I'm not long back from my first ever trip to Japan and absolutely loved it. This subreddit featured heavily in my planning so I figured I'd pay it...
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The original was posted on /r/japantravel by /u/odkfn on 2024-10-09 14:10:52+00:00.

I’m not long back from my first ever trip to Japan and absolutely loved it. This subreddit featured heavily in my planning so I figured I’d pay it forward and post an update of what I did in case anybody else finds it useful.

General Tips / Comments

  1. Get a suica card - if you’re on iphone you can add this directly to your wallet and top up remotely in seconds. My friend who had an android said you can only get them if you’re joined to the japanese android store - unsure how true this is, but my friends without iphones had to get a physical suica card and head to a terminal to top theirs up. Either way, these cards make navigating japanese trains a breeze - you just walk up to the gates, swipe your phone or card, and do the same when you leave the destination station and it knows how much to deduct. If you don’t have enough on your card there is a little “fare adjustment station” next to the exit gate.
  2. Google made navigating the trains super simple also - if I was, say, heading to “Teamlabs - Planets” I would just put that into google and select by train. It’d show me where to walk, tell me what train to get on, what stop to get off at, what the next train was, etc. Between this and the suica card it made travelling so trivial. This really is how public transport should be done.
  3. Klook was very useful for longer haul trains, such as going between Tokyo / Osaka / Kyoto. Buying them here gave us a QR code so we could, again, just use the E-gates.
  4. Airalo - I bought an E-sim on this app. It was around £20 for 20gb of data if I remember correctly. In my whole 2 weeks of japan I used around 8gb of data. My UK provider was going to charge me £9 per 150mb of data used - so it was obviously hugely cheaper to use this. Buy it in advance but just activate it once you land.
  5. Japanese people seemed to be hugely helpful and friendly. My wife accidentally dropped her passport on the bullet train - we went Osaka > Kyoto, but the train kept going to Tokyo. The worker behind the desk at our Kyoto hotel went out his way to phone around, source it, and asked them to leave it in Tokyo station lost and found for us, which we collected on our way back to Tokyo. I imagine in any other country a bag with cards and stuff in it would have been pilfered. In Japan the staff were too polite to even open it to see what was inside - we had to get the hotel worker to phone them back and request that they do open it to see if my wife’s passport was still present.
  6. Google translate is super helpful. Japanese people speak a varying range of english, and all of them speak infinitely more english than I speak Japanese (despite trying to learn some!). We had some conversations with non-english speakers using google translate, which lead to some nice interactions with people we otherwise couldn’t have communicated with.
  7. I found Japan surprisingly affordable / cheap. When we went we got ~200 yen per £1. My friend who was with us said last time he went to Japan he got roughly 140 yen per £1, so I suppose that factored in a lot. A nice bowl of ramen was like £7, each plate of sushi at kura sushi was around 80p, cocktails universally seemed cheaper than beer which was weird but welcomed.
  8. I stupidly made no effort to look up the weather when we booked this trip. It was 33 degrees pretty much every day. I’m Scottish and more accustomed to like 8-12 degrees in September. Needless to say we were grotesquely sweaty the whole time. I read (unsure if this is true) that Japanese people don’t sweat as much. Anecdotally I thought this may be true as even when they were fanning themselves or looking hot there were no visible signs of sweat, whereas we were literally sweating through our t-shirts like cretins.
  9. Something I found unusual, but is not a complaint, is how few places seemed to be open during the day. In British culture you’d often stop off for a single beer during the day to have a break or cool down if it was hot, etc. In Roppongi we really struggled to find anywhere like a bar that was open before 5pm. Weirdly when we moved from Tokyo to Osaka and Kyoto we found them to have much more food and drink options during the day.
  10. There are lots of etiquette rules and some posts here made it seem a lot more hassle than it is, or like you needed to memorise them. As with most things, if you just copy the locals you’ll figure it out. Be quiet(ish) in public spaces, stand on the same side of the escalator as them, don’t eat whilst walking if it can be avoided, etc.
  11. Tax free - if you show your passport and you’re not in the country for longer than a certain period of time (a couple of months??) you get things tax free. Consumable items must get sealed up in a bag, but things like knives, suitcases, etc. don’t. Then at the airport on the way home you just go to the tax free bit, they scan your passport, and that was it. They didn’t check any of our stuff as it was sealed away in our hold-luggage.
  12. Luggage Forwarding - If you go to reception of your hotel with the Japanese address of your next destination you can pay a nominal fee (we were like £8 per bag) to forward them on. This saved carting multiple bags through the subways, on trains, etc. We used this at every opportunity and don’t regret it. The form is in japanese but the reception staff were always happy to help us fill it out.

My Trip

  • 17th - 20th Tokyo;
  • 20th - 25th Osaka;
  • 25th - 27th Kyoto;
  • 27th - 28th Hakone;
  • 28th - 30th Tokyo.

Tokyo

For both our Tokyo stints we stayed in APA hotels - one in Roppongi and one in Shinjuku. The hotels themselves were clean and nice. The rooms were TINY but I assume this is just a Tokyo thing. The Roppongi one was more bearable as there was under-bed storage, so even if the room was small, it wasn’t cluttered. The Shinjuku one did not have under-bed storage so the whole room was taken up by the double bed, the desk, and our suitcases. Literally if I wanted to pass my wife I had to stand on the bed to get round her. This wasn’t an issue as I guess it’s just part of the Tokyo experience and we were out our rooms much more than we were in them.

  • Sumo Wrestling - this was probably the highlight of the trip. Sumo tournaments run every odd month of the year I believe. We used the “buysumotickets” website to get our tickets. We honestly thought this would be a novelty and we’d just go have a look then leave. How wrong we were! Your ticket covers you for a full day and there are 4 divisions (???) spread out throughout the day. The “buysumotickets” guide says the latter two divisions begin at 3pm so maybe head for that sort of time. Had I known how much we were going to enjoy it we would have gone for the full day. The actual bouts are very short (like 10-20 seconds) with a lot of ceremony inbetween, but it’s all really enjoyable. You can have beers or snacks whilst you watch, and the crowd was very into it. There is some thing where both sumos have to begin at the same time, so if one sumo doesn’t, it’s a false start. There seemed to be a lot of posturing and at the last minute one sumo would stand up and just walk to his ring-man (or equivalent!) and get a towel and just wipe himself down. This was quite fun after we understood it as the crowd gets really into them mugging each other off, and some sumos would do this multiple times. Regardless - would highly recommend this.
  • Mario kart - I wasn’t sure what to expect with this as my friend booked it, but this was also great. We did it in Shinjuku and it wasn’t like a race or zooming about, it turned out to essentially be a lovely site-seeing tour by kart. There were outfits you could wear, but due to the heat we just stuck some open shirts over our t-shirts. A lead car (an actual car) drives, and you follow in single file. Japanese drivers seemed very courteous and we had no issues. The “scary” part was if lights went red when only half of you were through, then you had to try navigate some busy junctions to catch up with the lead car (which pulled over very quickly to wait). You need an international drivers licence for this, and to take your own licence from your home country. This was such a fun way to just see large parts of the city with a breeze. We did this with “Japan Kart” and I would highlight recommend it.
  • BBQ Eden - We were just wandering around Shinjuku and looked up and saw what appeared to be a bbq near a glass balcony on a restaurant, so we sauntered up and it was a little place with 4 tables, each had its’ own bbq food and you ordered raw things to cook. This was a cool experience, the food was good, and the view was great.
  • Kill Bill Restaurant - Gonpachi Nishi-Azabu. This restaurant was cool to look at, the staff were friendly, and the food was good. The service wasn’t amazing - my friend ordered the set menu which had like 8 dishes or something. Throughout the night our waiter finished their shift twice, so we went through 3 waiters. Each time we got a new waiter they completely forgot about our friends set menu / the food he still had to get. We had to keep prompting them and what should have been like an hour meal ended up taking 2 hours or more. This is a minor criticism as the food and decor were good, and we had no issue spending “too much” time here.
  • Golden Gai - We wandered her for a look. It was our first experience of small japanese bars, but they were pretty cool. These streets were worth a look but, again, we seemed to come too early as only one bar…

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