Japan 2018

Originally posted on Medium in 2018

All prices in Canadian CAD dollars and cents rounded.

Trip date was feb 21 to march 07, exactly two weeks. Flew into Tokyo Haneda from Calgary, Canada. Stayed the first two days then Shinkansen to Kyoto / Osaka for 6 days and back to Tokyo for the last week.

Costs

Plane ticket: $652

Airbnbs: $126, $184, $270 (for a total of $580)

ATMs for ¥40K JPY cash: $125, $366 (plus 2x $5 withdraw fee = $501)

Bullet train: $160, $165 (not sure why the same trip was $5 different?)

Random meal: $12

Airport vancouver snacks: $11 (this hurt the most, 2x Clif bar and Powerade)

Grand total: $2081 CAD

Notes

You can stop reading here, it’s fine, I totally understand.

My biggest regret is that I don’t have a more granular breakdown of how the ATM money was spent. My impression of the receipts the train PASMO card spits out worked differently than I thought in the end, and I “lost” the whole trip’s train data (which I thought would be of everything but was actually just the last 15 card uses or so).

So, in hindsight, I wish I tracked that manually in my notebook or something.

The ATM money was also used for entry to things: the Kyoto aquarium was the most expensive at ¥2300 (about $28) and some of the other touristy places were expensive: Osaka Castle was ¥600 ($7.30) and stung a bit for how lame it was in comparison to the many very good ¥200 ($2.50) botanical and zen gardens or free temples I wandered through.

And, of course, food.

Food

Food is pretty similar to canadian restaurants: ¥600–1000 per plate and a few were ¥1200–1500 which makes for a $7–20 type spread. The cheapest I had was a Yoshinoya (ubiquitous white collar “quick-food” chain restaurant) gyudon beef bowl which was ¥450. The most expensive was a pizza for ¥2500 ($30) from pizza Savoy (but, it turns out, not that pizza Savoy. Oh well.)

Also there’s no tipping, which actually saves a ton in the end: your $15 burger doesn’t suddenly become $20 in the end (which is my pretty standard pub bill outcome here, sans drinking).

I discovered, as you might expect from Japan, that ramen is one of the better food-to-price ratios: ¥850 will buy you a heck of a bowl of fresh, delicious, filling, slurpy savory pork and noodles. I’d describe it like Vietnamese in Calgary: $10 might be more than a $6 fast food burger, but it’s a ton of food.

And bakeries: I ended up spending most of my pocket change (an inevitable outcome of cash society) buying sweet and/or savory pastries, which are ¥150–300 each, fresh baked. Buy a couple and you’re spending $5 ish for a snack / light meal on the go. In the end, I adored their quality and frequency.

In the touristy areas you’ll spend more for the usual carnival food affairs: crepes, icecream, those spiral potato skewer things, etc. Like any country, step one street off the beaten path and enjoy half the price.

It’s probably mostly genuine, but sometimes I swear Japan intentionally keeps the segregation real and restaurants with zero english in the name / menu / staff are the best cheapest places trying hard to be local-only.

Lodgings

This was the first time I booked and used Airbnb, so that worked out well.

As it turns out, the prices were roughly hostel-ish ($30–45 per night) and I got my own private room in each of them, the last being an entire apartment (that was admittedly very tiny, but complete).

Airbnb #1 was only two nights, so it was basically a “crash into Tokyo and beat jetlag” room. It was a homebrew quasi-hostel running under Airbnb, but whatever. Adequate.

Airbnb #2 was in Kyoto and off the beaten path (1.5km from the train) which was just beautiful. Tucked up in the mountains and lovely if you’re willing to walk a ton in and out every time.

Airbnb #3 was the full (tiny) apartment. Stayed 6 nights and it was a great home base for Tokyo explorations.

I don’t list these to write specific reviews, but I do want to show them as a way to gauge quality, since everyone’s measure of where they’re wanting / willing to stay will be different. My peeve with a lot of “travel for $X” type articles is that they never demonstrate how much of a hovel you have to live in to get down to those prices. So, I wanted to include mine.

All in all, I’d do the last two again for sure. I also happen to like sleeping on firm firm beds and the Japanese floor futon is perfect for me. That’s probably the biggest difference between a western style hotel, I’d think. Shared bathroom in 2/3 of them, the house one better than the hostel one.

Is that worth an extra $100+ night? It would nearly triple my expenses for lodging. For me? Not at all, I’m happy with my priority choice.

Trains

Last one: trains are the way to get around, if it’s a bullet train across the country (my new favourite thing) or the various LRT / subway city trains.

I wish I had the full receipt from my PASMO card. Gah!

Basically, it’s a prepaid card that you boop at the station you start at and the station you leave from and it deducts the appropriate total from your balance. Then you can plunk cash into the card’s balance from little kiosks in every station. It’s super easy and a clear evolution from a culture that wants to remove the pain of cash but never got into tap-to-pay credit cards like we did.

Incidentally, this became my favourite way to get rid of the immense change build up: you can drop ¥10 ‘dime’ and larger coins into the card kiosks so other than the ‘pennies’ you collect, almost all small change can go towards useful payments eventually. This is great, because it stacks so fast.

Bought two tickets for the Shinkansen (bullet) from Tokyo to Kyoto, then back, and that was $325 which was clearly the most expensive of them. No idea why the one trip is slightly more expensive than the first one.

The PASMO card is a $5 deposit that you (in theory) get back at the end but I didn’t end up returning mine. Little keepsake.

Trains are ¥170+ per trip, and sometimes you’ll spend that a few times to transfer trains getting across town, so it’s really more like ¥400–800 to get most places, and then a return trip to get home. It adds up for sure, there were a few days in Tokyo that felt I was adding ¥1000 bills like candy. The train from Kyoto to Osaka was ¥410 which is just amazing per distance.

Kyoto was a little cheaper, and my subway was more convenient (both Tokyo apartments were on arms away from the Yamanote line, so you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a transfer and pay more for the 4+ trains you took daily).

The advice given to me by everyone was to not get the JR pass. This turned out to be good advice: it wouldn’t cover the Shinkansen I took (the fastest express ones) and half the trains I used on a daily basis were non-JR owned lines, so having a JR pass wouldn’t have covered them anyway. I would have paid a huge upfront fee ($350–550) to get unlimited rides on… just a few trains, saving a couple bucks a day. Not worth it at all.

Mistakes and Misc.

I paid $10.60 in the Vancouver airport for two Clif bars (which you can buy locally for $1 each) and a Gatorade (also like, $1.50 in a store). 3x price.

Yes, I’m unreasonably bitter about this.

My only big mistake was booking my first Airbnb an extra night early. I didn’t fully grasp that flying from YYC on the 21st would land me in Tokyo later in the evening… on the 22nd. But I booked my airbnb for the 21st, right?

So I paid an extra $40 or whatever for that night I didn’t sleep in Tokyo. It’s a dumb mistake that I could have saved if I just read the ticket better. Ah well.

Other than that I think I spent an appropriate amount. Withdrew ¥40,000 from the ATM and it covered everything I needed on the ground. I feel like I could have saved a tiny bit doing less touristy entry fees but that’s a hindsight thing: some of them were amazing and I’d never know without going in and experiencing it to judge. After two weeks I don’t feel like I missed anything major or was held back by too-strict budgeting.

I maybe wouldn’t have eaten than $30 pizza again.

I didn’t spend ¥2800 ($35) to go up the Tokyo Tower observation deck. I’ll never know if it was worth it or not, but call it a hunch…

The Osaka Aquarium was $28 which is a biiit steep, but I love aquariums and it’s apparently one of the biggest in the world. This is maybe a bit misleading: the main tank is indeed huge (might be the biggest single tank in the world?) but as a whole building of exhibits it felt pretty similar to other aquariums.

The best money I spent was the ¥200 entry to both the Kyoto and the Tokyo Botanical gardens. Even in winter with all the outdoor gardens pretty dead, big indoor greenhouses are some of my personal favourite things in the world.

Fushimi Inara (the one with all the red pillars) is free and you can climb up the mountain far enough that the tourist throngs won’t follow you. There’s various rest points that also lead to going-down paths, so the regular folks are weeded out pretty quickly if you can stomach the crowd up the early stages.

My flights were found with the ever-amazing YYC Deals, so shout out there.

Without getting into the weeds further, I think that’s pretty much the financial summary as it stands.

I was casually aiming for $2k ish and ended up just over that. 4% more. It would have been 1.5% without my two mistakes mentioned above, which feels pretty on target. Of course, getting cash first and rationing it on the fly helps with the last few days to try and hit a $0 end point, which actually I nailed pretty perfectly. Last couple bucks were spent in the airport on drinks.

Kanpai