Japan is one of my favourite destinations. I went to Japan 3 or 4 times when I was really young but as you know kids never truly appreciate the fun, the culture and the food. So now I’m an adult and I’m all into food and culture (and of course all kinds of other things) Japan is somewhere I really want to visit again. So when I put together a list of countries I wanted to illustrate as part of my Map Illustration Project I decided instantly that Japan was one of the countries that I just had to illustrate.

As you may know this is part of an ongoing project that I’m working on but with the illustration jobs I have to do right now this project is sadly on hold. But, I will come back to it as soon as I can.

Below are some of the illustrations I illustrated for this map. I’m a foodie and a huge fan of Japanese food so you can see I really enjoyed illustrating Japanese food. During the research stage I found a really unique Japanese fruit called “Akebia” (some websites call it “Akebi”). I was really fascinated by this fruit because I have never seen or tasted something like Akebia before and I really love my fruit. So I had to illustrate this pretty looking fruit and hope I can visit Japan one day to try it.

I really like the animations from Studio Ghibli and they have a Studio Ghibli museum not too far from Tokyo. This is a place I definitely want to visit in the future. My favourite character from Studio Ghibli is Totoro so I illustrated Totoro to represent them. I just love Totoro’s chubby hairy look and my daughter loves their cartoons as well.

Another thing I really want to do apart from all the shopping and sightseeing is one day do a geishi and/or kimono experience. I remember before when I was looking at going on holiday to Japan (which didn’t happen) I read they do these experience tours in Kyoto. You can book these kind of one day experiences with your tour guides and when you arrive on the day your host will do all the make up, hair and clothes for you. So you can experience being a geisha for a day or if you want something lighter you can do a kimono experience instead.

I also really want to see a sumo match in person one day and the monkey hot spring in Nagano. So maybe you can help me achieve this by buying a copy this map from my Etsy shop here.

As mentioned I’m pretty busy right now with work but I’m hoping to do more maps in the near future. I illustrated Scotland, where I live now, before but I’m now thinking about illustrating the whole of the UK as well as Spain or France. My husband is nagging me to illustrate Australia but I haven’t decided yet so stay tuned.

Some of the detail image of my Japan map illustrations:

One of my favourite Japanese actor is Ken Watanabe. So I illustrate him on my Japan map illustration.