Yes the "interesting" mods on r/JapanTravel removed my post so here it is in the allegedly "right" one.
Background: my wife, two daughters (aged 16 and 13) went on holiday to Osaka/Kyoto/Wakayama/Osaka in late May/early June.
- Identify a few restaurants where you really really want to dine at and book well in advance. My wife and I did a lot of research and booked three restaurants that needed advanced bookings and were happy with two out of three of them (we were disappointed with Monk in Kyoto – food was great but we felt it was very overpriced for what we ate so IMHO skip this)
- Take note of nice trains that run on certain routes. We booked the special Aoniyoshi train from Osaka-Nara and were really pleased that we did. This train sells out quickly and seats literally disappeared as I was typing in my credit card details into the typically clunky Japanese website
- Don't overplan. Because we certainly did! I was constantly looking up tableog (the Japanese site that recommends restaurants where over 3/5 stars is considered very good!) to see where to eat. In the end, did we eat at the restaurants that we had considered? No because we would stumble upon a literal hole-in-the-wall and be blown away by the food there
- Don't underestimate timing of trains and distance between platforms. Give yourself plenty of time and get to the train station early. In Osaka for example, we got confused between Nankai Namba and Osaka Namba but luckily had enough time..
- Cash or card? My last trip to Japan was in 2014 and since then cashless has taken off. But at train stations, we found that 90% of transactions (especially the subway tickets) are still cash based so be prepared if you don't have a physical Suica or Icoca card. For our 11 days, we had JPY120,000 in cash and that was just about enough – we did get back quite a bit of cash from tax-free shopping so spent that too.
- Please don't just go to the cities – visit the countryside! Hands down, our family's top two memories of our holiday was not in the city but out in the country where it was so much less crowded: we took day trips to Lake Biwa, and Yuasa and Shirahama in Wakayama. In Kyoto we went to Arashiyama and it was so packed! Yes beautiful but so many people that it was unpleasant… But we went on a bicycle tour with Biwako Backroads (please google them!) and it was AMAZING!!! Cycling through quaint little villages, through forests and rice fields near Lake Biwa or walking along the beach in Shirahama. The cycling tour is not cheap but definitely do it if you have the ability to.
- Takyubin or any luggage forwarding service. A bit overhyped in our view as they do not do same day, city-to-city service (not even Osaka to Kyoto or vice versa) so did not work for us as a family. We used Luggagent for the Osaka-Kyoto leg and that was it: three luggages for US$80 which I thought was ok. They were picked up at 10.30am at our Osaka hotel and delivered to our ryokan in Kyoto at 4pm.
Hope this helps some travellers out there.
by Milk_Savings
