Japan planning thread

[Takoneko]

I’ve just booked the hotels for my third trip to Japan next year and about to start planning the itinerary in earnest.

Japan threads pop up here quite a bit and I think people spend a lot of time on planning for Japan trips. I thought it might be nice to have a shared thread where we can pool questions, tips and share research for anyone who has a trip coming up.

All budgets and styles of trip are welcome, whether you’re going hiking, temple-hopping, skiing or visiting theme parks, maid cafes and arcades and whether you’re going to hostels or 5 star hotels. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to enjoy Japan. It has something for everyone.

We’re a couple in our late 30s and our trip will be mid-budget, probably up to about £3.4k per person with food and spends. We’ve splashed out a bit on direct JAL flights and have upgraded all our hotel rooms to at least king size beds in hotels that are in really well connected locations. They are all mid-range Japanese business hotel chains rather than luxury hotels though. (Candeo, Daiwa Roynet and Sotetsu Fresa). We like Japanese food but we’re definitely more likely to be eating eat in mom and pop restaurants and mid-range Japanese chains than in fancy kaiseki places. Any recommendations for mid range restaurants with relaxed atmospheres would be very welcome.

We plan to use the Sanyo-San’in rail pass in the second half of our trip and would be really interested to share ideas for places to visit with anyone else who is planning on using that pass (or who has used it in the past). At the moment we are thinking Iwakuni, Miyajima, Kurashiki and Onomichi from Hiroshima and Himeji and Uji from Osaka, but we are open to other ideas. I speak passable tourist Japanese and we are ok with going to places that don’t cater to English speakers and muddling through with broken Japanese and Google translate.

@faffadoodledo We also went to Kamakura as a day train-ride from Tokyo - yes, it’s very easy. The fastest train is about an hour, from Tokyo or Shinjuku Stations. There are several other temples there which are worth seeing and it’s a nice little place.

You can also get the train (about 25 minutes) to Enoshima Island from Kamakura, though we didn’t go there.

Thanks @Halsall. Didn't want to be wasting our time. We may decide to spend all our time in Tokyo while we're staying there. But I wanted a good day trip option, and it seems Kamakura might indeed be that option

Odawara Castle is another day trip option, if you won’t be moving elsewhere on your trip that has a castle nearby.

The Ramen Museum in Yokohama is very nearby and completely bonkers, for a much shorter trip! But you do have to really like ramen….tasting the product is compulsory, or it was when we went there.

Kamakura is very easy as a day trip, especially if you are staying right on top of Tokyo Station.

It was our favourite day of our trip. There’s loads to do there besides the daibutsu and it just has a lovely, relaxed, beachy vibe. The other temples are beautiful and really quiet and peaceful. Try and do it on a day where the Mount Fuji visibility is good. https://fuji-san.info/en/index.html That way you can get a really great view of Fuji down by the beach.

My other tip is to pay the extra fiver each for the green car on the train. It’s worth every penny on commuter routes, less so on Shinkansen.

Reading this thread, but absolutely panicking about our trip in October which we have absolutely NOTHING planned/booked for except the flights 😂 (and a hotel in Tokyo that I can cancel for free). Had many problems recently that made me put off planning, but now I'm in absolute panic mode 🥶

So we need HELP from all you lovely and knowledgeable people. It will be me and my teen going for 9 days and we want to pack in as much of the "Japan must sees" as we can.

Very rough itinerary - Tokyo - Kyoto - Osaka - Hiroshima - Tokyo

Can anyone please let me know what we absolutely MUST book and how best to pack in as much as possible into 9 days? Thank you ☺️

@XelaM
I think everyone has different ideas about what is “must see”.
Are you looking for historic Japan? Anime and pop culture?

I do think that Tokyo-Kyoto-Osaka-Hiroshima-Tokyo sounds like an incredibly packed itinerary for 9 days. Especially if day 1 is arrival day and day 9 is departure day.

Are you thinking of staying overnight in all those places? If I only had 9 days, I would probably not want to spend that much time checking into and out of hotels. It’s possible, but I’m not sure it would be very enjoyable. There’s so much to see and do in all of those places. I think there can be a temptation to try and speedrun Japan and do everything in one trip but that means you end up just rushing from one crowded tourist attraction to the next ticking them off with no time to just stop and just enjoy being in Japan. If you only have 8 nights and need to start and end in Tokyo then I think it’s a push to try and squeeze in staying in three other cities.

For nine days might you be best basing yourself in just Tokyo and one other place - maybe either Kyoto or Osaka? Kyoto and Osaka are v close together so I’d save the time and disruption of moving around and just do a day trip from whichever one you stay at to the other one.

In terms of must sees, I’d say don’t panic too much - a lot of the usual things people want to see don’t necessarily need booking or planning - things like wandering around different areas in Tokyo (eg Harajuku, Shinjuku) or seeing the many shrines and temples in Kyoto (eg Fushimi Inari or Kinkakuji).

However this might be a good time to check out some blogs and use that to work out where you want to stay, and book hotels fairly soon as October is a busy month for tourism. Also, if you want to do anything like the Ghibli museum or other ticketed events that book out, definitely look now.

@Takoneko and @ChilliPB Thank you!! I think it's great advice to minimise hotel moves. I think we will stay the first few days in Tokyo, then base ourselves in either Kyoto or Osaka and do day trips from there before returning to Tokyo for some pre-flight shopping.

Any advice as to whether we should stay in Osaka or Kyoto as our base for day trips?

@XelaM I prefer Osaka. It has a far superior public transport system, which makes it a really good base for day trips. Just book somewhere on the Midosuji line between Shin-Osaka and Namba and you can’t go far wrong.

Has anyone here been to Okunoshima (Rabbit Island)? We’ve decided to shift things around on our itinerary a bit to make time to go see the bunnies and the poison gas museum and ruins. Has anyone else done this? Did you enjoy it?

Ok, I have now made a (very) rough plan of what we are going to do in Japan 😀 I have rebooked hotels, so we are staying 5 nights in Tokyo and 4 nights in Osaka to minimise moving hotels. What do you knowledge people think of this itinerary...

Tokyo:
Day 1: arrival in the evening and restaurant
Day 2 : Digital Arts Museum and ?
Day 3: Kamakura and Hachimangu Shrine and Enoshima island
Day 4: Shibuya sky scraper/ restaurants/ shopping etc.
Day 5: Disney Sea or Disneyland

Osaka:
Day 6: teamLab Botanical Garden / cheesecake / Aquarium(?)/ Dontonbouri
Day 7: Universal Studios
Day 8: Kyoto: Gion / Yasaka shrine/ Kenninji Temple / Yasui shrine / Hanamikoji street / Gion Shirakawa/ Higashiyama
Day 9: Hiroshima and Miyajima island/shrine
Day 10: shopping / flight back

Does this sound doable? Any recommendations as to what to remove/add to the above list?

Just to add... in Osaka we're staying in a traditional Ryokan which I'm also worried about as no one I know spent more than 1 night in one 😅

Hi, that looks like a good starting point.

Day 2- Is that the digital art museum at Azabudai Hills? If so we combined Asakusa with Azabudai Hills. I really recommend getting the water bus from Asakusa to Hinode. I’d start in Asakusa in the morning/early afternoon and then spend the afternoon/evening at Azabudai hills. Tokyo tower looks better at night.

Day 4- As first-timers I think you may want to combine Shibuya with Harajuku. I like to start in Meiji Jingu in the morning and then check out Takeshita street and maybe a character cafe or crepes before moving onto Shibuya.

Day 5- I would go for Disneysea over Disneyland.

Day 6- think about what order you want to do things. The botanical garden is only open in the evening, Dotonbori also tends to be an after-dark sort of place.

Day 7-9 This is a rreally busy three days. Day 9, especially. I understand the appeal of Hiroshima, but that is a 4 hour round trip on the Shinkansen the day before your departure. Are you flying home from Osaka or do you also need to get from Osaka to Tokyo on day 10? I would drop Hiroshima and do a morning-early afternoon in Nara and then spend the late afternoon/evening in Shinsekai in Osaka.

I prefer a hotel, personally. I think that’s personal preference though.

Awesome - thank you so much for the advice! Adding the Tokyo suggestions to our list.

We really want to do Hiroshima, although many have told us it's not worth the long trip, but I really want my teen (who has dropped history in Y10 😒) to know the history of it.

I also wanted to book a tea ceremony - can you or anyone on this thread recommend the best place to have one?

@XelaM I didn’t do one this time but I would imagine Asakusa or Kyoto are your best bet for tea ceremony.

I definitely understand the appeal of Hiroshima, but Japan is such a big country. I think it can be easy to underestimate the distances. Osaka-Hiroshima is a similar distance to London-Brussels. Hiroshima-Tokyo is a similar distance to London-Geneva. I’d think really carefully about whether you and your teen really want to spend well over 4 hours of your last proper day in Japan on trains and ferries. I think there’s a good reason why lots of people are saying to skip it.

I think one of the hardest things about planning a trip to Japan is accepting that you just can’t see everything worth seeing in one trip, especially when it’s a relatively short trip. My upcoming trip will be my third one, and there’s still tonnes of things on my “must visit” list that we still won’t get round to this time (e.g Takayama, Kanazawa, Fukuoka).

for the people with trips coming up this autumn, the forecast for autumn foliage has been updated today.

https://n-kishou.com/corp/news-contents/autumn/?lang=en

Has anyone done the Hakone loop? We’ll be staying in Tokyo (Taito-ku, Nishiasakusa) and I was thinking of doing the loop from there in one day, staying the night in Gora (looks like we can get a bus to there, once we get off the pirate ship) and then spending the morning in the Yunessun spa (youngest DC is very keen on that) and then travelling on to Ito. I’m having real trouble working out what makes sense in terms of timings.

Ito is not booked yet, but we’re keen on something more rural for a few days after time in Tokyo. We would send our luggage ahead, so just do the Hakone loop and the night in Gora with a small backpack each.

@CherryBlossomFestival - we're hoping to do it on our trip. I'm also thinking of forwarding luggage from Tokyo and just taking an overnight bag to hakone. Do the loop maybe over two days with a night in a ryokan in the middle (any recommendations anyone?) and then go on to Kyoto afterwards.

Yes, we’ve done it in a day, @CherryBlossomFestival. In fact we discovered that we were going in the opposite direction to most other people once we got to Hakone from Tokyo 😂 (you can go round the loop either way, whichever you fancy). This actually worked quite well, as it wasn’t massively busy. But then next time we went to Japan, we just went back to the Open-Air Museum because it was so lovely there.

@CherryBlossomFestival The yunessun spa looks so much fun. I’d love to hear what you think of it.

We're under a month away for our trip and I'm a bit bamboozled by packing. We'll be in the central area - Tokyo down to Miyajima - and I wonder if the weather will be like autumn here, or whether in might be a bit warmer.
Packing tips from pros would be great!

I'm usually a relaxed traveller but I'm a bit floored by this one x

I just looked at https://www.yunessun.com/ and got a pop up message saying people with tattoos must cover them and can't use the hot stones area of the spa.

Is this normal for Japanese onsen?

I think the weather is generally warmer than here except in the mountains at that time of year.

This website is good. This link takes you to Tokyo for Nov 2023, just change the city to see other places. If you look up the cities you are going to it should give you a good idea of what to expect.

https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/japan/tokyo/historic?month=11&year=2023