Overview

Hi,

This post is extremely late, but I figured doing a write up of two trips I took would allow me to reminisce and hopefully provide some help to future planners. I want this to be as comprehensive as possible, detailing all my reasonings and mistakes made throughout the trip and what I would do differently / do again had I the chance. I’m also a big fan of data and, as such, have kept a fairly detailed track of my expenses throughout both trips. Please enjoy my ramblings / diary because this is going to be a very long post.

I was originally going to write up the second trip here as well, but, well, it would make this already long post even longer, so I will save it for another time.

Trip #1 (November 2024)

The duration of this trip for myself was 21 days, however, the initial planning for this trip was for 13 days as the rest of my party arrived at different times. My initial itinerary check for this particular trip can be found here, though I will be going day-by-day comparing what was planned versus what actually happened.

Day -???

The planning for this November trip started basically in January since that’s when I bought my plane ticket. Singapore Airlines usually has a New Years sale, though I would still find tickets around the same price later on in the year. In attempts to save money, I made my first mistake:

I bought manually connected flights from my town to LAX to NRT for both my departure and return trips.

Had I handled this correctly, I would have saved a decent amount of money as intended, however I realized during my return flight from NRT to LAX that I would be landing at ~11AM and not ~11PM and decided to rebook the following flight from LAX to my town in order to not have an extended layover in LAX (during Thanksgiving mind you). That rebooking essentially killed any money I would have saved.

In the future, and in trip #2 for example, I would just pay a bit more for bundled connected flights departing from my town to save me the headache and other potential issues.

I gave my group the timeframe I was aiming for and had them just send me any and all ideas for the next many months. I ended up going a little overboard and made a fancy little app to compile and plot all of their ideas on a map. As we drew closer to November, I tried to plan a route that would at least place us in areas with as many listed things as possible which resulted in a slightly modified version of the golden route (Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto).

There were a few things that I, personally, wanted to go out of my way to do, one of which was biking along the Shimanami Kaido since it was supposedly lovely around autumn. In addition to the golden route, this had us travelling and staying in Setoda, Matsuyama and Hiroshima. Now, you may be thinking, “Wow, sounds like a lot of hotels!” and you would be correct. However, this somehow didn’t end up being much of an issue, though some of us may have packed a little heavier than others.

One of the more difficult things to plan around was Japan’s lotteries. Concerts, Pokemon Cafe, Ghibli Museum, etc. as most of us know all contain an amount of uncertainty as to whether or not you would be able to actually attend said event and it’s quite hard to plan around uncertainty. The best I could do is place us around those areas on the days that I had attempted to win tickets for and not expect much.

Speaking of uncertainties, about 1 month before the trip I had 2 group members drop out because of emergencies. If you are managing a moderately large group, I would recommend booking hotels that have good cancellation or modification policies.

Before the day-to-day breakdown, I figured I should mention that our final group consisted of 5 (including myself) late 20s to mid 30 year-olds in not too terrible shape. It was not our first time out of our respective countries, but it was all of our first times in Japan. Our main goals were to eat have have a good time.

Day 1

I flew out and arrived alone in Narita at around 6PM and chose to skip the Welcome Suica card at the airport to grab a real Suica card later (the real Suica card machine in the airport was sold out / out of order). If you haven’t done it before, using paper tickets and the fare adjustment machines is pretty fun.

I took the Keisei Skyliner to Tokyo and spent the time trying to activate my Mobal eSIM. I chose Mobal specifically for the Japanese phone number included since I was trying to claim concert tickets that I won.

At some point I stopped by a 7/11 to withdraw some money from the ATM. Before leaving the US, I had setup a Wise account and converted a bit of USD to JPY in preparation for this trip. I seemed to only be able to withdraw about 30k yen per day with my Wise card, but that was more than a enough.

My first stay stay was an APA hotel in Akihabara which is where I realized my next mistake:

I accidentally booked a smoking room.

I was well aware of the existence of smoking rooms, but I guess I just misread when booking the room. Everything smelled of smoke and by the time I left that hotel, most of my things did too.

Anyways, I was not tired at all and ended up walking all around Akihabara and Ochanomizu for a few hours till I was tired enough to call it a night.

Day 2

I didn’t have much planned until all of my group members arrived, so a lot of it was spent travelling around randomly. However, I did have a lunch reservation by myself at La Rochelle. If you are familiar 料理の鉄人 / Iron Chef, this is Iron Chef French Hiroyuki Sakai’s restaurant. One of my personal goals this trip was to eat at as many Iron Chef restaurants as I could.

I probably left my room at 6AM to go to Ueno where I picked up a real Suica card and have my first real meal at an quick Udon shop in the station. Things don’t really open until 9AM, so I killed some time walking around Ueno park. Around 9AM I headed back to Akihabara to explore for a while.

Somehow I misremembered my lunch reservation time as an hour later than it actually was, so I ran whenever I could to and from stations to get to the restaurant. I was maybe 10 minutes late, but the staff were very kind and understanding and were expecting me. It was delicious and I got to talk with my server about Iron Chef. On a side note, there was a wedding going on in another room separated by glass, so that was cool. Here are some pictures if you are interested.

I walked around Minami Aoyama for a while and decided to go to Kawasaki and walk around a bunch there too. After working up an appetite, I returned to Akihabara and saw a line outside of Tonkatsu Marugo. It was great.

Day 3

Lunch for today was at Ristorante Massa, Iron Chef Italy Masahiko Kobe’s restaurant. Also delicious. Here’s some pics.

Afterwards, I meandered around Ebisu and found the Yebisu Brewery within Yebisu Garden Place. I’m not much of a beer person, but I bought a flight of beer and explored the park. It’s quite a nice area with a tall building you can go up for free and get a nice view of Ebisu. On the way back to the station, I found out that there was a nice skywalk straight from the station to the park.

I decided to finally tackle a little of Shibuya. I don’t particularly like large crowds, but I’d be remise to miss it. Got the crossing out of the way and looked around Ikea for fun. I stopped by LOST bar for a little drink and had a chat with a few strangers.

At some point a few of my groupmates who arrived wanted to meet up at their hotel in Roppongi, so I headed over and we had some dinner at Moti Roppongi Ten in the Mori Tower. There are a lot of Indian restaurants in Japan and they should not be slept on.

Day 4

The day before, I realized another mistake I made when booking this hotel:

My schedule checkout date was a day too early.

Clearly I must have been really messed up when booking this hotel, but it was probably for the best since it got me out of that smoking room. My groupmates graciously allowed me to crash in their small room for a night.

A fun thing you can catch if you get out early enough in the morning are long lines of people waiting to enter pachinko parlors.

Me and my groupmates head over to Ginza for our own respective plans. They had wanted to do some shopping and eat at a kaisendon place while I had yet another lunch reservation for Rokusantei Ginza, Iron Chef Japan Rokusaburo Michiba’s restaurant. Out of the three so far, this was the cheapest, yet had the best atmosphere and food. I was seated at the counter and even caught a glimpse of Michiba as he was leaving the kitchen. Here’s some pics. This unfortunately ends my Iron Chef restaurant tour, bu…

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Trip Report (21 Day in November 2024)