Joanna Lumley's Japan S01E01 - Episode 1

Joanna starts her 2000 mile journey across Japan in Hokkaido – one of the four main islands, where she travels to meet one of the most important animals in Japanese culture, the red-crowned cranes.

Leaving the countryside behind her, Joanna heads to Sapporo her first Japanese city. She arrives during the middle of the annual Snow Festival, and meets members of the local indigenous community, the Ainu. Travelling south she visits a brewery that has been making sake since 1689 and walks to see one of the oldest Pagodas in Japan, dating back to the 10th century and constructed entirely out of wood with no nails.

Joanna travels into the Fukushima exclusion zone, where a huge tsunami devastated the nuclear power plant in 2011. She visits Jigokudani Onsen which is not full of people….but Japanese Macaques or snow monkeys. Over 150 of them come down from the frozen mountains every morning and spend most of the day enjoying the steaming hot waters. Joanna takes a Shinkansen (bullet train) from Nagano to Tokyo, the capital of Japan and world's largest metropolis; where it's time to embrace the modern metropolis of Japan's post war economic boom.