We've been back from Japan for a week, but we can still taste the sushi and can still hear the bells from the shrines in our ears. Here are just a few of the pictures we took in our travels north from Tokyo to Aomori, and south to Osaka.

One of the first stops on our tour was the Asakusa Buddhist Temple in Tokyo. The huge temple was founded in order to house a statue of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. In the mid 1600s, two local fishermen discovered the golden statue in their nets. It stands only 7.5 centimeters tall. And it's so holy, you can't see her, apparently. But she does have a magnificent temple.

We went to the top of Tokyo Tower, the second tallest thing in Tokyo, where we had a cloudy view of this really, really big city. I am no longer sure that DC is a big city anymore. Tokyo stretches for miles in every direction, and we took pictures from all sides of the Tower that look similar to this. It looks like it doesn't have a downtown. It is one big downtown.

On Linda's first trip to Japan eight years ago, she didn't get to see Mt. Fuji because of cloudy conditions. This time she saw a little more of it, but not all of it. Here is her best picture of the mountain from this trip, They say Mt. Fuji is a shy mountain. I say Mt. Fuji maybe is working on a full-fledged neurosis. We went to what is called the "fifth station", about halfway up the volcano at the end of the road, where of course there was a gift shop.

On a boat ride across Lake Ashi, we saw this torii gate on the lake. Torii gates mark the entrances to Shinto shrines in Japan. Most are wood painted red, but we also saw stone and concrete ones, and all have the same distinctive shape. We saw huge gates over major roads in cities leading to the cities' main shrines, and sometimes we would pass a tiny one on the side of a highway leading up into the forest. Sometimes we walked through a gate on our way to a shrine that was still a long walk off, and sometimes a shrine -- often on the grounds of a Buddhist temple -- would have a gate only a few few feet from its shrine.

After riding the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Kyoto, we went to Kyoto's Heian-jingu, a relatively new shrine that was originally built in 1895. The shrine is dedicated to emperors Kammu and Komei, the first and last emperors to live in Kyoto. Inside the grounds of the shrine, we walked around the gardens, which were manicured in what I can only describe as a uniquely fastidious Japanese style.

These sake barrels were stacked at the entrance to the Heian-jingu in Kyoto. They had been given by donors in celebration of the 1,100th anniversary of the founding of the city.

Heian-jingu is a Shinto shrine, and so has its own torii gate. Here it is, as seen from the entrance to the shrine.

On the final night that we spent with our tour group, this apprentice geisha and her mentor entertained us with dancing and music.