A great way to see Aomori! - We had a great day! Our guide, Kaz, was friendly, courteous, and very informative. He took us to the Seiryuji temple, the Sannai-Maruyama world heritage sight, and then the Warasse Nebuta museum. I would definitely recommend this tour and Kaz in particular.

Fantastic half day tour of Tokyo - Mani Hayashi guided our half day tour of the Senso-ji back streets and the Ameyayokocho market alley ways. We saw things that we would have never seen on our own. We have been there before and never seen what we saw this time. Had the best Tempura and sashimi meal ever. This small eatery has limited seating but worth the wait. The portions were big, tasty and reasonably priced. Highly recommended!

Highlight of our trip! - Spending time with our tour guide Kudo-san was one of the highlights of our vacation to Japan. His pride in Aomori reflected in our trip with him. He was very insightful and gave us a greater appreciation for the prefecture of Aormori and people of Northern Japan. We are looking forward to visiting again in the future!

Perfect Day - Warm, wonderful, and kind. Our group had an outstanding day. The guide helped accommodate all of our special requests, even helped us taste local apples during harvest time! If you are looking to customize you experience, this is a sure thing.

Aomori apples and 100 yen - Kaz was incredible and adapted the plans as the day went on. Kaz had great information and was a fantastic guide.

Wonderful Day - Great guide that helped up navigate trians and subways. He took us to shrines, temples, shopping, restaurants, and gave important information about the area

Don’t miss sannai maruyama with Kaz - Had a good tour with Kaz. The best part was the visit to Sannai maruyama where Kaz is a expert guide with lots of info about the dig, the history and the culture. Also really enjoyed a lunch at the fish market with the freshest sashimi ever. Great experience!

Have Amore for Aomori - I cannot fully express how wonderful my tour experience in Aomori was and that is due in large part to my wonderful guide Kaz. Kaz was in touch with me via Whatsapp ahead of time so that we were able to easily customize the itinerary according to time, interest, and my spur of the moment requests. He had a wealth of information about the various points of interest, and being a teacher, he was deftly able to convey that information (both in verbal and pictorial form). For the second half of the day, my mother-in-law (who has mobility issues), and he deftly navigated assisting me to get accessible/disables seat (front row!) tickets to the breathtakingly wonderful Nebuta Matsuri Festival. I recommend this tour and Kaz without reservations. Kax is an excellent guide.

Agency was remiss in communicating with me - We had our tour all planned. On the morning g of the tour no one turned up. Our guide did not appear. A short while after the start time, I received a message from our lovely guide that he had a heart attack and was on his way to the hospital. We never heard from the tour operator Japan Guide Agency. I had to pursue them myself to request my refund. The agency themselves should have looked after us and communicate with me. Later in the day I received a message from Viator that I would receive a refund in 3-5 business days. I will watch for this.

Refund request for the horrible Aomori experience by guide Rocky - Our guide met us outside our cruise ship (Princess Diamond). Our ship arrived a little late and we met Rocky at 10:20pm, only 20 minutes after the the planned meeting time of 10am. He handed us the planned itinerary and right away asked us which activity we should remove from the plan because we are "late"? Here are the issues with Rocky: 1) There were 9 activities on the itinerary, and we have only done 2 (ASPAM and the last one, Seiryuji Temple), with much rushing. We hired a local guide so that we can maximize our time use to visit more places, but Rocky does not seem to know about the time needed for each activity and ended up needing to keep deleting items from the itinerary list. 2) We missed Nebuta Museum, Lunch at Fish Market, Walk in Downtown Aomori, Japan-Lacquer Ware shop, and Utoh Shrine. We took us to the Fish market but saw a long line, and then rushed us to go to a bad restaruant while rushing us to finish our noodle in 8 minutes. 3) We asked about the meaning of the Nebuta Festival, and he gave us some ridiculous explanations of waking sleepiness. A quick search on the internet can tell us a completely different meaning of the Aomori Nebuta Festival. As a tour guide locally, it is disappointing he does not even know the background and history of the Festival, he should not be a guide at all. He also gave us false information about the Festival parade and told us that there will be no parade on the day we were visiting. We returned to the cruise ship and have people showing us pictures of the floats on the street - we completely missed that because of his lies. 4) Good thing our family was not physically disabled, Rocky would walk at least 50 feet ahead of us without stopping or looking back in the crowded streets and in the super hot weather. He does not seem to have the right character traits to be a tour guide. 5) We went up to ASPAM frist thing, which he kept telling us would be free, but then ASPAM ended up charging us. He is definitely not updated with the local travel scenes. He then rushed us through lunch, missing how long the wait would be at the fish market, missing Nebuta Museum and Walk in downtown Aomori completely. We skipped Utoh Shrine and Japan-Lacqueir ware, and he rushed us onto the bus to the very last activity to Seiryuji Temple. 6) At Seiryuji Temple, he told me the wrong box to pick our fortune-telling notes, and when our family wanted some refreshment from the tea house at the temple, he again rushed us and said the bus was coming in 5 minutes. We had to leave much of the refreshments at the tea house to follow him, only to find out we had 13 more minutes. 6) Rocky is not qualified to be a guide when he lied about Aomori's Nebuta Festival's history, had no clue what was going on in Aomori, leading us to miss the many things planned on the itinerary. He should have predicted what/where was crowded and planned the itinerary accordingly. We are officially requesting a refund for this horrible experience.