading survivor stories and standing silently in front of artefacts that made my throat tighten. A child’s tricycle. A tattered school uniform. Glass bottles warped by fire.

I don’t have the words to properly capture the feeling of standing beneath the A-Bomb Dome. You don’t just see it, you absorb it. And as someone who loves history, but often keeps a respectful emotional distance from it, I felt completely disarmed. This wasn’t just a chapter in a textbook. This was grief, perseverance, and hope all wrapped into one stark structure. I left Hiroshima with a heaviness I didn’t expect.

Kyoto was exactly as stunning as I hoped. I saw geisha slipping quietly down side streets in Gion. I climbed through thousands of torii gates at Fushimi Inari, each one a prayer, a wish, a step forward.

But Kyoto also taught me something about travel fatigue: how even beauty can become background noise when you’re constantly on the move. I’d hit a point where I was “doing” Kyoto rather than feeling it. Checking boxes. Taking photos without really seeing.

So I slowed down. I picked one temple a day instead of five. I sat longer in gardens. I let myself be bored, and from that boredom came renewed presence. There’s a reason rituals are so central to Japanese life: the repetition is the meaning. And in that repetition, I found comfort.

I ended the Japanese leg of my trip in Koyasan, a mountaintop town known for its temples and its deep spiritual roots. Getting there felt like a pilgrimage: a train, a cable car, a winding bus ride through trees that flamed red and gold.

I stayed in a working temple, sleeping on a tatami mat, eating beautifully prepared vegan meals in silence. Mornings began with chanting and incense. Nights ended with long walks through Okunoin Cemetery, where thousands of stone lanterns flickered softly between moss-covered graves.

I thought I’d feel lonely here, even cut off. But something unexpected happened. There was no pressure to speak. No expectation to perform. Just stillness. Kindness. The gentle rhythm of a place that had been doing its thing for hundreds of years without needing anyone’s approval.

And in that quiet, I finally heard what the trip had been trying to tell me all along.

Travelling alone isn’t always the empowering dream we sell it as. It can be confronting, isolating and even a little boring. It forces you to meet yourself again and again especially in the quiet moments.

But it also gives you space. It peels back the noise. And if you let it, it’ll show you what matters.

Japan gave me joy, confusion, awe, hunger, frustration, serenity and more convenience store sandwiches than I care to admit. But most of all, it gave me the chance to sit with myself… without judgment, without distraction, without needing to be anything more than exactly who I was in that moment. That’s the kind of peace I didn’t know I was looking for. And I’m grateful I found it, even if it came in a language I didn’t speak.

For the romanticisation of the feel, as the train hurtled toward Tokyo Narita, I was never more comforted in all my life than to know that family would be waiting for me at the next destination: Palau.