When friends ask me where I went on holiday this year, I am able to boast that I spent two weeks in Japan, thanks to playing the tuba with the National Youth Brass Band of Scotland. I only made it by the skin of my teeth, though. I'm just outside the official 13-23 age range for the band - but, as it's such a rare occurrence for a Scottish youth group to undertake a concert tour on the other side of the planet, it seemed harsh to exclude those of us with long-service medals.

The National Youth Brass Band of Scotland is made up of 71 young musicians from every corner of the country and meets every summer for a week's intensive tuition before a concert in St Andrews. To celebrate this, its Golden Anniversary year, it undertook its most ambitious project yet. The two-week tour would take the young musicians across Japan, from Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto to Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Hamamatsu and Tokyo.

The tour's start, at the beginning of July, was marred by a familiar problem to all musicians - baggage handlers. After a 15-hour flight, the band arrived in Narita International Airport on the outskirts of Tokyo to discover 34 suitcases were missing, along with a tuba. Several instruments were also damaged. But despite this, the following day the NYBBS took part in one of the most surreal performances in its history.

Most of the 1500 people who attended the concert were students at Seitoku University, an all-girls establishment in Chiba. The girls were not there by choice - the concert was on their timetable as an evening lecture - but their night was made by a certain trombone player with the band.

Douglas MacKillop, from Kilmacolm in Inverclyde, was the piper for the band's encore item. When he strolled from the back of the hall in full pipe-band regalia, blazing out the familiar drone of Highland Cathedral, bored Japanese teenagers forced to a lecture at 7pm were suddenly whipped into frenzy. After their rapturous applause, young MacKillop, assisted by several other NYBBS members, spent half an hour signing autographs and posing for photos - a strange experience for any brass band player.

The next day, the NYBBS joined up with the Senzoku Gakuen College of Music to form a massed band of more than 120 musicians. The concert, held in the beautiful Minato Mirai Hall in Yokohama, was once again sold out to a capacity 2100 audience. The event was a great success and the band was on a high, but that was not to be the picture for all of the gigs on the tour. While audiences at other concerts were enthusiastic, they numbered several hundred only at each event. As the concerts were taking place in some of Japan's premier venues, including the Mielparque Hall in Osaka and ActCity Hamamatsu, the empty chairs were sometimes a distraction.

On day six, the NYBBS performed an afternoon concert with the Grest Brass Band in Kyoto, followed by a Burns Supper. Instead of a chill January toasting of the haggis, this mid-summer event involved course director Neil Cross toasting some sushi.

That evening was one of many highlights for Steven Mead's YouTube video blogs. Mead, who is arguably the best euphonium player in the world, accompanied the NYBBS as guest soloist and also filmed many special moments. Perhaps his most moving images come from July 14, when the band visited the peace memorial at Hiroshima and heard the testimony of A-bomb survivor Miyoko Matsubara, before walking around the site and its associated museum and leaving paper birds on the memorial.

The final concert of the tour took place in the beautiful Shinjuku Bunka Centre in Toyko. Performing a varied programme, which included Midlothian composer Alan Fernie's Alba (written for the NYBBS in 2004) and Stephen Roberts's arrangement of Jupiter from the Planets Suite, the band brought the tour to a fitting close. For 14 members, this writer included, the concert signalled the end of their NYBBS career. It was a sad moment, but Neil Cross is already looking to the future.

"The tour will be remembered by everyone," he says. "Both musically and culturally, it will be something we will never forget - and it was disappointing not to receive more financial backing from the big financial and cultural institutions back home. We will now have to focus on raising some funds."

Conductor Richard Evans was proud of his band's performance. "The tour was full of some wonderful moments. All of the players have now made some Japanese friends, and they were great ambassadors for the Scottish brass band fraternity"

To watch Steven Mead's video diaries, visit www.youtube.com and search for "NYBBS tour of Japan".