Japan - some practical notes

We visited Japan for the first time in April 2023 when our children were 7 and 10. Much of this practical information can be found throughout our blog posts for each destination we visited in Japan.

However, we thought it would be useful to pull the information together in a single post, in the hope that it will help others planning a trip to Japan.

Accommodation

Japanese hotel rooms are smaller than those found in the USA, Australia and Aotearoa but we didn’t think they were much smaller than European or British hotel rooms.

Family rooms in chain hotels are rare; it is more common to find connecting rooms such as these at Sotetsu Freesa hotel in Hiroshima.

Apart-hotels like Mimaru which we stayed in at Tokyo and Kyoto cater well for families with ‘western’ style family rooms with bunk beds, sofa beds if needed, and double beds.

Ryokans and traditional inns have rooms like the one pictured here (at K’s House in Kanazawa), where everyone sleeps on tatami mats on the floor so this works well for families happy to co-sleep.

We booked our accommodation online about 3 months in advance. We paid for most of our accommodation in advance using UK debit or credit cards.

Where we paid on arrival debit and credit card payments were accepted.

Laundry

We packed light and washed clothes along the way.

Laundry facilities in hotels were plentiful, and affordable at around £4 per load to wash and dry (coin cash payments only).

Detergent was automatically added to washing machines, and there was no choice over wash cycles or heat settings.

Food

Convenience stores were numerous; the main chains being Lawson, 7 Eleven and Family Mart. All of them sold a range of baked goods, dairy products including milk, and freshly prepared cold and hot takeout meals including bento boxes, sandwiches, kebabs, steamed buns and soups. We found that most fruit came pre-prepared and heavily packaged in plastic; and finding loose whole unpackaged fruit was rare.

We tended to buy baked goods from bakeries or convenience stores for breakfast; eat out at a restaurant for lunch; and buy pre-prepared meals or fresh produce for supper. We spent about £30-£40 per day on food with this approach. A simple one course lunch for 4 people at a restaurant cost around £15-£20.

Many restaurants had plastic food outside on display to illustrate which dishes they served and/or English menus. We found that we all liked udon noodle soup (pictured below) ramen, and tempura, and so these became our go-to options.

Vegetarian food in restaurants was rare to non-existent. Most soups had some kind of meat or fish stock base and bonito flakes. Items marked on menus as vegetarian weren’t always so. For example, an onion and cheese gratin marked as vegetarian came with bacon. Egg mayonnaise sandwiches from the convenience store were a good fallback!

Money and budget

Hotels, many larger shops, and larger restaurants accepted card payments. However a significant number of shops and restaurants took cash only. We needed cash for markets and street food stalls, laundry, topping up our SUICA transport cards and vending and capsule toy machines.

7 eleven convenience stores had ATMs that didn’t charge withdrawal fees. ATMs were also easily found in train stations. When paying for things, money should be placed on a tray rather than directly into the cashier’s hands.

There is no culture of tipping and tips are not accepted. We don’t tip (because we prefer employers to pay their staff a decent living wage), but if we had tried to tip the recipient would have assumed we had overpaid or forgotten our change.

Retail tax is about 10% and prices shown usually include tax, or state clearly the price with tax added. Some larger stores offered tax free purchases with a foreign passport.

We spent around £300 per day (for 2 adults and 2 children). This average daily spend excludes flights but includes all overland travel within and between cities, accommodation, all food and groceries, laundry, activities including entrance fees for temples, museums and theme parks, luggage forwarding, and shopping and souvenirs. We could definitely have spent less if we had bought fewer souvenirs and if we had skipped Disney.

Transport

Driving was on the left. But pedestrians walked on the right, except when on escalators in which case pedestrians stood on the left and allowed others to pass on the right.

We used SUICA cards to get around within towns and cities. The cards we purchased in Tokyo were valid across the rest of Japan, and made tapping on to buses and going through subway gates easy. They could be easily topped up at stations or convenience stores, but only with cash.

For travel between cities we used our JR passes. There are two classes of train carriages in Japan - ‘ordinary’ and ‘green’. Tickets for green cars are more expensive and so they can be less crowded. Seats in green cars have marginally more space.

At the time of purchasing our ‘ordinary’ 14 day JR passes cost 52,960 yen (£300) for adults and 26,380 yen (£150) for children. This worked out at only £21 per adult and £10.50 per child, per day.

In October 2023 price increases saw the cost of the JR passes almost double. It’s strongly advised to use one of the many online price calculators to decide whether it is worth purchasing a pass or better value for money to buy separate tickets. Unless one is taking many long distance train journeys the new cost of a JR pass is now unlikely to pay off.

We bought our passes online using the JR website which:

1. helped us to spread the cost of our trip to Japan before we travelled and

2. entitled us to make seat reservations online and in advance on the JR website.

We collected the paper copies of our JR passes from Narita Airport when we first arrived in Japan. At the ticket desk we had to show our purchase confirmation and our passports. We used these paper passes in the ticket gates across Japan.

We then relied on the digital copies of our seat reservations on the JR website rather than printing them out. No staff asked to see our seat reservations on any of the trains we took.

Taking the bullet train was something we’d really been looking forward to and one reason we chose to visit Japan. We love travelling by train as it’s better for the environment with a much lower carbon footprint than flying; is usually comfortable and quick; and doesn’t entail security and check-in queues!

The Shinkansen had very comfortable seats which, even when the seat in front was reclined, had lots of leg room. There were charging sockets, arm rests and tables for every seat.

Train stations were useful hubs for both transport but also shops and restaurants. Google maps worked well in Tokyo for telling us which entrances and exits to use.

Most stations were fairly easy to navigate, except perhaps Tokyo, and Kyoto in particular was gigantic and illegible to us.

We got lost so many times in Kyoto station between the bus station, JR lines, subway and Shinkansen. Too often the signs we’d been following would suddenly drop off and we’d be faced with a dark staircase or end of a corridor with no idea where to go next. We joked that whoever designed Kyoto station was inspired by Escher and/or playing a trick on commuters; and that part of us is still lost somewhere inside.

Luggage

To avoid lugging big bags on transport every time we changed accommodation, we took advantage of the excellent luggage forwarding courier delivery system. For around £12-£14 each time we sent our big bags ahead of us and they never failed to be waiting in our hotel room on arrival.

We visited Japan as part of a longer 3 month trip including travelling around Australia and Aotearoa, so we couldn’t avoid having large backpacks with us. If we were to visit Japan again we would come with smaller backpacks that would easily fit in the overhead storage on trains.

Wi-Fi and data

We purchased Airalo e-sim cards for Japan for our mobile phones. A 2GB data allowance for 14 days cost £6.

Airalo was really easy to use with iPhone and it worked very well throughout Japan, even in mountain forests and on underground subway trains.

The kids have iPads (not phones) and found they could connect to free Wi-Fi in hotels and on trains when travelling between cities. We left the iPads at our accommodation when out for the day.

Etiquette and safety

Most people we encountered spoke a small amount of English and understood us well enough. Some people spoke no English. Everyone was very patient and keen to help us work through any language barriers.

Japanese people were quiet in restaurants and on public transport. Devices were set to silent or people used headphones. People spoke in low tones. We found this tough as our kids are loud, and chatty, and active. We were always by far the noisiest people on the train, in restaurants, in public spaces, and at temples. By far.

Most Buddhist temples charged a small admittance fee of £2-£3 per person. Shinto shrines were generally free to visit. Photography was allowed in the grounds but usually prohibited inside the temple buildings (though not always). Shoes had to be removed before entering temple buildings and shoe storage was provided.

Japan felt very safe. We walked everywhere during the day and at night and never felt unsafe.

Outside of Tokyo, pavements were rare and most roads had a designated pedestrian lane delineated by white lines. Sometimes cars or motorbikes would come down narrow streets quite fast and we’d have to step out of the way, but generally road safety wasn’t an issue.

There were very few litter bins on Japanese streets. Teams of volunteers regularly passed through streets picking litter (which is scarce anyway) and we quickly got into the habit of bringing a plastic bag with us to put our rubbish in, which we would then dispose of back at our accommodation.

Public toilets were clean, free and plentiful, located next to temples, in shopping malls and department stores, and at entrances to main attractions and sites. Japanese toilets were amazing with heated seats, bidet and privacy functions (white noise that masks any potentially embarrassing noises).

The majority of Japanese people, and about 60% of tourists, wore face masks. Some restaurants asked patrons to use hand sanitiser and take a temperature reading. In no way did it feel as though Japan was imposing covid restrictions or that the voluntary mask wearing impacted our trip.