Hello! My husband and I are traveling to Japan for the first time next spring with a couple friends. We’re looking for input on our rough schedule; we’re hoping it’s not too packed or too vague. Nothing is booked or set in stone just yet, though we plan to begin shortly after we get some feedback. We’re novice travelers, so bear with us! Thank you.
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|Day N|Activity/Hotel|Comments/Questions|
|:-|:-|:-|
|1|Land at NRT around 3-4pm JST. This is the arrival time for most flights we’ve seen from our airport. Train to Tokyo that day to pass out in a hotel.|We’ll get the 21-day JR pass and a Suica card to cover our travels. Is loading up the Suica card on Apple Wallet a good idea or is a physical card preferred?|
|2|Hang out in Shibuya, recovering from jet lag|Basically a free day; I don’t know how jet lagged we’ll be.|
|3|Food tours and bar hopping tours in Shibuya, exploring|The events of Days 3 – 7 can happen in any order; these are just places we know we want to hit|
|4|Meiji Jingu Shrine, National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo||
|5|TeamLab Planets, exploring||
|6|Kabukiza Theatre, exploring|I’ve seen that there should be subtitles/explanations available.|
|7|Akihabara shopping, exploring||
|8|Travel day to Hakone|How easy is it to book the Express RomanceCar?|
|9|Visit onsens, Hakone Ropeway, explore|Any recommendations for private onsens? I’d prefer not to be separated from the rest of my group the entire time (our group is all dudes except me)|
|10|Hakone Open Air Museum|This place looks huge; is it reasonable to spend an entire day here?|
|11|Hakone sightseeing, find some black eggs|Any restaurants of note to visit?|
|12|Travel day to Kyoto|Not sure if this will take as long as it takes to get from Tokyo to Hakone.|
|13|Kyoto exploring, dinner at Tominokoji|Does anyone have experience eating here and getting reservations?|
|14|Kyoto Manga museum, Weekender’s coffee, exploring|Thoughts on this museum? Is it an actual museum or is it a tourist trap?|
|15|Kyoto Imperial Palace and garden, exploring||
|16|Bike tour in Nara, traditional tea ceremony, explore, spend night back in Kyoto|There appear to be a lot of hotels in Nara; should we stay there for the night or head back to Kyoto?|
|17|Travel back to Tokyo, explore|I assume we’ll be tired so not planning much here.|
|18|Disneyland Tokyo; Disney Sea|Not our choice; our friends are Disney fanatics and demand at least a day here. Any suggestions if we were to ditch them at the gate?|
|19|Travel to Yokohama: Bandai Namco store, CupNoodle Museum, explore Yokohama; back to Tokyo that night|Same question as the manga museum: is the CupNoodle museum worth it? We may stay in Yokohama instead of Tokyo for the night.|
|20|Back to Tokyo maybe; Tokyo Sky Tree, go anywhere we missed||
|21|Travel back to Narita and fly home||
2 comments
If you’re going to be in the Kyoto and Nara area you need to rearrange something to go to Osaka even for a day.
Based on your travel plans you could just stay in Kyoto the whole time and do day trips to Nara one day and Osaka another day.
First of all, have you looked if you will save money with the 21 days pass. Total you spend 21 days and the 7 first days are in Tokyo, where you will not save money at all from the pass…. Like even 7 days when you go from Odawara to Kyoto then back to Kyoto would not even be worth a 7 days pass if you ask me. Just buy two individual shinkansen tickets for that and use your Suica for all the rest, including going to Nara. Not having a JR Pass will also allow you to use the faster Nozomi and just use whatever private railway, like Kintetsu to go to Nara (because Kintetsu station is closer to Nara park than the JR station).
Physical Suica or in your phone. The two problems you might encounter with the card in your phone is app exclusively in Japanese and possible problem charging the card directly in the phone from a foreign credit card (you could still load it in machine that can load phones).
Check the Odakyu website, I think you can now book romancecar online, otherwise, go to the Odakyu ticket office in Shinjuku and they will sell you a ticket.
To be Honest, I would try to reduce the amount of time in Hakone. Like total 3 days should be fine instead of 5 (I know it’s not 5 full days). You should look to get to Hakone early on day 1, so this mean you have most if not all day to explore, and leave at the end of day 3. Why 3 days? Because Hakone Free Pass is available in 2 or 3 days version…. and 5 days it overkill anyway. You make is sound as it’s super long to go to/out of Hakone and it is not.
Manga museum a tourist trap… I don’t think. But what I heard is that a big thing there is their manga collection, that is obviously mostly in Japanese. Unless there is an exhibit about a mangaka or series you like, maybe skip it.
There is a lot to see in Tokyo, you don’t even have to ditch your friend to the gate of Disney, just let the people want to go do that by themselves. Just read any Tokyo tourism webpage and you can easily fill a week and that is without counting many daytrips options.