How to…travel around Japan

Japan is easy to travel around, thanks to its excellent public transport networks.

Many signs are in English, as well as one of the three Japanese scripts, and staff usually speak some English once they’ve got over their initial shyness.

Still, we found it helpful to get hints and tips from fellow travellers, both before we left and when we were travelling around, which helped us to make the most of it.

The following are a few tips we thought you might find of use. Do let us know if you think we should add any more.

JR Pass

William Morris would approve of the Japan Railways (JR) pass: it is both aesthetically pleasing, with a nice shiny rendition of Hokusai's famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa on the front, and remarkably useful, giving you the freedom to travel Japan’s extensive, efficient rail network at your leisure.

Only available to purchase outside of Japan, the pass is regarded with considerable envy by some Japanese, for the fantastic rail services they enjoy come at quite a high financial cost.

So if you plan to travel around Japan do yourself and your wallet a favour and buy a JR Pass before you leave home. Although it costs a weighty 350 Euros or so the pass is more than likely to pay for itself in just a few journeys.

Armed with one of these beauties you can use local trains, Shinkansen bullet trains (only the super, super fast Nozomi service is out of bounds) and even some ferries.

In addition, with a JR Pass you can cunningly negotiate your way around cities by using their local train services - given the size of a city such as Tokyo this helps you save a tidy sum.

Try and purchase your JR pass in your home country. If you run out of time before you leave , and you are visiting other countries before you reach Japan, then you should be able to purchase a JR Pass in that country. Certainly this should be possible in Europe (we bought ours in Finland).

Full details about the JR Pass are available on the Japan Rail website here.

Train ticket reservations

Trains are rarely completely full. Outside of the big cities in the rush hour, we never encountered trains that were fit to bursting with hundreds of weary passengers hanging onto the handrails.

Still it pays to get to train stations early and reserve seats. Do it ahead of the day you travel and you won’t to arrive early, plus you’ll be able to pick seats with a good view.

For example, on the Shinkansen heading south out of Tokyo try and get a seat on the right hand side - you should get a view of Mount Fuji (cloud / smog permitting).

If you haven’t reserved a ticket, consumed one too many earthenware bowls of sake the night before and overslept don’t fret. There are several carriages on each train for passengers without reservations.

Simply study the map of the train (found on the platform or the entrance to the platform) for the location of unreserved carriages.

Like the civilised people they are, the Japanese rigorously observe the queuing system. These are denoted by tramlines marked on the platform with people standing between them, whilst the smug passengers with reserved seats lean nonchalantly against the counter of the noodle bar, catching up on last night’s baseball match.

One final thing - when on the train, if people suddenly get up and start swinging their seats around 180 degrees don’t call for the authorities, this isn’t a spontaneous act of mass vandalism.

Rather this is another one of these clever Japanese technical gizmos. The train has come to the end of a single-track line and passengers can swivel their seats on an axis in order to allow them to continue facing in the direction of travel.

Be sure to remove your belongings from the pocket in front of your seat if you don’t wish to see it ending up halfway down the carriage.


Train timetable and prices

It helps to go the train station pre-armed with information about train times and prices. This is easy to do thanks to some new-fangled thing called the internet. The JR website’s ‘Hyperdia’ search engine gives you up-to-date train times and prices.

Bicycles

Don’t forget the jolly old two wheelers! Bikes are often a great way to get around cities such as Kyoto, where the sights are quite spread out.

Japan is a comfortable place for cyclists. You see little road rage and many locals use them for zipping down to the shops or speeding up the commute.

Most train stations have secure bike parking facilities and many locals use them. A day’s parking should set you back 200 yen at the most.

Hotels and hostels often lend them to their guests free or for a small charge. Don’t forget to ask when you book a room.


Buses

Where the train line stops, the bus route starts.

These proved slightly tricky to understand at first so the following should help:

1) Enter at the back of the bus and exit at the front

2) Take a ticket when you board from the funny little machine at the top of the steps. You pay your fare when you get off

3) Fares are shown on the rather whizzy laser display board-type arrangement at the front above the driver. The number printed on your ticket correlates with that you on the board, with your fare displayed beneath it.

Budget on about 200 yen for a journey across town. There is a change machine incorporated into the ticket machine, located by the driver at the front of the bus. This comes in handy when you only have a 1000 yen note rather than the exact fare you need.

Drivers seem to be incredibly docile, slurring their words over the tannoy, leaving you bewildered about quite where you get off for that temple.

Don’t fret: buses seem to be populated entirely by old people, garbed in sun visors, white gloves and sensible shoes. They are invariably kind and helped us out of several pickles when we hadn’t the foggiest where to get off.

Oh and one more thing regarding buses: this is Japan and people are small. It helps to be the size of an oomph-loompa and carry nothing bigger than a pencil case on these buses.

Or you could measure six foot, and sway about with massive bags the size of sumos thwacking all in your path like us. Your choice.

Trams

Some cities, such as Hiroshima have trams or ‘streetcars’. These are a great way of pootling through a city and, from our experience, were easy to use.

Fares are usually clearly displayed and paid on leaving the tram to a nice chap at the door, who has a ticket machine similar to the one on buses.

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Kyoto's legacy

In the sweltering late summer heat of Kyoto, I was most grateful I had the company of Captain Stag.

But this was no pith-helmeted adventurer, bristling moustache and pink gin at the ready. Rather my companion was a small, zippy Japanese bicycle, and jolly useful he was in covering the city‘s streets in the soup-like heat.

I wasn’t alone in choosing this eco-friendly form of transport to pootle through the little streets, as elderly housewives and smart young businessman whizzed by on their own little two wheelers.

This got me thinking about this great city, its green credentials and those of Japan.

The former imperial capital of Japan and justly famous for its splendid temples (a mere 2,000 or so), Kyoto has more recently become closely associated with a more contemporary issue, namely the global fight against climate change.

Finally waking up to the warnings of climate scientists, in 1997 the world’s leading polluters gathered here, seeking to secure a binding agreement to reduce their emissions of the greenhouse gases driving climate change.

The resulting agreement, commonly referred to as the Kyoto Protocol has since then been ratified by over 180 countries, including all developed nations (with the very notable exception of the United States) and Kyoto became a byword for progressive action towards a cleaner, greener future.

A decade on from Kyoto and progress towards the targets set is still painfully slow. Once more Japan is in the lime (or green?) light, having just hosted the annual G8 nations summit, placing climate change high on the agenda.

At the Hokkaido summit the Japanese proudly showed off their spectacular volcanic surroundings to their guests, but what impression did their own record in preserving their natural environment and tackling climate change leave?

Is this crowded country of 120 million leading the world towards an environmentally sustainable future?

Their ambitions are impressive, with (now ex-) Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announcing before the summit a new target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80% by 2050,
though of course in practice they have a long way to go.

In Kyoto’s famous Ryoan-ji temple I came across a sign which I though rather neatly reflected the Japanese attitude towards the natural world:

“[Ryoan-ji is] renowned throughout the world as the ultimate example of kare sansi, or ‘my landscape’ style rock garden, in which nature is compressed and given abstract expression within the confines of a very narrow space“.

Can extend this to Japan as a whole?

Japan often seems a country at war with, or at least under siege from, the natural world and its more violent manifestations: typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis. And their response, in this mountainous country, appears to build, build, build, on the flat coastal plains they are squeezed into.

To the visitor it can seem like the entire country is made of concrete, passing through gigantic urban centres, like the south of Honshu, where one city seems to merge into another. Here, in the land of ‘salary man’, business is the new emperor and profit is the new creed. Heavy industry scars the coastline and naked development runs riot.

But outside of here, up in the ‘Japanese Alps’ or in the wilds of Hokkaido, it is still possible to lose yourself in the wild. Many Japanese revere these places and great efforts are made to protect them. Here the Shinto emphasis on working harmoniously with nature remains.

When it comes to their relationship with the natural world, perhaps for many Japanese the religious, or spiritual, influences still run deep.

In the zen gardens of Kyoto, the urban dwellers are given an idealised impression, an artificial world where nature is scrubbed-up nature and every blade of grass, every piece of gravel is placed according to how it should be.

Maybe this explains the extraordinary number of zoos and aquariums. Every town, every city we’ve visited seems to proudly boast at least one caged animal-related theme park.

Animals and birds are seen as cute and cuddly, but to be kept at a safe distance, preferably behind bars.

The Japanese are meticulously clean; in the hot summer heat everyone seems to have their own little towels to mop their brows and regularly wipe their hands, and throughout the year people often venture outside wearing surgical masks to prevent infection.

Where foreigners are sometimes feared for their supposedly lax approach towards hygiene, goodness knows what they think of animals.

Their love of nature, their shy curiosity, their tendency towards the artificial, the cellophane-wrapped, the air-conditioned - this all helps to explain the phenomenon of the Japanese tourist.

Left unbounded mass tourism is strangling the very places they love - visitors often complain about the tendency here to build ugly hotels and shops next to beauty spots.

We witnessed this in Toya Ko, with hideous hotels despoiling the natural beauty of Lake Toya and, more recently, at the famous Miyajima, where the Itsukashima temple's famous O-Tori gate, ‘one of the three best views of Japan’ ™, seemingly rises out of the sea - an extraordinary sight.

Were it not for the monumentally ugly line of hotels scarring the hillside directly behind it.

But perhaps the most apparent manifestation of excessive consumption, and the damage this causes, is the incredible amount of waste this country appears to generate.

After a day strolling through a Japanese city, I find myself weighed down with a huge mountain of packaging, simply from visiting a few food outlets.

Everything is sealed in packaging. Often you find yourself struggling with an item of food, from sushi to bananas which, to the Western mind at least seems over-elaborately and excessively wrapped.

It becomes fiendishly difficult to penetrate some wrappers; for example I defy anyone to successively unwrap a triangular rice ball in the manner in which it was designed.

For the budget-restricted traveller you can’t escape the world of 7/11s; individual grocers or other small food shops are scare, and hence you become part of the problem, adding yet more to the 25 billion disposable chopsticks the Japanese throw away every year.

So a lot of work to do then.

But it’s not all green gloom. I’d rather be optimistic about this astonishing nation. The Japanese may do many things to excess but this can bring advantages as well. Take their fantastic public transport system, fully integrated and boasting superfast Shinkansen trains that negate the need to fly.

And consider their incredible postwar economic recovery, which has allowed them to sit firmly amongst the leading industrial nations in the world. Time and again Japan has been looked to be its peers for technological innovations and solutions to the problems posed by a burgeoning world population.

Witness their many inventive answers to the considerable problems posed by dense urban living. Thanks to these their cities, with their huge populations, are civilised, clean and ordered. They work; something we can all learn from.

Japan has woken up to climate change. Like a salaryman after too much Suntory Whisky and Okonomi-Yaki pizza this country is already witnessing the terrible effects of their over-consumption, be it more and devastating extreme weather, the effects of over-fishing or rising oil prices.

They are beginning to realise they have to live within their means. And if any country can do this, Japan can

Rightly or not, our great leaders are pinning their hopes on technology as a way out of climate catastrophe, and we they are going down this route we need Japan, with its wonderful capacity for innovation and resourcefulness at the forefront.

So here’s to future Captain Stags…

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