Tips for your first time in Japan (After our first trip to Japan)

After recently getting back from a 3 week trip to Japan we visited Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Nikko and Hiroshima. Here are some essential tips we think it’s important to know before your first time! We discuss how to get Suica on your iPhone for an easier time getting in and out of the metros, and as a form of payment. How should you go about booking the shinkansen? We used the website SmartEx to book our seats early. Disneyland, Teamlab and Shibuya sky – among other things, should be booked in advance. This avoids missing out, as well as sometimes cheaper tickets. Follow along our video, and we will tell you what worked for us and what didn’t!

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:26 Suica on iphone
1:52 Train tickets
3:11 How to get to and from Haneda airport
4:23 Weather in Japan (summer months)
5:10 What tickets to buy in advance
6:24 Misconceptions about needing cash
7:57 Lining up for food?
8:30 Garbage in Japan
10:55 Stomach Issues
12:52 Can I find it in Japan?
14:21 Language barrier
15:31 What size bag should I bring?
17:17 Hotels/laundry
18:42 Cost
19:30 Subscribe!!

Links:
SmartEx: https://tinyurl.com/2cxkxs88
Tokyo Disney Tickets: https://www.tokyodisneyresort.jp/en/tdl/
TeamLab BorderLess Tokyo: https://www.teamlab.art/e/tokyo/
Shibuya Sky: https://www.shibuya-scramble-square.com.e.apy.hp.transer.com/sky/ticket/
Airport Limousine Bus: https://webservice.limousinebus.co.jp/web/en/

hey guys Welcome to our video today we’re going to be talking about some tips and tricks for Japan there were a lot of things that we read before our trip that ended up not being true and there were things that ended up being true so we just want to go over those and how we experienced Japan in real life so let’s get started so we’re going to start off talking about the things that apply to the entire trip so the first big thing is the sua beforehand we heard that you need to pick this up beforehand at the airport or that these were going to be unavailable when we traveled there was one video we watched that recommended getting a sua on your phone we ended up doing this and it saved us a lot of hassle on our entire trip getting a s on an iPhone is really easy you just go to your wallet app and add a transportation card I believe you can also do this on an Android but we don’t have Android so I’m not exactly sure how to do that but once you have it in your wallet on your iPhone you just add funds to it as you go and it’s really simple to use the sua can be used not just on metros but it can also be used for vending machines it can be used to go to Disneyland on their train a lot of Transportation locations ‘s the sua get it on your phone and it’s going to be so much easier you don’t have to worry about loading up your physical card you just load it up on your phone and you don’t have to worry about losing it another thing with that is having it on your phone you can just tap it and then you can go into the Metro stations rather than getting a physical card and tapping it so it works on your your phone just as great as a car just tap it and go and it’s super super simple now while it’s super simple there are some limitations just make sure that you know when you need a train ticket and when you need your sua card so if you’re going long distance just make sure you have the right train ticket and sometimes you can use a sua as well and we’ll talk about that next next item up is train tickets before we went on the trip we heard that you can go ahead and just buy your train ticket when you get to the chenc conin station now while you can do this there are only specific train cars that allow for non-reserved tickets when we were there we found out that the non-reserved train cars ended up being pretty busy and we saw a lot of people standing on the shc Consin and sometimes they’d be standing for quite a while so if you want to make sure you get a reserved train seat make sure you book ahead of time and before your trip another tip for this is to make sure if you’re going from let’s say Tokyo to Kyoto and you want to see Mount Fuji you want to book on the right side of the train or if you’re going Kyoto to Tokyo you want to book on the left side of the train and you can only do that if you book in advance one way to book tickets beforehand is the smartx website so on smartx you can make an account and you can book tickets about 30 days in advance and you’re going to be able to pick your seat and train car on the website now I did have to put a Japanese address to make an account but I just put my hotel and it worked fine this way you’re going to have a reserve seat and have to worry about getting into the non-reserve train car and fight everyone else for a seat or worry about standing on your journey from Tokyo to Kyoto or wherever else you’re going in Japan FW into Hana airport and we took the monreal and the metro to get to our hotel doing this again I probably wouldn’t take this especially if you have bigger bags the reason for this is it’s a little bit harder to navigate just because of how many people there are and honestly it’s just hot it’s hot carrying all your bag bag and it’s just uncomfortable if I were to go again I probably would just Splurge to take the limousine bus Which is the bus that you can take to from the airport to a specific area in Tokyo it’s a a large bus that you can put your luggage underneath and it will take you to a certain area in Tokyo you might have to take the metro to your final destination if it doesn’t take you close enough to your hotel but it’s going to be a lot comfier than having to walk up and downstairs or squish onto the monreal for a long period of time especially if you don’t get a seat or I would just Fork out the money for a cab and take me directly to the hotel because I think after such a long flight or before a long flight you really don’t want to be dripping through your clothes right before the flight like we were that leads us right into our next one which is the weather in Japan okay so we went to Japan in the beginning of May the weather was about 70 75° I would say basically the whole time and there was quite a bit of showers so it was raining we live it’s a dry climate and in Japan it is humid and we didn’t think it would be that bad but it was pretty crazy it was way more humid than we were expecting and thankfully we brought quite a bit of light layers we also had to buy some as well because we weren’t expecting to be that hot so be prepared for some humidity especially if you’re going in the summer months another big thing is to buy tickets in advance for instance you can book your slots for Disneyland 2 months in advance which is what we chose to do another thing that we bought in advance was team lab tickets because we heard it’s very busy so we wanted to make sure we had tickets for it some other ones to mention are like shabuya Sky when we showed up that day they were sold out so if you want to go on a specific day make sure you buy tickets for those things in advance another thing I want to talk about real quick talking about Disneyland there are certain dates where it’s more expensive to go we ended up going right after a holiday so we got the cheapest price available so you just want to make sure when you’re booking your Disney tickets just to see what the price is and if there’s a cheaper dat and one tiny thing about Disneyland is your sua will will cover you to get to and from Disneyland so don’t worry about having to buy anything extra if you’re going to take the metro to Disneyland one thing I heard beforehand about Disney is you need to have cash with you which isn’t true you can use your sua and also cards to pay for everything even the vending machines and that will lead us into the next thing that we heard is that you’re going to need cash for almost everything we heard that we were going to need to have about $600 in cash on us or more more because we were going to have to use cash at restaurants we were going to have to use cash for souvenirs for basically everything we wanted to do we would need cash so we rolled into Japan with quite a bit of cash on us did not end up needing it and luckily we found a place to exchange it if you need to exchange cash back into your currency go to Shinjuku there’s a bunch of places and somehow it seems like they didn’t take any fees for me so it was pretty awesome but back to the cash thing it ended up being that we only had had to use cash in a couple of flea market type places in Osaka most places ended up taking card or if you really need cash 7-Eleven has an ATM that only takes about five bucks from you in fees so don’t worry about it unless you really need it I would say overall we probably had to use our cash three times the whole time we were in Japan so like Javi said you don’t have to carry as much cash as you think you do even in some of the smaller restaurants they were taking card so don’t worry about it too much I would just always have enough on you to cover a mill so that’s that’s my my rule is I’m not going to go into a Mill and not have cash to cover me I would carry cash on you just in case just be prepared but you don’t need that much next up is talking about popular restaurants or restaurants that are recommended on Reddit Instagram Tik Tok so I’m a foodie and I like to save a lot of restaurants in the Google Maps app because these were so highly recommended we really wanted to go to these restaurants and when we got there a lot of the times they had really really long lines and we don’t really like to wait in long lines so we ended up going somewhere else and almost always the food ended up being super good even if it was just a little mpaw shop I don’t think we had any bad food at all in Japan it was all really good the next thing is garbage in Japan and I’m not talking about like hauling garbage to the dump I’m talking about the garbage that you got to carry around with you because there’s no garbage cans in Japan so this is something we heard about beforehand I honestly didn’t really believe it but it is true when you show up in Japan and you go to a convenience store like 7-Eleven or Loston and you get a drink and you finish the drink there’s not going to be a garbage can for you to put your drink in now if you get a water bottle or some sort of plastic bottle that is a pet bottle you can recycle that or if you get an aluminum can you can recycle that and there will be recycling cans around once in a while but they’re not on every corner and they’re not you don’t see them very often sometimes they’re attached to vending machines that’s where you can recycle your bottles your pet bottles and your aluminum cans but if you get something that has a wrapper on it or some kind of trash there will be no garbage can for you anywhere unless it’s inside the 7-Eleven or inside your hotel room now there are some exceptions we found a few garbage cans in Japan but there are not very many of them so you’re going to need to carry a backpack with you to put your trash in even if you’re not planning on carrying a backpack at all you probably should bring one because you’re going to have to put some trash in it this includes basically any Trash you can think of don’t buy a bunch of food that is going to make a bunch of trash because you’re going to have to carry that for quite a while before you find a place to put your garbage now if you go to Kyoto that’s one place where things have changed because Kyoto is mostly tourists it’s mostly American Tourist I would say and they’ve started putting trash cans because they’re so many tourists kind of sad but Kyoto you may not have to worry about this as much I made a mistake sake of getting a wonderful 7-Eleven smoothie and I didn’t drink it right outside of 711 so I could throw my trash away I instead had to carry it all day with me and end up putting it in my bag and some of the smoothies spilled in my bag so don’t be me and don’t make that mistake speaking of food the next thing we’re going to talk about is stomach issues in Japan because the type of food you eat there is bound to do something to your belly so because a lot of the food there especially tourists what they eat is ramen and ramen is high in sodium and here in the states we don’t eat as much Ramen as we did in Japan and this caused us to have stomach issues AKA constipation especially for me he had some issues probably not as bad as me but for this you’re going to want to bring your own medication for constipation they have certain things here in Japan but it’s not what I was used to here in the states so I would highly recommend bringing your own stuff if you think you’re going to feel sick there in Japan but if you don’t want to take medicine or you don’t want to bring medicine just start eating vegetables and fruit when you first show up because many Japanese meals don’t include vegetables at all you don’t really realize this when you eat Japanese food when you’re at home but when you’re there you start thinking H I haven’t had a vegetable in a long time so when you have breakfast or something or you go to 7-Eleven you know eat a banana or two uh and you know hopefully you’ll stay a little bit regular yeah and with that they have single bananas so you don’t have to buy a whole bundle of bananas you can just buy one which is super nice they ALS also have some Fiber drinks that will help it helped me a little bit but I should have started it early and started eating vegetables earlier on but just so you know just be wary start eating your bananas from 7:11 so your gut can be normal while you’re enjoying your time in Japan the next thing we heard was that you can’t get things in Japan that you can get in the United States things like deodorant we heard that you can’t even buy deodorant there well well the first place we stayed in I left my deodorant in the hotel so I immediately had to worry about buying deodorant and I had heard that you can’t buy it there well I went to the store and I immediately found a type of deodorant now it wasn’t the type I typically wear but I found an anti-per Sprint that literally made me sweat 0% because I think it closed all my pores it burned it burned when you put it on but it definitely works so they have they have basically everything you could ever need in Japan it just may not be the exact brand or the same formula that you use like we were talking about the constipation meds I think that that stuff doesn’t work as well as what maybe what we’re used to but they’re going to have everything that you need it’s just you’re going to have to find the alternative to what you normally use and worst case you can go to the pharmacy and people there are more than willing to help you I had to use Google Translate with someone and she helped me find the meds I needed so worst case you can always use Google Translate and that’s a good transition into our next topic which is the language barrier in Japan so what I heard is that basically everyone in Tokyo was going to be able to speak English really well the thing is is when we got there and the thing is with our whole trip I just feel like we didn’t have that many Interac action with Japanese people and having to speak with people people in Japan are fairly shy and don’t really talk to you unless they have to so most of our interactions were at businesses where in restaurants you can really get away with just pointing at the menu especially if they have an English menu I mean you can figure out what you want pretty easily or at like ramen shops you’re just ordering on the machine and typically they’re translated into English even if they’re not they have pictures you just order on the ma machine and pay with your card fairly simple so there’s very few situations besides like when Kylie was at the pharmacy that we had to use Google Translate but we did meet a few people that we talked to that ended up speaking English really well overall it just wasn’t that big of a concern because we didn’t get into that many situations where we needed help everything went super smooth and so the language barrier just wasn’t much of a problem yeah along with what he said don’t let the language barrier scare you off for from going to Japan while we were planning our trip to Japan the thing we saw most is to not bring roller luggage because of how many stairs there are in the Metros and how busy Japan can get typically there will be an elevator on one of the exits but it may not be the exit that you want to take so a lot of times we would see people carrying their large roller bags up huge flights of stairs because they obviously didn’t want to take the elevator which may have been all the way at the other end of the platform and may have been the wrong exit for them or like on shonin there would be an elevator but everyone would be lined up to get on the elevator because everyone had roller bags so many situations where roller bags seem like a bad idea including the Shen conin where large roller bags were only a good idea if you bought the seat had space allowance for you to have it in front of you they really didn’t fit overhead and and the normal seats don’t have enough room in front of you to have a large roller bag in the Metros too they have escalators however a lot of the escalators have signs posted that said no big bags allowed however because we had little backpacks on us we were able to go up the escalators so that’s another reason why you’re not going to want to bring a big roller back now I don’t think it’s realistic for everyone to bring backpacks to Japan especially if you have kids or older people in your party not everyone can bring backpacks but I think it’d be a good idea to bring only small roller bags instead of big ones I think that this transition is good into our next topic which is hotels and talking about getting a place with laundry because we were bringing our little small backpacks with us we had to find a hotel that had laundry available overall what you should expect is that these hotel rooms are going to be really small the beds are also really small if you’re used to having a king bed or even two queen beds in a room throw that out the window because you’re going to have probably a double bed in your room in Japan so get comfortable with whoever you’re staying with because your room is going to be tiny we our room in Tokyo was smaller than a room we had on a cruise ship so there’s not a lot of room for your bags which is another reason not to bring large bags on your trip to Japan there’s just not room in your your hotel room now there are American style rooms in Japan but your trip to Japan is going to be way more expensive if you buy if you pay for one of those rooms our rooms cost approximately 80 to $90 a night and we stayed in nice hotels but if we were to stay in let’s say a Marriott with a normal American style room they were going to be $200 to $300 a night and when we were staying for three weeks that just didn’t make sense you do have to get used to the small room size but overall I think the savings are are worth it the last thing we’re going to talk about is just the overall cost of everything definitely the most expensive thing about going to Japan is the flight once you get there things are actually a lot cheaper than you would imagine obviously we kind of heard this but we didn’t expect it to be as cheap we mentioned just a little while ago how much our hotels cost but the food cost is what’s really surprising the food cost really is inexpensive having a bold Ram in is something like $6 the dollar is really high to the Yen right now so that’s part of it and that’s not good for the Japanese people but if you’re traveling there it is a bonus mhm so that is something to expect when you go there that you’re going to be able to make your money go along way as far as food now as far as souvenirs I don’t think it really helps those kind of items are I would say marked up to about normal prices but it is something that’s going to help you on your trip as far as food let us know if you guys have any questions or comments on anything we talked about today or something that we might have missed and thank you again for watching this video and be sure to like And subscribe