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Our 6 yr old girl has been to Japan on holiday 3 times (first time at age 3).
She LOVES Japan. Her favourite things are:
- onsens. She absolutely adores having a hot spring bath. All it takes to make her get really excited is if we tell her we're staying at an onsen ryokan. And once we're there, she is constantly asking "can we go for a bath now?", "can we go for another bath now?"
- collecting gotochi Kittys (the Kitty phone charms that you can get in different towns/regions. Each place has some thing(s) it is famous for, and you generally find a Kitty themed along those lines. E.g. in Hokkaido they are famous for potatoes and sweetcorn, so you find Kitty charms where Kitty is a cob of corn, or a potato.) They cost 600 Yen or so, iirc, and she will happily trek all over with us and do some more grown-up sightseeing as long as there's the promise of a Kitty at the end of it. We give her some cash of her own, and then she has to do some counting, and learn a few ("please" and "thank you") words. (On that note, we found Kiddyland rather poor in terms of selection. You get something sort of as good in the toy dept of a big department store.)
- Japanese food. Especially this last time, at 6, she loved the food. Kaiten sushi is amazing for her ("robot food"). And if all else fails, there's always tempura or katsu. And many places will do super-cute children's meals.
- collecting all the amazing admission tickets, leaflets, etc and making a scrapbook-diary as we travel between towns. Admission tickets in Japan are typically lovely, with great colourful designs and photos. With glue, scissors,pens (see below) and a blank book, she was as happy as anything being our official family record-keeper.
- Japanese stationery stores. For fun things like sushi-shaped erasers, origami paper, and a great selection of colouring pens.
- Miraikan and the kids' science museum in Tokyo. Seeing Asimo was a highlight of her last trip.
- some of the modern art that Japan has in abundance. She loved Benesse/Naoshima, and also the wacky stuff at the C21st museum in Kanazawa.
- food markets.
- the TOTO factory museum, and Japanese washlet toilets in general. She finds the whole experience of suing them hilarious and fascinating.
- the beaches (and the beef) on Ishigaki.
- being made a huge fuss of by so many people. We've always found that travelling with a child in Japan brings out so much kindness in people. Especially if she can say a handful of simple words.
- train journeys, especially bullet trains. If you can turn them into quality family time (books, a few treats and snacks, games, scrapbooking), they can become really good points of the holiday instead of the dull time it takes to get from A to B.
Finding parks and playgrounds can be difficult (but if you ask, then people will generally help you), and depending on when you visit (e.g. if it's school term time in Japan), there may not be many other children around during the week, so it might be hard for her to play with others of her own age (and of course there's a certain element of language barrier), but on the other hand she gets lots of concentrated time with her parents, so (hopefully!) that's a good thing.
We've never been to Disney, and she's never complained about that. I thought of going to Puroland, but when you look at it, it's not really all that exciting, imho.
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