Japan Trains February 9, 2008

The Shinkansen is the super fast, bullet train in Japan.  Superman couldn’t catch this thing.  And what’s more, there are a ton of them.  From Tokyo to Kyoto there’s one leaving every 8-10 minutes.  In order to ride it, you have to buy a ticket (of course) which should be easy, but it’s not.  On top of the base fare to get from here to there, there are all sorts of “extras” to choose from: reserved seat, unreserved seat, fewer stops, more stops.  They all have different fees, and the charts are somewhat confusing to a layperson like myself.  Luckily for me, the American, I have one more option: the Japan Rail Pass.

The Japan Rail Pass (JRP) is a 7 or 9 day pass that you can buy to ride almost any train in Japan unlimitedly for its time period.  The catch is that you must, must, must buy this ticket in a country that is not Japan.  Did you catch that?  You have to buy it before you get there from one of their listed travel agents.  Don’t forget or else you’re out of luck.  Once you get to Japan, you can activate the JRP for its specified number of days.  So that you don’t have to worry about activating the card while you’re stressing over finding a train going to your destination, you can even pre-activate it for days in the future, as in “start this 7 day pass in 3 days”.

The JRP costs ~28.000Y and the exchange rate is about $1=106Y as I write this, so an easy estimate is to just divide by 100Y to get $.  As far as I can tell, the JRP is not good for the city subway, but it is good for the train between Tokyo and Narita, which is usually ~3.100Y each way.   The round trip ticket Tokyo-Kyoto is ~27.000Y, so that extra trip to Narita makes it worthwhile.  It’s even more worthwhile if you take a day trip to Nara or Hiroshima from Kyoto (we plan on going to Nara).  But you can’t take the express train, called the Nozomi, on the JRP, so beware.  I think the Nozomi only accounts for a small fraction of the trains, anyway, though.

The Tokyo subway system seems to work a lot like the DC metro system: at the end of your ride, you find out if you’ve paid enough based on where you got on and off.   So even when you can’t find a ticket machine in English before your ride, you can pay the least fare possible and if you paid too little, just fork over the rest as you leave.  I like that system.  Of course, I also like the Boston way of doing things: flat fare all around!  At least that way there’s no fear of getting trapped in the metro station with too little money…

Finally, when traveling between Tokyo and Kyoto, try to get seats J-H on the train for an excellent view of Mt Fuji.  You can get off at the Mt Fuji stop, but I think it’s another 2.5 hours to the mountain, itself, and then another day to climb.  Most of the climbing is above the tree-line, leaving you with boring old rock, so perhaps seeing the mountain from a distance is really for the best, anyway.  If climbing is your thing, though, they say the sunrise is the best part, so an overnighter would be required.