First time visiting Japan – Tokyo Itinerary advice

2 comments

1. Day 1. Venus fort and oedo onsen are permanently closed. Miraikan is the other major attraction in the area that you could add. Aside from Gundam Base, I’ve never found shopping in Odaiba particularly interesting.

   Day 6. Robot restaurant is also permanently closed.

   If you want to add those additional places, I would cut stuff out of Day 4. Ginza isn’t the most interesting area: it mainly luxury shopping, so unless that’s your plan, it’s easily skipped.

2. Just finishing my trip, we did 7 nights in Tokyo, 3 nights Osaka, 3 nights in Kyoto. I’m saying nights because sometimes we would arrive to the new destination at 7:00pm as we normally took 3pm trains (don’t recommend later trains, schedule it so you arrive around check in time).

   If I could do those 3 places again, I’d do 4/5 in Tokyo, 2 in Osaka and 3 in Kyoto. We don’t party much, aside from Shinsekai and Dotombori there wasn’t much else in Osaka that interested us. We were more interested in the unique food in Osaka.

   If you’re willing to change your schedule and you’re getting a jr pass, I highly recommend Kanazawa. Loved the city and you can get in the heart of the Higashi district for $120/night. It’s expensive to travel to if you don’t have the pass.

   We hated the Sunshine aquarium. It’s obviously interesting to see the fishes, but we were pretty disgusted by some of the habitats for them. Perhaps it’s better behind closed doors, but that sort of ruined it and we didn’t go to any aquariums after that.

   All of the Pokémon centres have the same stuff. We went to 4 of them and aside from the giant Mew two in Akihabara they were identical in merchandise. Be prepared to spend 8000¥ for a children’s meal at the cafe.

   You have a lot of shopping booked, I would say unnecessarily but my GF would disagree. If you’re planning on bringing a lot of clothing back, be sure to pack light and just do laundry. I’m sure your boyfriend is going to get tired of shopping considering your 5 different spots in a day. If you wanted to, you could easily do Akihabara and Shibuya in 1 day.

   Highly recommend teamLabs. Highlight of Tokyo for us. You should book in the evening so you don’t break up your day horrendously because it’s a ways out of the way.

   Akihabara also doesn’t open until 10:00-10:30am, we went around 9:30 and spent a bit just taking in the buildings.

   I’m not a huge anime guy, but Ghibli was pretty cool. I think we were there for 2.5 hours.

   You have a couple Daisos, with your length of trip I don’t know that it’s worth going to more than one. We went to a couple, but we were in Japan for 32 days. They’re basically dollar stores, highly recommend your BF gets a coin bag from there. They’re basic and cheap. I’m assuming you’ll want something a little more designed.

   A lot of your trip is very quick sight seeing… you’ll say “Wow that’s a bridge!” and then move on.

   I recommend you get your hotels sorted out and start mapping your destinations from the hotels. We had a similar itinerary in terms of length, but some stuff was just very out of the way and not worth it once the day started. I know you want to do everything you can while you’re in Japan, but you need to prioritize.

   Nothing you mentioned to, but maybe avoid the buffets at the restaurants. It’ll force you to get up and out of the hotel to start the day. Typically they’re around 3000¥ PP, and you can eat much cheaper literally anywhere in Japan.