Traveling Japan By Train

Although there is plenty of automobile traffic in Japan, it's not like visiting other locations where you can simply rent a car, and find your way around. Firstly, you need an International Driver license to rent a car in Japan, which unless you test for one, most Americans don't have. Second, forget reading traffic signs...

That leaves traveling by rail. The good news is that Japan has an incredible (maybe best in the world?) rail system for getting around not only Tokyo, but the rest of the country. What's more, most of the rail lines we've been on offer station announcements in both Japanese and English. Some older trains don't offer verbal announcements in English, but at least there's signs that have the Romanized (Romanji) station names on them so you can follow along.

We've been using Japan Guide for our travel planning, and determining what sights to see. In particular, this page covers (in tremendous detail) the same information I've got below regarding rail travel. Rather than rehash everything there, I've tried to explain our specific experience with the Japanese Transportation system.

Metro (Subway) versus Standard Rail

We're staying in Tokyo, which means we have access to one of the largest subway systems in the world. It's tightly integrated with the rest of the national rail systems here, so I'll describe how to get around Tokyo first.

There's 9 lines throughout Tokyo, and although the map seems daunting, it's remarkably simple to get around. This site does a better job than I ever could describing how the whole thing works. Metro stations are identified by this icon:

Pretty much every district within Tokyo has a station of the same name that serves it. Most often times, the main attractions within the district are integrated right into the station. So, let's say you want to go to Akihabara. If you just ask Google Maps to take you from your current location to Akihabara station, you'll see exactly which station and line you need to take. Standard subway riding procedure, I know. Just remember this when you're overwhelmed by not being able to read a lot of the signs in the stations.

One last thing here. All the stations we've been in use both IC and traditional ticket systems. The first thing we did was purchase a PASMO card. This allows for you to whiz right through the metro turnstiles, and it even affords you a discount on all your metro travel to boot.

Make sure you have about 2000 Yen cash (about 20 bucks) per traveller handy when you want to buy one. Find the one or two automated kiosks that offer English transactions for PASMO, and buy yourself a new card. The first 500 yen is used as a deposit on the card, and the average travel costs about 165 yen. We travelled to Asakusa the other day, which is considered to be on the Northern end of Tokyo, and it cost us about 200 yen (so 2 bucks... big deal...).

You can also use PASMO to pay for things in certain shops around stations and throughout Tokyo. I don't know if it offers a discount or anything, but I'm all for convergence on this front.

You get your 500 yen deposit back when you return the card. I don't know how to do that yet... I'll update this post once I figure that part out...

National Rail Network

You can get pretty much anywhere in Japan by rail. You might need to take a bus to get to some of the outer lying areas, but you can catch a bus to almost all of these areas. The largest (I think) rail provider in the country is Japan Rail (JR). Pretty much everywhere we've been contains a JR station, which is the local hub for public transportation. Again, Google Maps is your best friend for getting around by public rail. Just make sure that if you go the JR Pass route (below), that you ensure that your route is handled by JR Trains. JR doesn't always offer the shortest, or fastest route (sometimes there's a regional company that's better), but they do have the broadest network of trains, and usually are the main operator of a station in any given town. So, when it doubt, look to JR to get around...

Acquiring a JR Pass

You don't need to do this, but if you don't then you have to buy tickets for every journey at a JR station. There's always a line and language barrier, so if nothing else, avoid this by purchasing a tourist JR Pass. This allows foreigners visiting temporarily, unlimited* passage on all JR trains (*there are certain lines, and specific trains which are not accessible under the pass). It seemed like a pretty good deal when we bought the passes for roughly $220 each, and now that we've used them, I think we can confirm that it was an excellent value.

You cannot buy a JR pass from Japan Rail. You have to use a third party. We purchased ours through these guys. It may seem sketchy that it'll somehow arrive to you in the United States within a couple business days, but I can confirm that it does in fact arrive overnight via FedEx from England. Seriously. Just make sure that you plan to purchase these passes at least a week before your planned departure for Japan.

You'll receive a 'voucher' in the mail. When you arrive in Japan, find one of the information offices on this list (we chose Shinjuku Station because we happened to be there on the first day of our travels). After about 20 minutes of forms and phone calls, we had our Rail Passes. Side note: Japan loves forms. No joke... there are forms for everything over here.

Using a JR Pass

This seemed easy... Turns out, this was the hardest, or rather, most confusing part of the whole process. First off, you need to understand the difference between 'Green' cars, and ordinary cars. This has absolutely nothing to do with reserved seats, as we found out the hard way... You'll notice that we bought an 'Ordinary' pass. This is basically the equivalent to 'coach' travel on an airplane. Based on our experiences traveling by 'ordinary' means so far, we don't feel as though we're missing anything by not traveling by 'green' cars.

Once you have this notion down, the rest falls into place pretty easily, although it's a bit of a long explanation:

How to plan a route

Use Japan Guide first. This will tell you what station is the best to shoot for, and also enumerate all of the other public transportation options once you arrive.

Once you know what station to shoot for, then use Google Maps (like I said above). Just be aware that you won't have detail on the train configuration (number and type of cars and whether seats are reserved or not). Additionally, this is where the language barrier, especially with respect to being able to read comes into play.

I haven't quite figured all of this out yet, but from what I can tell, there's basically two large groupings of trains: Shinkansen (Bullet Trains) and non-Shinkansen. Shinkansen are intended for long distance travel (although they make multiple stops in some metropolitan areas so you can get on and off), and seem to require reserved seating more often. Non-Shinkansen are broken down even further into rapid and rapid express trains. The classification has something to do with train speed, but also the stations which the trains stop at. I'm sure that if you ride trains more regularly than me or Heather, this makes perfect sense to you already...

In Google Maps, Shinkansen icons look like this:

Non-Shinkansen icons look like this:

Trust Google Maps to get you to your destination. If your route includes, or rather, insists on non JR trains, there's probably a pass that you can buy that allows for your passage on not only that train, but other modes of transportation at your destination (more on that later).

Once you get to your destination, you should plan to visit the tourism information center in the station. There's likely someone who speaks English who can point you in the right direction

When and How to Reserve a Seat

Ordinary cars on Non-Shinkansen trains don't seem require a reservation. I think it's because the cars are designed like subway cars with a few more seats on them.

If you travel by Green car, regardless of the train type, you need a reservation.

If you travel by Shinkansen, depending on the name of the train, you might be able to travel non-reserved on an ordinary car. What we learned the hard way, is that there is such a thing as a train with no non-reserved seats on it. While there may be open seats, you still need to have one reserved in order to travel. Since I'm still not sure how to tell what a particular train configuration is in advance of our travel, I think it's a safe recommendation to reserve a seat for planned Shinkansen travel.

To reserve a seat for travel planned in the future, you must find one of the ticket offices on the outermost side of a JR station.

To reserve a seat for travel on the same day, you can use any JR ticket office (as far as we can tell).

If you have a JR Pass, it won't cost you anything extra to reserve a seat. You just need to do it in order to guarantee passage on a train.

Getting through a typical Rail Station

JR Stations are identified by this sign (the color may be different depending on the branch of JR you're dealing with):

Here's what a typical rail sign looks like in jibberish

Now here it is in English

Boarding a Train

If you have a reserved seat, your ticket will tell you what car and seat you're sitting in. Find the area for your train car on the platform and queue up. There seem to be a mix of painted lines on the platform, and our initial assumption was that red lines were for non-reserved seating, and green lines were for reserved seating, or green cars. Honestly, since we can't read anything properly, we've been successfully going along with whatever the crowd is doing on the platform...

As long as you know the difference between reserved and non-reserved, then you're not going to get yourself into too much trouble by going with the flow. Heather and I even managed to ride an ordinary reserved car without reserving a seat (we didn't know what we were doing yet). I think we were just lucky that it was the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday, so the train wasn't that busy...

Non-JR Travel

In all of the areas we've visited, there are other providers of rail and/or public transportation. In fact, if you don't buy a JR Pass, you can get to some of the more popular tourist destinations by purchasing a 'free pass' from a competing rail operator to get you there from Tokyo. For instance, Tobu Railways offers a train from Tokyo to Nikko which is actually more convenient than traveling by JR Rail alone. Once you get to Nikko, you realize that Tobu handles most of the local transportation, even though JR has their own station there as well. As I said above, Japan Guide is a tremendous resource at telling you about how to get to your destination and how to travel around once you get there. They'll also direct you to all the pertinent 'free passes' or combo deals for transit in the area you're researching.