Japan Travel Planning - Top Tips for First-Time Travellers Visiting Japan

In episode 14 of the Global Travel Planning Podcast, Tracy brings you invaluable tips for first-time visitors to Japan. Based on her three-week trip to Japan and notes from her travels, Tracy shares practical advice on navigating airports, transportation, accommodations, food, etiquette, and more. 

From the importance of learning some Japanese phrases to the convenience of using the SUICA card for transportation, Tracy covers a range of essential tips to ensure a smooth and enjoyable experience for anyone planning a trip to Japan.

Whether it's guidance on using the trains, making the most of convenience stores, or understanding local customs, this episode is packed with insights to assist you in your global travel planning.

Show notes - Episode 14

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi and welcome to the Global Travel Planning Podcast. I'm your host, Tracy Collins, who, with my expert guests, will take you on a weekly journey to destinations around the globe, providing travel inspiration, itinerary ideas, practical tips, and more to help you plan your next travel adventure. Hello and welcome to episode 14 of the Global Travel Panel Podcast. This week I'm again in India recording this episode. I'm about to embark on a month-long tour of India, but before I left, I want to record this episode and basically to share off top tips for first-time visitors to Japan. Now, this is based on our three-week trip that we took in October, November 2023, and the notes that we took while we were traveling. And these are the things that kind of struck us that would be useful for anybody visiting Japan for the first time to actually know. So thank you very much for tuning in to the Global Travel Plan and Podcast. It's lovely to see that we are getting regular listeners, so I really didn't want to skip a week while I was traveling. So if you are traveling to Japan, it seems to be coming incredibly popular at the moment. The yen is quite low, so it's making it a cheaper destination for many people to go to. Far cheaper, in fact, than we imagined when I first started planning the trip to Japan. So first thing I'm going to do is I'm just literally going to talk about some tips under different categories. Um may sound like a bit of a list, but we will have an article to go with it as well, so you can check these things off. So the first thing that Doug actually wanted me to share was to check in to arrive in Japan. You have to fill in online to get a QR code for when you arrive. And he did that on his laptop. And when we arrived, it meant that he didn't have the QR code that he needed. We couldn't access it. He said it would have been easier to have done that on his phone, and then it would have actually been able to do it then and there. So it meant that we were delayed getting through arrivals, and it meant by the time we got through our luggage was actually off the carousel. It took us that long to do it. I think just make sure that the read up and prepare before you arrive because that's something that we made a mistake about. One thing I'd say as well is before you go, anyway, learn a few words of Japanese. Very minimum amount of words that you really should learn. I found every Japanese person that I spoke to when I spoke in Japanese just loved it. It's just polite, really, to learn some words in Japanese before you go. So when you're planning your itinerary, we would recommend that you do visit some of the most popular sites as early as you can in the morning before the crowds. Also, allow yourself enough time to reach the sites. So plan it at the minimum the day before we did that because some of them honestly were incredibly busy. Also, have some cash because we did find that some places prefer cash for entry, so obviously you don't want to be then scribbling around trying to find some cash if you're not carrying any. When you go shopping, take your own bags and also pack them yourself. Something that obviously, if you're from Australia, we used to have people pack the bags, and from North America, you have somebody to pack your bags, not so much in the UK, but just to remember that you're actually responsible to pack your bags and take your own bags. We have some small fold-up bags that we take with us wherever we travel around the world, making sure you've got your own with you rather than having to buy plastic bags. So a bit of etiquette when you're boarding trains, just jumping out of trains here. We travelled a lot by train around Japan, and we found there was a lot of etiquette about actually boarding the trains. So there are um lines for you to stand in, people will stand in the lines, people will wait for people to get off the trains, which is not something we saw when we're in London. Everybody seems to just scrabble on these days. So you need to stand in the correct place for the shinkans and trains around the coach number and seat number, it's very well organized. So that's something when you're thinking about travelling by trains. I'm just gonna skip through my notes because I actually have got a few other things about traveling by train. So if you are traveling by train, which I imagine you probably will be around Japan, you'll find that the ticket offices are excellent once you find them. Stations are labyrinths, there's so many exits. So you really plan or practice if you're gonna be traveling around, it just makes things a lot easier. You'll find that give yourself time to find the correct platform, and it can be quite a walk. Also, lots of steps, so be prepared. Um, also say one thing about the train stations, there's an amazing amount of restaurants and shops that you'll find, honestly, like little shopping centres. So if you actually need some food before or after, buy some snacks to take with you, that's a perfect place to do it. Talking about transportation, I'd also recommend because we did this, is if you're arriving in at the airport, book yourself a transfer, get picked up and transferred to your hotel. Honestly, if you can afford to do that, it's the best we do that wherever we go in the world, it's the best way because there's just less stress having to navigate the system that you're not sure about. So I'm jumping back on over to the supermarket shopping thing again. We found the supermarkets to be absolutely outstanding. The convenience stores in Japan are fantastic. So, main ones we found were Family Mart, 7 Eleven, Fresco, there are others. They all have a toilet, they all have a cash machine, and they all have a photocopier. How fantastic is that? But what they also have is a wonderful selection of sandwiches, snacks, meals, uh, drinks, just everything that you could possibly want. Now I struggle a little bit with the food in Japan. I don't particularly like fish, I don't like the smell of fish. So the convenience store was a go-to for me, and an insider tip have the egg sandwiches, they are amazing. So when you're walking around Japan, you will see that everything is spotlessly clean, but there are no bins, you will find no bins whatsoever. Apparently, they were removed um during COVID and they haven't been replaced, and you will find that it doesn't matter whether there's no bins because the place is spotlessly clean because everybody takes their own rubbish home. So the best thing to do is make sure you've got a little bag or something that you can put your rubbish in and take it back to your um hotel or apartment or wherever you're staying and get rid of it there. There is no litter. We did not see any litter in Japan, it was incredibly clean. Another tip from Doug is for medical is to check any prescribed meds that you may have and check the banned medications uh list for Japan. You may have to apply for permission to take your medications in. So you make sure that you've got all of your authorized and paperwork with you. Doug had to do that for his particular medications before he arrived and had the authorization. So make sure that you check on that. Also, it goes without saying make sure you have travel insurance, but also make sure that you have the details to hand because you just never know when that you're gonna need it. One of the other things we found for plugging in our technology stuff, because obviously we had laptops and phones like everybody, is that we actually took the wrong adapter. We found that actually the one that we took was we took that it was a three-pin and actually it was a two-pin. So that sounds a bit complicated, but we ended up having to buy an adapter. So I would check because you don't want to end up like we did. We got there, arrived, and found that we had the wrong adapter. So do check that you have the right one. Food and drink, jumping back to that. Is we took a knife fork and spoon set for each person, which we did use often. Take a refillable water bottle. As I said, check the train stations for food shops. There's lots of vending machines everywhere selling all sorts of things. So we even saw a little bouquets of flowers for sale in the vendor machines, cakes, drinks, you name it. There's drink vendor machines absolutely everywhere. You will see a lot of local produce, wonderfully packaged different foods that you can take, buy again at the train station. Doug had a particular fondness for the apples, apples were absolutely huge and lovely. So I say I struggled a little bit because I don't like fish, and next time I will do a little bit more research into what I can actually eat, and that was probably me not being as adventurous as I should have been. But do check if you're not sure and you don't like fish, do a little bit of research beforehand about other options that you have. I think I just got so upset and the kind of sushi fish mindset and the smells that I really did struggle. I recommend apps-wise that you get the Google Maps app, make sure you've got that on your phone, and the translator. It's fantastic. We used that in lots of places. Basically, you can do a visual translation, so you can hold it over a menu or over a sign, and it will translate it into English. You can actually speak into it as well, so you can say the words that you want to say. We had to use that quite a lot actually, and then it will translate it and then say it in Japanese, which we found just invaluable on a number of occasions when we did meet people who didn't speak any English at all. Bit of bathroom, toilet, the restroom etiquette. Uh, make sure that you have your own washcloth towel or wipes for hands because quite often we found that we went into the public restrooms and there were no hand towels, nowhere to dry your hands. We found that more often than not. So actually, we carried our own washcloth with us so we could dry our hands. So that was useful. The toilets are absolutely amazing, honestly. They're just you really have to experience a Japanese toilet, really, to understand what I'm saying, but that they are incredible. They even play music, they're absolutely all singing, all dancing. When it comes to money, take some cash. We needed cash. We withdrew money from the 7 Eleven cash point, and you can select an English option. So make sure that you know we're all pin numbers and you have your card with you when you're going to do that. I did use Apple Pay quite a lot on my phone to pay for things, but there were occasions where we absolutely needed to have some cash. When it comes to traveling with luggage, we recommend that you travel light, make sure you've got lockable suitcases. Now we use the transfer services, Yamato, it's called, which means that you can basically move your suitcases from area to area. So we were travelling from Tokyo, and then we're going to Nagano, Takeyama, Kanazawa, and then to Kyoto, and we did not want to take our suitcases with us for that particular week of the journey. So we used this service and we moved our suitcases basically, had them picked up in Tokyo and then taken and stored in Kyoto and then delivered to the hotel the day before we arrived. Now, I'd recommend if you're going to do this that you have a photograph of your luggage and that you have air tags in them as well, so that you can follow them just for peace of mind. So we used that service twice. We used it once from Tokyo without any problems. We struggled in Kyoto because the hotel that we were staying at would not help us fill in the paperwork and they did not use that service, so they wouldn't allow them to pick up the bags. So we had to take them to the convenience store, which you can do now. When we got there, well, the problem we had was they wanted everything filled in Japanese. Now we had popped into the Amato store and they had filled it in for us, so luckily they accepted it. But I would be careful if you're planning to do it through the convenience store route, that you are able to fill in the details in Japanese. And the guy in the store said the reason was that is that they were concerned that people would lose the luggage because things weren't correctly uh completed. But I would recommend it, it just made life so much easier. So I would also recommend that if you can't travel as light as possible, the rooms and hotels are quite small, it's just easier for storage that you travel as light as possible. Another thing, actually, as well, if you're traveling on the trains, is really you don't want to be taking luggage on the trains or in the train stations up and down steps. So that's another reason to use that service. And if you are traveling on the Shinkansen and you have got large luggage, you've got a reservation in it, reserve a place for your luggage. So I would check on that if you're doing it, but really ideally, just use the service, it's fantastic. Most Japanese people seem to use it. You don't see a lot of massive luggage on their trains. So I'm trying to think, oh, yeah, some ideas to save some money, use the numerous convenience stores for some meals, mix it up, use in restaurants as well. But honestly, the convenience stores are fantastic. We also had the seeker card, so we bought the seeker card and had that installed on our phone. We didn't actually have the physical card. Now that's a card you can use to tap on and off the public transportation system. So we used that in Tokyo, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Kyoto. But also, what's fantastic about it is you can use it in the convenience stores to pay. So I just had the app on my phone and I would just add money to it. You could track what you'd spent. Fantastic, really brilliant system. So I'm going to end with a quick list of things probably not to do when you're in Japan that we learned. So one is not to eat and walk, it's not really acceptable to do that. Make sure that when you're crossing the roads that you wait, it's a very organized system, so you'll find they're very busy. So just follow the instruction, you'll see everybody else as well. But it's the best way to do it is to don't jaywalk and just follow up the crossings. We found that tipping isn't expected in Japan. When you're on the trains, be quiet, there's not a lot of noise and chatter going on. And the last thing is to make sure that you take your shoes off if you're going indoors. We stayed in an apartment in Kanazawa, and there there was like an little hole bit, you took your shoes off and then you stepped up to go into the main apartment. And that seemed to be the the same way when we stayed in the rear can as well, is that you would take your shoes off and then step up so shoes are stored, and then you could put slippers on. So take socks. Yeah, so those are our tips. We wrote those out as we were going, so we thought we'd quickly share them in this episode. So that was a quick recap. That was episode 14 of the Global Travel Planner podcast. If you want to find out about our itinerary for Japan, that is in the previous episode 13. So from two weeks ago. So pop over and listen to that if you haven't already. But thank you very much for tuning in this week. That just leaves me to say happy global travel planning.