2024 May to June Japan Trip Preparation Questions

[kuro68000]

Just yesterday Kuga posted this thing in Kobe:

 

https://youtu.be/YBEldUItcxo

 

Not exactly a railway, but might be of interest.

Edited April 4 by mojo

[kuro68000]

This was just posted on Twitter too, looks interesting:

 

[cteno4]

Now that looks like something very interesting to just ride back and forth a few times for a relax!

 

jeff

[arkh]

9 hours ago, Gunzel said:

I don’t have a good line on meal service trains but here are some good experiences I’ve had in the areas you mentioned. 
 

...

Thanks for the reply! Those are some great recommendations! Will be adding those to our list of things to potentially check out. The Kyoto Tango and Rokumon restaurant trains are actually a couple of the ones we want to do for sure. The Kintetsu pass we're almost certainly going to do. It's a really great deal. I haven't looked into the Kansai WIDE Area Pass until now, but I've seen it mentioned. It actually looks to cover a decent amount so might have to consider that as well. 
 

8 hours ago, katoftw said:

Japan's JR joyful trains aren't what they used to be.   And the better ones that are left are in more rural non city locations. You aint near them.  Better off chasing some unique railways and trains on certain lines instead.  Maybe wooden trams in Osaka, or the 700s in Otsu etc etc.  Or hit up private railways like Kintetsu for there limited express runners.

...

One of the main aims of our trip is actually to head out to the more rural areas (long thread by this point, but it is mentioned above). We don't really want to spend most of our time in the major cities. We are hoping to have a lot of free time to travel out to more random places, but we're not sure, at this point, how far is too far, I guess.

The Kintetsu's Hinotori and Shimakaze are some of my favorite trains so we'll definitely try those and will be on the lookout for other interesting trains to try for sure. 

Thanks for your opinion about the Japan Rail Pass. That's basically what we were thinking, that it probably won't be worth it - at least in our specific case. We've been leaning more towards specific area passes and day passes (like the Kintetsu pass seems like a really good deal) especially since we aren't planning on using the Shinkansen much, if at all. 

Here's some of the food-focused tourist trains we're currently hoping to do in case it's helpful to others. Keep in mind these mostly are weekend trains, which is why we've been trying to find ones that also run on weekdays so we can do more of them.

Nagano - Rokumon
Toyama - The Story of 13000'
Gifu - Akechi Railway Gourmet Dining Car
Kyoto - Tango Kuro-Matsu

There's also a couple of others ones we'd really like to try but they are way further out from the main areas we'll be staying in. So we're not sure if we'll have time for them or not. I'll mention them in case anyone wants to take a look though:

Fukuoka - Rail Kitchen Chikugo
Kumamoto - Orange Restaurant

We also have some other tourist trains we want to try out but they aren't ones that specifically are about food or offer a special meal so maybe I'll save that for another post, haha. 
 

Edited April 4 by arkh

[katoftw]

Well if you do make it as far as Kyushu...

 

https://www.shimatetsu-cafetrain.com/english/

 

Shimbara ticks of the rural box also.

[arkh]

Even if we don't make it to that one, it's always cool learning about these sorts of trains! That'll be added to our list to consider going to at least. Thank you. Scheduling on that one looks a bit weird (seems like weekends but not every weekend), so might be a bit harder to factor in to our itinerary even if we can make it that far, though.

[arkh]

Major update on our plans for the trip! Partly because of having to go straight to the Osaka/Kyoto area to meet someone a few days after we land, we decided that we'll be halfway there so we might as well head down to Kyushu. The Orange Restaurant and Rail Kitchen Chikugo are two tourist trains, in particular, that we've been wanting to ride the most, so we figured it's worth the change in plans. We'll have a bit of a mad dash back to Tokyo (for shopping and to meet someone else) at the end of the trip, but I think it's worth it given there's lots of food tourism trains in the Kyushu area that we want to try. 

In total, we have tickets for five tourist trains now: Rokumon, Tango Kuro-Matsu, Rail Kitchen Chikugo, Orange Restaurant, and the new Kanpachi train (also known as the "Ichiroku", depending on the route) which just started service! All of these are trains with a meal plan. We're looking at whether we can add katoftw's suggestion of the Shimatetsu Cafe Train also. We'll have to see though as basically all the Kyushu tourist trains we're doing are going to be one after another in the same week. 

If anyone has any suggestions for things to do in Kyushu, feel free to let us know. It looks like we'll be in and around Fukuoka, Kumamoto, and Oita. We may have 2 or 3 completely free days to explore the area.

So our plan is set for starting in Tokyo for a few days and then heading to the Osaka and Kyoto areas. After that we may dip into Mie to try to visit Suzuka Circuit (my favorite race track and there's a Super GT race taking place at the time we'll be there). From there we'll head to Kyushu for all the tourist train goodness, then back to Tokyo to end the trip and head back home. We should have at least a couple of days in each area where we don't have a set plan, so hopefully we can use that time to wander off to random places and maybe jump on trains and see where they take us. 

It's a relief to finally get our plans solidified after so much deliberation and also just waiting on some things. Still need to make a few more arrangements but the major structure of our trip is in place now so that makes everything so much easier. 

[chadbag]

We've purchased a few suitcases at Yodobashi.  They do the tax free thing as well.

 

The one nice thing about a JR pass, even if you won't see much savings, is that it frees you to be more spontaneous as you don't have to worry about preplanning your budget or going over budget if you want to change or add a trip in.  You can just go and do it (pending seat availability of course).  Before we started using JR Pass we would always worry about our budget and planning ahead all our travels and stuff but once we got the JR Pass we would just decide to take a day trip somewhere or whatever and hop on a Shinkansen and go.  From Osaka to Tokyo is about 3 hours by Shinkansen so we could decide to get up early, get the Shinkansen in Kobe or Osaka, spend 1/2 a day in Tokyo, and return the same day if we wanted to.  Or like we did on our last trip to Japan, the kids and I went to Nagasaki (unplanned more than a day or two in advance) and stayed over night and returned back to Kobe the next night.   We wouldn't have made these decisions to go do random stuff if we'd been buying tickets as we went since we'd be stressing about the cost of each ticket.  With the pass, we've already paid, so why not use it.  Be spontaneous.  Go places.

 

The same can be said for regional passes etc if you plan on staying in certain regions.  With the price increases of JR Passes, we may get a 2 week or even a 1 week pass instead of a 3 week pass next time and use more regional passes for the other time (we usually go for a little over 3 weeks).  But still the pass gives us the flexibility and lack of stressing about costs since the decision to spend the money is already made by the time we get there.

 

[arkh]

That's a fair point on the convenience aspect of the JR pass. We'll certainly be getting some regional passes but, as you may have already seen, we've been debating whether to get the JR pass still. We've pretty much finalized our plans for the areas we'll be in, so I think we'll try to crunch some basic numbers over the next weeks and see what it looks like. It's just really such a higher cost now that it doesn't feel like we should get it no matter what anymore. However, just as your family did, we do want to be able to just go on some random trips to wherever we feel like without a set plan, so that could sway things in favor of the JR pass.

[kuro68000]

The basic JR 21 day adult pass is ¥100,000.

 

Tokyo to Nagoya is about ¥10,560 one way, and there is no discount for return tickets so you might as well not bother and keep the flexibility. Tokyo to Shin-Osaka is ¥13,870. So including other JR trains you can use the pass on, you can see the break even point is probably somewhere around the 5-6 Shinkansen journey mark.

 

When I go I have an unlimited travel budget. I just refuse to think about it. Pain for later, although so far it's always worked out cheaper than the pass for me. I tend to take things a bit slower than what you are planning though.

[chadbag]

There are also the regional JR or multi company(?) passes or getting a pass for a lesser amount of time if your longer stretches or "flexibility" can be constrained down to a shorter time (ie, you have a set schedule for half the trip and just need a 1 or 2 week pass).

 

For me its the mental freedom.  And we typically take a few lonegr day trips.  We've not been since teh price increase so I'm going to have to work it out before we go next (which should be this summer but won't be due to our house project).

 

[katoftw]

Thats alot of shinkansen trips and mental freedom to warrant the much higher price passes.

As Chad has spoken about above, region passes seem are a lot better value nowadays.  They only jumped (apat from JR East) by 10-15 per cent.

 

Example:- Kansai-Hiroshima pass.  5 days. 17,000 yen.  Shin-Osaka to Hiroshima = 10,000ish yen.  20K return.  But go to Kure, Iwakumi, bunny island, Onomichi, Kurashiki, Okayama and/or Himeji.  You well and truly get value like the old passes.

[arkh]

As of last night, our itinerary for the trip has been finalized! It definitely isn't what we originally had planned but we were able to fit in a lot of things we didn't think would be possible while still having a pretty leisurely schedule. We have a little over a week of days totals where we can just wander around and almost all the other days really only have one thing - such as a tourist train or activity - scheduled that we have to get to on time. So should be lots of time to explore at random, which was one of the things we wanted to make sure we could do. We also found a lot of pretty cheap accommodations so that helps a ton with the budget in terms of leaving room for lots of yummy food and any souvenirs we may (absolutely) pick up. 

Below is a map of the areas we will be visiting during our month-long trip to Japan. It's not quite everything, though, as it's mostly just the places that are specifically set in our travel schedule. We'll be starting in Tokyo and working our way down to Kyushu. Most of the trip has been planned so that we don't have to take the Shinkansen. It should only be about two or three times aside from one long trip back from Kyushu to Tokyo at the end of the trip. There's a couple of weird spots both location- and schedule-wise where the Shinkansen is probably the best option despite the short distance.



Anyway, very excited and relieved to get the planning done. Now it's mostly a matter of waiting to leave and making sure we have everything we need for the trip. I tried a test pack and wasn't able to get everything down to just two backpacks, despite one being a rather large travel backpack. So we'll likely still have to bring one carry-on suitcase, but maybe we can whittle down what we bring over the next month. 

Thanks for everyone's comments and suggestions. If you have any more, feel free to throw them in still as we're still compiling things to potentially do during the free time we have. I'm, at the moment, trying to compile some cool trains I'd like to ride that we won't necessarily need to schedule a lot of time in advance. Any suggestions for those, in particular, would be much appreciated!

Edited April 22 by arkh