Despite the language barrier it’s very possible to travel around Japan independently. But it’s a big place with an extensive transport network, so it’ll work best if you spend time developing a plan before you land. To help you on your way, here are 10 top tips I picked up while planning my trip to Japan’s stunning south.
1. Planning the perfect itinerary
I’m often asked how I decide where to go when I’m planning a new adventure. For me, it starts with research, and I do it in a few ways. My first port of call is usually my Lonely Planet book ‘The World’. It has an A-Z guide to every country in the world and is a great way to get an initial feel for a potential destination and an idea of highlights you won’t want to miss.
I also look at tour itineraries online. Travel companies spend time and money developing them, so they are usually a good source of ideas. One thing to bear in mind is that what works when travelling in a tour minibus around a country like Japan might not work when travelling by public transport.
In addition, I often get a full Lonely Planet or Rough Guide from my local library for more detailed information. I find the library usually has the most recent version and if it’s not in your branch you can order it for a small fee. If I’m going on a big trip, I usually buy a guidebook to take with me. But before I’ve 100% committed to the destination, the library is a much cheaper option. You can read about the places I included in my Japan itinerary in my post Highlights of Japan’s stunning south.
2. Japan’s cultural home in London
As I live just outside London, another source of information for this trip was Japan House in High Street Kensington. It’s a great place to visit for anyone interested in Japan. It has a cafe selling Japanese drinks and snacks, an upscale restaurant, exhibitions and lots of Japanese goods for sale.
But most importantly for trip planning, it has a travel section. On my first visit, I scooped up a pile of leaflets and maps for the places I was interested in visiting. Then once my friend and I had an idea of our itinerary we went back to talk it through with the travel adviser. She’s available Monday to Friday and will give you 30 minutes of her time for free. When we visited no one else was waiting to be seen so we had a longer slot and found her advice invaluable. I’d recommend taking a notebook as there’s lots of information you’ll want to write down.
3. Up, up and away
As Japan has excellent fast bullet trains it’s unlikely you’ll need to do internal flights but the price of long-haul flights can vary. My usual place to start looking for flights is Skyscanner as I can usually find options for whatever journey I want to take. After searching you can sort by price, duration or whatever is most important to you. I haven’t personally booked through one of the links Skyscanner offers as I prefer to book directly with airlines. So, I use it to find out which airlines fly the route I want and get an indication of the cost.
For this trip, the most cost-effective option was to fly via Seoul to Kansai International Airport with Asiana Airlines. Kansai was ideal for starting the trip in Osaka, going as far south as Hiroshima and looping back up to finish it in Kyoto. Although in the end, we chose to go back to Osaka for our last night as it was a much quicker journey to the airport than from Kyoto. Finding this flight route also sparked the idea of including Seoul in our itinerary. So we spent three nights there on our way home and were very pleased we did.
4. Finding your home from home
I used to book directly with hotels but latterly I’ve mainly used Booking.com. You can invariably find an option that has free cancellation in case plans change. And the more you use the site, the better deals it offers you. Often that’s a price reduction, or it could be a free breakfast or room upgrade. You can also earn credits for some bookings which can be used against a future one.
All the accommodation for this trip was on Booking.com which meant everything was in one place. And it was easy to amend the bookings once we looked at the transport in detail. As well as changing the last night’s accommodation, we also took one destination off our itinerary completely as decided it wasn’t worth the journey time and money for the amount of time we’d have there. And we found that even the temples on Mount Koya were on Booking.com. If it’s good enough for the monks, it works for me!
5. Unravelling Japan’s train network
As mentioned, Japan has a fantastic train network, but it is quite complicated. The advice we got from Japan House was that the fabled JR Pass wasn’t going to be good value for our itinerary. It might have been in the past, but in the autumn of 2023, the price increased significantly. So, we decided to book tickets individually for journeys that involved Shinkansen (bullet) trains. There are usually some unreserved seats (except during Golden Week which is Japan’s busiest time) but we wanted to be sure of seats together.
Bookings open a month in advance and when we got to that point, we spent quite a bit of time unravelling how to book the tickets. Every Google link took us back to the JR Pass or the regional version of it. We did look at regional passes, but they are for quite short periods and we didn’t want our trip to be any more hectic than it was already going to be. Eventually, we found a page on the JR West website which allowed us to book individual journeys. And we could book whole journeys that included more than one train rather than just the Shinkansen element.
However, we then discovered that the booking part of the website closed at 11.30pm, which was 2.30pm in the UK. So we had to make sure we sorted our bookings before then! Once in Japan, we collected all the booked tickets via a machine at the JR Namba Station in Osaka using the credit card and PIN set up when booking. If the journey includes different trains and seat reservations you might get three or four tickets. If that’s the case you need to put all tickets for the whole journey through the slot at the ticket barrier together as a bundle and the machine keeps any that are used up.
The JR West website covered most of the destinations we wanted to visit but there are other regional companies for other areas. We also pre-booked our trip from Osaka to Koya-san through Nankai which isn’t part of the JR network. The Nankai Koyasan World Heritage Digital Ticket is very good value for this trip. Nankai also runs the airport express so we prebooked our train ticket back to the airport to save time when we had a flight to catch.
6. Travelling light
Knowing that the trip would involve lots of public transport (one journey involved three trains and a ferry), I realised it would be best to travel light. Lifting a 20kg suitcase onto a train luggage rack above a seat isn’t very feasible when you’re 5’4″! The best combination my friend and I came up with was to take a large cabin bag as our checked-in luggage and buy a new rolling backpack to take as hand luggage. After researching it, I found this Ligsan backpack on Amazon. It’s a great size and has lots of sections including a front one where I could fit my daypack. And it can be wheeled or put on your back, which is ideal for hopping on and off trains and ferries.
I also invested in some packing cubes to use across the two bags. My friend was pretty dubious, but I bought her some too and after a few days of moving around Japan she was a convert. It made it a lot easier to keep different items together and just lift the cubes out rather than rifling through the bags to find stuff.
7. Staying connected
If you’re travelling independently in Japan it really helps to have constant access to Google Maps and Google Translate. The best way to do this is to rent a mobile WiFi device. Lots of companies offer them in Japan but we chose Wi-Fi Box as it’s bookable in advance and was open 24 hours as you get it from a sort of ‘vending machine’ at Kansai airport. I got an email with a pick-up link a couple of days before arriving and then used the free airport WiFi to access it after we landed. We had two phones connected all day and it never ran out. Then at night, we charged it via a cable in the back which plugged into a USB socket.
8. Cash is king in Japan
For such a technologically advanced country Japan is surprisingly still a cash-based culture. You can pay by credit card in many shops and restaurants, but there are also plenty of cash-only businesses, particularly the smaller ones. Even some of the tourist attractions only took cash. I took £300 worth of Yen for 12 days and found that was plenty. I used a card to pay where it was accepted for the first week or so and then started to use up more cash in the second week when I knew I’d have enough left.
9. The essential IC card
Be sure to buy an IC card at your first destination in Japan. These plastic transport cards are called by varying names in different areas of Japan, but most are compatible across regions. Icoca is the main one in the Kansai area. We found ours very handy for all sorts of short journeys including local trains, metros, trams and even the ferry from Hiroshima to Miyajima Island. You can top it up at a machine in stations using cash, or there is a digital version on iPhone that can be topped up using Apple Pay.
10. Put it in writing
My final tip is to put it all in writing. I typed up our itinerary in a Word document and included all of our hotel details, travel times, pre-booked activities and any other links I thought we might need. There were multiple destinations on our Japan trip and the journeys between them sometimes included three or four different forms of transport. So, it was much easier to have all the information in one place. As well as taking a printed copy I saved it in my Dropbox and emailed it to myself and my friend so we could quickly check it on our phones when we were in transit. I also created lists for each place we were visiting in Google Maps and added the hotels and train stations as well as restaurants and bars we liked the look of.
We covered a lot of ground in the 12 days we were in Japan but thanks to the planning we did in advance (and Japan’s very efficient transport network!) we never missed a connection and had a fabulous trip. I hope sharing my tips helps you to do the same!
Look out for future posts about the different places I visited in Japan in the Asia section of my blog.