Japan Trip? Here’s the Tech Stuff You Really NEED! (Apps, SIMs, etc!)

Japan Trip? Here’s the Tech Stuff You Really NEED! (Apps, SIMs, etc!)

There’s a lot of techy stuff out there that you’ll want for your Japan trip. Apps, cards, devices, SIMs, Wi-Fi, it’s really easy to get overwhelmed and it can be a little bit confusing, but once you know what you really need, it’s pretty simple. So, I’m here today to tell you everything you need to know about the techy stuff for when you go to Japan. Hi everyone, it’s Abby from Pctor. I’m a photographer and guide in Japan. You can see more about me here. Let’s get started. So, let’s start with internet access because without it, most of your other tech is not going to work. When you come to Japan, you have three main options, and that would be an e SIM, a regular SIM, and some kind of pocket Wi-Fi device. And I highly recommend just paying to get one of these at least because not only is it super convenient, but in case of an emergency, unless you speak really good Japanese, you’re going to regret not having one of these. So, let’s start with eSIMs. What is an eSIM? If you don’t know, an eSIM is a digital SIM card that you need nothing to install besides just a phone. So, you don’t need to pick anything up at the airport. You don’t have to return anything. There’s no little SIM card you have to deal with. It’s already able to be done just with the phone. So, you will need a newer model of phone. You can look online to see if your model is compatible. And the other biggest issue with any kind of SIM card, whether eSIM or regular SIM would be, is your phone carrier locked? So, if your phone is carrier locked, if you’re still paying your phone off or if you just think maybe this could be me, um you will need to check with your carrier to see if they can either temporarily unlock it or if it is already unlocked. So, otherwise, some carriers I know, especially in America, they do not want you to just kind of get their phone and then go off and use another carrier. They want you to stick with them and so they will lock your phone. So, this is just something if you think it could be you, just call up your carrier, see if they can help you with that. If your phone’s already paid off or you bought it already unlocked, you’re good to go. So, the advantage of an eim is, of course, that you don’t need to deal with any kind of little item. I love not having to make an extra stop at the airport to pick anything up and just having this ready on my phone. All you have to do is install it. Usually when I’m just sitting at the airport waiting for my flight, I set it all up and then once I arrived at my destination, I just go in, I finish the install and boom, there we go. Done. I have data. Next up would be physical SIM cards. You guys know what a SIM card is. It is just a little thing inside of your phone. You can either pick this up at the airport or you can have it shipped to your hotel. you will just need to usually either pay for it beforehand online or show up to a place at the airport and get one. You can of course also get one like at certain convenience stores. Um, but I don’t know why you would go that far when you could just get it as soon as possible when you arrive to Japan. So, if that sounds like you, I would just go online to one of the places you can see in my blog and get one of those. Lastly, if your phone is locked or sometimes if you’re a big family, it might be nice to get a pocket Wi-Fi device. It is just a little tiny device thing you carry around with you. So, when I first came to Japan many moons ago, this is what I used. It is fine. It is a little bit inconvenient because you do have to keep it charged. You can connect usually about as many devices as you want to it. So, that is the advantage of a pocket Wi-Fi. Sometimes with the eims and sims, you cannot use hotspot tethering. Um, some you can, some you cannot. You just need to check that on the website that you go to. With a pocket Wi-Fi, you can connect um your phone, grandma’s phone, grandpa’s phone, the kids’ phones, whatever. If that sounds like you, I would go with the pocket Wi-Fi. But if you are just coming here in a smaller group, I would go with getting some kind of eim. I am very pro eim. I use an ESIM every time I go outside of the country. Next up is a rechargeable IC card. If you’ve watched my channel before, you know I’ve talked about IC cards. I literally have two videos about them. The one I recommend checking out is this one. What is an IC card? If you don’t know, it is a rechargeable little card that you can use to pay um when you take trains, when you take buses, sometimes when you take taxis, you can use it at convenience stores. It is just a rechargeable essentially debit card specifically made for travel, but you can use it a lot of other places now as well. You’ve probably heard of Suika, Pasmo, Ecoa. These are just examples of IC cards. Welcome. Suika is another one that is geared towards foreign tourists. So, you can get a physical card from most major train stations or from the airport or you can also get the welcome sua app on your phone, which for a majority of people is what I recommend as long as you have an iPhone. If you do not have an iPhone, you will need to get a physical card. And I’m not going to sit here and talk about this. I highly, highly recommend checking it out because it will answer all of your questions about IC cards. Bottom line, you will need to get either an IC card app on your phone or you will need to get a physical IC card if you want the super super duper convenience of just blasting right through the train gates and the the bus. And I know I could not live without the IC card on my phone. I cannot imagine a life where I do not have that and I have to get paper tickets. So, this is me telling you it’s good. Next up, let’s talk about navigation. How do you get around Japan? So, if you’ve seen my videos before, you’ve also known that I really like Google Maps. I like Google Maps. Um, it is not perfect, but it’s honestly one of the most useful tools that you can have to get around Japan. It will tell you the train lines, the platform numbers, um, transfer stations if you need to transfer. It will give you walking directions. Um, oftentimes it even tells you what exit number to take out of a station because if you go to some stations, they are just massive football fields uh in size and it can be super overwhelming to figure out how to even escape the station in the first place. So, having an exit number to get you going in the right direction is very, very helpful. And if you are driving here, you will really want Google Maps because I know I would have ended up like in the ocean without Google Maps driving around here because it can get confusing. Signs will have English, but it’s not always very straightforward where you’re going. So, we love Google Maps for driving here. And then one more reason why I do like Google Maps is because you can often make restaurant reservations through the app. So, I love making reservations here. I think it will save you time, especially if you’re going somewhere on a weekend. And even if the Google Maps app itself does not allow you to make a reservation through it, oftentimes it will have a link to take you to where you can make that reservation. So really very helpful for um actually getting into restaurants sometimes. Next up would be translation tools. Once again, the big monopoly that is Google kind of wins in this case. Google Translate is fabulous. It is so helpful. the live translate where you use the camera and you can like just hold it. If you know what I’m talking about, you know what I’m talking about. It literally will live translate things as you’re looking at it. Um, that is lifesaving. It can read even written Japanese a lot of the time. If you’re looking at like a written menu, um, signs, anything, it is so helpful. Even I use it sometimes if I am not totally sure what I’m looking at, which does happen. My recommendation for this is you can also go into the app and you can pre-download the Japanese language. So you can also use it offline if for whatever reason you get disconnected from the internet. They also have a tool where you can talk into it and it will try to have a conversation with someone else. So you can speak English and someone else can speak Japanese. I don’t think this is really perfect yet. Um, the nuances of this kind of like translation between English and Japanese um, are not always translated very well. Will it get the point across? Probably. But if you need to leave some kind of longer message like a note or sending some kind of little email to someone, I highly highly recommend using something like um chatbt or some like another more natural AI language tool to do this. Like if you have a food allergy and you need to communicate that to people, I would not rely on Google Translate to communicate that. I would go into something like chat GPT and write out what you need to say and that’s probably going to be a little more intelligible and potentially save you a hospital trip. So that’s always great. So let’s talk about a few other helpful apps. First up, we have Uber, Go Taxi, and DD. So most big cities will allow you to get a taxi with these apps. I will note some of you do not know this. You can also just go like this and a taxi will appear out of thin air. Not really, but you can do the New Yorker and one will pull up and you can get in. You don’t have to have an app, but an app is helpful, especially if you do not want to speak to anyone the entire time and you just want to put in your destination and get there. Zero speaking. So, my favorite uh app like this is Go Taxi. Um, go taxi I think is the best because even if I hail the taxi normally, I like that usually in the taxi they have an option where you can click in the little screen that you use to like pay and it’s got like the ads and everything as you’re sitting there. You can click on the little go taxi button and you can even go in and pay on your phone while you’re literally in the cab going to your destination. So once you pull up, you are done. You do not have to do anything else. You can just hop out of the cab, sle up, and that’s it. And I love the convenience of that because usually if I have gotten a cab, I got places to be. And I don’t want to sit there dealing with coins or whatever else when I’m already at my destination. Other apps, if you’re looking for vegan or vegetarian food, um, Happy Cow works here. I get a lot of questions about um, vegan, vegetarian food. It’s really not that hard to find here, but I understand the struggles you guys are going through. Happy Cow is really, really great. Also, I mentioned Google Maps earlier, which I’m partial to, but Nava Time is another great app for getting around. And this has the advantage of being able to filter where you are going um by passes. So, if you have like a regional train pass or the JR pass, Hakon free pass, Kai pass, whatever, you can filter the route by what you have already paid for with your pass. So, if you have spent um $8 million in your firstborn child on one of the JR passes, now you can go into this app and only take routes that are through JR pass. So, I know that is really helpful. Um because sometimes people buy these passes and then you get to the train station and you’re like, what am I doing? Like, there’s all these different lines. What can I take with the pass? So, that is helpful. Another app is Nerve. I have Nerve on my phone and this will give you notifications on weather alerts, earthquakes. Hopefully that doesn’t happen while you’re here. Um, and you can set it up by region as well so it’ll notify you if there’s any like big earthquakes over a three in your area so that you can know sometimes even, you know, a minute in advance maybe if something’s going to happen. Will you probably encounter that? No. This app will probably just sleep on your phone the whole time, but you might come in use and you might be glad you downloaded it. Last thing to mention here is visit Japan web. This is not really an app. Um, it is a website, but I’m putting it here because before your flight, you can go to this website and you can fill out all of your flight information, your personal information, and then once you get to Japan, it will expedite you through customs. um and you will get out to the country faster. Basically, you just say in advance, I have nothing to declare, etc. And then you all you do is you show the QR code that it will give you uh beforehand when you arrive to Japan. And you’re through the gate already before everyone else who’s standing there filling out a piece of paper. All right, let’s talk about electricity. A lot of people don’t think about this, um but Japan uses typea plugs. This is the two flat parallel prong ones. Um, just like in the US, Canada, Mexico, um, and a few other countries. So, if you’re coming from any of those I just mentioned or this sounds like your your plug at home, you don’t need an adapter. Um, you are pretty much good to go. The exception is devices that have three prongs. I know that my laptop that I had from the States had the two parallel and then the little one at the bottom. Um, I call it the the that one. Um, they don’t have that here. You will need an adapter for that. If you are coming from the UK, Europe, Australia, anywhere that doesn’t have this thing, um, you will need to get some kind of plug adapter. I presume just off of Amazon in advance. Another note, Japan runs on 100 volts, which is lower than some other countries, but most modern electronics are designed to work from, I believe, 100 to 240 volts or so. So, um, I would just check your charger label that this will not be a problem when you get here. related to this. Many hotels, especially smaller ones in cities, they often only have like two or so power outlets. And if you are someone like me that has like 78 devices when I travel, you will probably want to get some kind of multi-port charger to take with you. I have a little one and it has like six little USB slots on it so I can plug in, you know, the camera, the mic, the the other camera, my phone, earbuds, whatever. Um, without, you know, unplugging lamps and stuff like that or whatever. So, I think that’s really useful as well. Um, related to that, I highly recommend bringing a power bank. Um, some kind of mobile battery pack thing. I even use these a lot because when you’re out and about sometimes you’re just sitting on the train, you don’t realize you’ve been sitting there for 45 minutes on the train and your phone’s battery will run down and then you will be sad when you have to go home and your phone’s dead and you just look out the window. Not a familiar story for me at all. So, have a little battery pack with you and I would say you can either buy that here. They have a really nice selection of battery packs here or you can just get that at home. Also, if you have a pocket Wi-Fi, you will want one of these. Nothing worse than your Wi-Fi thing dying and you’re um out of luck. So, speaking of phones, another thing is to make sure you have enough storage on your phone. I know this sounds really silly, but I have encountered people that were like together on a tour or something and they’re taking pictures of stuff and suddenly their phone is out of storage, which is really sad if you’re like in Fushimi and already trying to take selfies and so make sure you kind of are already backing up stuff to the cloud, Google Photos, your laptop, whatever, and you have enough storage on your phone while you’re here. Um, you also on your phone will want to have important documents stored. I recommend having a picture of your passport. I recommend having your hotel’s name and address, especially in Japanese. You will probably be showing this to your cab driver quite frequently. your flight confirmation, any QR codes of stuff uh or tickets that you’ve booked in advance. And that way if you lose signal or lose Wi-Fi, um whatever, having that on your phone already is really useful. I always do this when I travel. This is just kind of a general track tip, but really good idea. Another useful thing to have is a VPN. And no, this is not an ad. This is me telling you that I think it’s good. um a lot of uh workrelated things you’ll probably want to VPN here not only for safety but because a lot of um more like private websites they will not be able to be accessed from here sometimes. I know some people like their banking information sometimes it won’t let you access it from here and then just because you are wandering around a foreign country maybe it would be nice for safety reasons if you’re using like cafe Wi-Fi and things like that. My personal recommendation is Surf Shark. And one final tip is to make sure you have the find my device or find my iPhone whatever on your phone turned on. So you probably will not get your phone stolen while you’re in Japan, but I have seen many a person uh who has left it on a train, who has left it in a cab. I don’t know why I can tell you quite a few times I have heard of people that have done this and you will probably get your phone back which is reassuring but it’ll be helpful to know which lost and found it has been dutifully turned into. Um you also probably cannot speak Japanese so having this information will help you know where whereabouts your device probably is. Um, don’t lose it in the first place if possible. All right, that is it. So, you do not need to be a tech expert to travel Japan comfortably. H, but I hope these tips have given you some ideas of things to think about to give you the smoothest experience possible. Friendly reminder to like and subscribe. By the time this video is posted, I may or may not have reached um my daughter goal of 30K subscribers. We will see. But whether or not we have, thank you as always. You guys are much appreciated. And go back up there. Thank you, sir. I’ll see you guys in the next video. Bye.

All the answers to the questions you’re stressed about! Don’t be without these things on your trip to Japan.

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This video is based off a long accumulation of knowledge of what you really do need when you visit Japan. Although there may be more helpful things and apps, these are my ultimate recommendations of what’s really needed. I hope this helps you all out! Thanks as always for the support.