Traveling to Japan: 10 Tips and tricks

Andrew and I have wanted to go to Japan since before we were married, and most of all, we really wanted to visit during hanami (cherry blossom viewing season). Since we married in June we decided to plan a delayed honeymoon trip for Spring 2014... a plan we thought we might have to cancel when we realized I was pregnant. But Andrew really wanted to go, and, since we figured that it probably would be easier to travel there with a baby bump than with an actual baby, we decided to go for it.

I'm so glad we went because it was amazing. Although I don't think Andrew or I can take credit for how well it went; after all, we were planning a vacation together for the first time with absolutely no vacation planning experience, I thought perhaps what we learned might be helpful.

On the plane headed for Tokyo

Tip 1: Track airline prices. It's helpful to occasionally visit a website like kayak.com even before you know when you're traveling, just to get an idea of what kind of price range you should be expecting. There's a lot of debate online about exactly what the sweet spot is for booking flights (especially international flights), but I didn't ever manage to pinpoint exactly when that was.
However, one really nice feature on a couple of flight search websites is the ability to explore your travel days flexibly. Google's flight search will let you see the price fluctuations for the entire month so you can find the best travel day (assuming you have some flexibility). Andrew and I were able to save $500 on our tickets simply by traveling on a Tuesday rather than any of the other day of the week.
Also, clear your cookies or use an incognito window when looking up flights. Many travel sites track your visits and increase the prices each time you return in order to make you think you need to book your flight immediately without shopping around any more.

Tip 2: Book your tickets through the actual airline. Even if you use a flight search engine to find the tickets you want, in my experience, it actually ends up being cheaper to then go to the airline's website and book your tickets through them directly. I don't know exactly why this is, but in my experience re-finding the tickets you want on the airline's own website can knock off another $20-50.

Tip 3: Be cheap about your hotels. A cheap hotel in Japan is not the same thing as a cheap hotel anywhere else. Andrew and I decided to be thrifty about our hotels because we honestly didn't see the point in spending most of our budget on sleeping, so we decided to stay primarily in business hotels, with one night at a traditional Japanese Inn (Ryokan) for a splurge. The business hotel rooms were small (but everything in Japan is small), however they were immaculately clean, had great mattresses and pillows, and provided more amenities than your typical hotel by including slippers, pajamas, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and razors. Obviously you should research and read reviews (reviews are the best thing ever), but keep in mind, real estate is one of the most expensive things in Tokyo, so when you're paying a lot for a hotel you're mostly just getting more floor space.
On that note, our favourite hotel was the Comfort Hotel Tokyo Kiyosumi Shirakawa, which was where we stayed on our first two nights in Tokyo. It is directly outside a metro station which means you can find it easily when you first arrive in Japan and you have great access to the metro when you're exploring the city. It also includes a breakfast buffet with both Japanese and western breakfast foods, which is especially nice if you're not yet acclimatized to the notion of exclusively eating rice balls, salad, and soup for breakfast.

Breakfast at the Ryokan

Tip 4:  Get a Japan Rail (JR) Pass if you're going to be traveling around Japan. One of the things that Japan offers tourists is a really easy way to explore the country via train with the JR Pass which allows unlimited travel on any JR lines for a certain number of days. If you are planning on traveling much while in Japan, you may find that you'll save a lot of money by purchasing a JR Pass rather than buying round trip tickets, since a week long JR Pass costs only slightly more than one round trip ticket from Tokyo to Kyoto.
Traveling within Tokyo is quite inexpensive so there wasn't really any point in having a JR Pass during our time there, but since Andrew and I both wanted to visit Kyoto we decided to get week long JR Passes and fit all of our non-Tokyo sightseeing into those seven days. It made traveling a breeze and allowed us to be really spontaneous by just being able to hop onto a train without waiting in line for tickets.

Tip 5: Pack light, really, really light. The lighter you pack the happier you'll be, especially if you're going to be changing hotels during your trip. Andrew and I took two carry-on satchels and we're pretty much convinced that we probably could have fit everything into one (and then maybe gotten a second satchel in Japan for the trip back with all our souvenirs). Being able to stick our luggage into the coin lockers (which are mostly carry-on sized) at the train stations meant that even if we were checked out of a hotel we didn't have to drag our luggage around with us or go back to the hotel and pick it up later. Every hotel we stayed in had washing machines so with a couple of good pieces you can turn a handful of clothes into multiple outfits.
Also, roll your clothes. All the packing tip websites I checked are in agreement that this is the most space efficient way to pack... and bonus points, you'll deal with fewer wrinkles and it's really easy to find what you're looking for without having to pull everything out.

This was all our luggage for a 15 day trip, and we probably could have taken only half of it.

Pregnancy Tip: Don't even try to plan your outfits ahead of time. I figured out the clothes I would pack three times before we left, and in the end I took an entirely different wardrobe. My baby bump didn't really look like a bump until right when we departed for Japan. The first two times I tried to figure out what to pack, I was building my wardrobe around the fact that I looked tubby and not at all pregnant. Then suddenly I had a distinctly pregnant look about me and I had to re-plan my wardrobe completely the day before leaving. Bottom line, your body is changing week to week, what looks good one day won't necessarily continue to do so two weeks later. Wait until the last minute to decide what you'll be taking, because this is one case in which planning ahead just ends up being a waste of time.

The baby bump was just starting to show up.

Tip 6: Don't dress too casually. People in Japan dress nicely pretty much always. You don't see very much casual wear and you don't see much skin. (The exception is mini-skirts, which are viewed as being cutesy rather than revealing; in Japan covering up is viewed as being mysterious and sexy while a short skirt is a more childish look.) There were several items of clothing that I had packed that I never wore during the trip because they looked too casual. We would be hiking up a mountain with a crowd of Japanese tourists (since it was hanami there were lots of Japanese tourists also visiting Kyoto) and the women would all be wearing skirts or dresses and heels. I ended up wearing a skirt and either ballet flats or low heels during our entire trip because I'd spend the entire day feeling under-dressed if I were wearing my jeans or boat shoes. Of course, as a Westerner you're going to stick out in a crowd regardless of what you wear, but for me it felt disrespectful to dress more casually than what seemed to be socially acceptable.

This outfit or some variation was basically my uniform while we were in Japan.

Tip 7: Currency and credit cards. You can save money by doing your currency exchange at your bank rather than at the exchange services offered in the airports; exchange services may charge a fee for the exchange based on the amount of currency and/or have a higher exchange rate. (Although you'll have to go in to one of the major branches of your bank since smaller branches don't typically keep foreign currency on hand.) Try to have a good idea of how much you'll be spending since withdrawing cash abroad will incur a percentage fee. You're going to want most of your spending budget in cash since Japan is primarily a cash based economy; although you can use a credit card in a mall or at a major hotel you'll need cash for metro tickets and to buy things in many of the shops and smaller restaurants.
Also, check to see if you have a credit card with no foreign transaction fees since you'll get a 3% fee otherwise (we used Discover and CapitalOne).

Tip 8: Switch to T-Mobile. This is hardly a must, but we're glad we did before our trip. In order to use your phone internationally with most carriers you have to purchase a international package that costs $30+ and only has very basic service, and in some cases the texting and call package is separate from data, so you have to purchase two different packages. T-mobile provides free international roaming and texting (phone calls are $0.20 per minute), which means that we were able to use our phones to map our way all over Japan... and to text people while we were there.  Tokyo is a pretty easy city to navigate via their metro system (lots and lots of English signs and every stop is announced in English with details about which lines you can transfer to). But we found it really nice to be able to use Google maps because it provided all the details about which metro lines to take, where to transfer, and how long it would take, so we were able to be very spontaneous about deciding where we wanted to go next. And, by having the ability to text Andrew and I were able to communicate with each other if we ever got separated.

Being able to use our phones in Japan made everything much easier.

Tip 9: Don't be panicked by the language barrier. I was really worried about how we'd do in Japan because the first time I traveled there my brother and I had gotten lost and a little Japanese lady had to lend us her phone to call our host (and then she talked to him and led us out of the twisty little neighborhood and back to our accommodations). I was convinced being lost would be the central facet to our trip, but we never got lost during our entire trip (although we did once miss our stop on an express train and ended up an entire town away from our intended destination). If you're taking a train there are a million English signs telling you where to go, and if you're in any of the touristy areas they have large maps that show you where you are, what else is nearby, and where the nearest metro is. Also, Japanese people are incredibly nice and very willing to help you, if you just stand in the sidewalk looking confused someone will probably come over and ask you where you're trying to go and then take you there, even if it's completely out of their way.

Most of the tourist areas have English signs.

Tip 10: Make a record of what you do. You don't need to write down a lot of details (after all, you want to spend your time experiencing everything you can), but you should write down some notes to prompt your memory. For me I would write the day and then in the order that they occurred, where we went, what we ate, and any other little details that could help trigger my memory. They're very vague notes but reading them helps me to recall many details that I would typically forget when just thinking back on the trip. My notes looked like this,

28.3.14 Comfort Inn breakfast, Onigawa river walk, vending machine cans of coffee, Tokyo Station, banana twinkies, bento boxes, shinkansen to Kyoto, Shosei-en Garden, Ryokan, Cube Ramen Shop, Onsen. 

 Just those basic notes help me remember the conversation Andrew and I had over breakfast; the path we explored that took us to the Onigawa river; the little schoolboy who stopped on his way to school to admire the cherry blossoms; getting Andrew to try his first can of hot coffee from a vending machine and how we stood next to the vending machine until we finished our drinks, because in Japan you don't eat or drink while walking; stopping by a convenience store to buy washclothes to dry our hands since public restrooms don't have paper towels since they are regarded as wasteful; how completely confused and disoriented we were when we first went to Tokyo station; trying to decide which bento boxes we should get for lunch because the options seemed endless; getting on the Shinkansen train and being thrilled by how clean and comfortable and fast it was; arriving in Kyoto station and having to spend twenty minutes trying to figure out which exit we were supposed to take and getting confused because we kept finding ourselves in malls (and later discovering that Kyoto station had three separate malls in it in addition to all the little shops that all metro and train stations have)...
I could go on, but my point is that many of these details I would probably forget in the jumble on the trip, maybe not immediately but over time. Just having some basic prompts helps me to retain so many more moments and details. During my first trip Japan in my teens I journaled during the first few days of the trip but then stopped, seven years later I can still clearly remember the days that I have notes about but the rest of the trip is vague with only a few clear memories and no chronological order to them. So make sure you write down at least a few things to help you remember your time there.

We were so sad to leave.