JR Pass – Where to, Gumshoe?

For anyone travelling to Japan with the intention of seeing more than one city, buying a Rail Pass of some sort is an important consideration to make. While there are a lot of train companies in Japan (with a lot of different rail passes), the one most people are likely familiar with is the JR Pass from the Japan Railways Group.

When buying a JR Pass, you have to decide if you want an ordinary pass, or a “First Class” pass which gives you access to nicer train cars. I find regular cars on JR Trains comfortable enough, so the only real consideration is the duration of the pass.

7-Day: ¥29,110
14-Day: ¥46,390
21-Day: ¥59,350

So is it worth it to buy a JR Pass, or would you be better off just buying train tickets as you go? You’ll need to do a bit of research before you make a decision on whether to buy a pass or not. Here are my suggestions to help you make your decision.

Map out the “big segments” of your trip that you know you will be making (e.g. Tokyo to Osaka, Osaka to Kyoto, Kyoto to Tokyo, etc). Don’t worry about all the shorter segments you might use the JR Pass for.
Price out those segments using JR websites (or Google Maps does a pretty good job of showing fares when you use it for transit directions).
Look at your dates to determine what duration Rail Pass you would need.

After making that comparison, if the JR Pass is cheaper than buying the tickets individually, then I say go for it. Not only are you saving money on the cost of buying tickets individually, but you get other added benefits of having the JR Pass.

You might be open to going to different places (accessible via your pass) rather than just staying in your intended cities. Having the pass gives you options to see things you might not of wanted to spend money to see, but knowing it requires no additional cost, makes you open to checking it out.

You can use your pass within cities you are visiting, since JR runs intracity rail systems in some of the bigger cities (e.g. Osaka and Tokyo). I wouldn’t bother trying to price out these intracity trips when determining whether the JR Pass is worth it or not, but it’s nice to know you’ll be able to get some more value out of the pass.

So, how did the JR Pass work out for me and Kait? We bought a 14-Day Ordinary JR Pass which cost $558 CAD each. I’ll do the price comparison with the JPY cost of the JR Pass (46,390JPY) since that’s what the individual train tickets would have been purchased with, and depending on what country you buy your JR Pass from, you’ll be paying approximately the JPY cost plus a small currency exchange premium (dependent on who you buy the JR Pass from).

Here is a list of all the train (and boat) rides we took using our JR Pass:

Hakata to Beppu: ¥5560
Beppu to Hakata: ¥5560
Hakata to Hiroshima: ¥8940
Hiroshima to Miyajimaguchi: ¥410
Myajimaguchi to Miyajima: ¥180
Miyajima to Miyajimaguchi: ¥180
Miyajimaguchi to Hiroshima: ¥410
Hiroshima to Shin-Osaka: ¥10230
Osaka to Kyoto: ¥560
Kyoto to Saga-Arashiyama: ¥240
Saga-Arashiyama to Kyoto: ¥240
Kyoto to Inari: ¥140
Kyoto to Osaka: ¥1210
Tennoji to Nara: ¥470
Nara to Tennoji: ¥470
Osaka to Sannomiya: ¥410
Sannomiya to Osaka: ¥410
Osaka to Namba (Via Imamiya): ¥190
Shin-Osaka to Tokyo: ¥14140
Tokyo to Shinjuku: ¥200
Shinjuku to Akihabara: ¥170
Akihabara to Tokyo: ¥140
Shimbashi to Shinjuku: ¥200
Shinjuku to Shibuya: ¥160
Shibuya to Ebisu: ¥140
Ebisu to Shinjuku: ¥160
Shinjuku to Maihama: ¥390
Maihama to Shinjuku: ¥390
Shinjuku to Ueno: ¥200
Ueno to Shinagawa: ¥200
Shinagawa to Shinjuku: ¥170

Total: ¥52,470

Overall, I’m satisfied with the value we got out of our JR Pass. When we made rough plans for the trains we’d take in Japan, we included several longer distance day trips out of big cities that we ended up not going on, but we still came out ahead ¥6080 per person. That’s why I suggest only including the main segments of your trip when deciding on the JR Pass. Plans can change and you don’t want to feel like you have to go out of your way to use your JR Pass in order to make sure it was better value than buying individual train tickets.

If you’re the kind of person looking to maximize value, and are willing to plan your trip around maximizing the value of your JR Pass, then I think you can come out way ahead of the cost of buying individual train tickets.

While rail passes can offer good value, train travel in general in Japan is not exactly cheap (e.g. Tokyo to Osaka round trip on the Shinkansen is $320 CAD). Depending on your itinerary, it might actually be cheaper to fly between cities than to take the train. Kait has mentioned before the discount airline tickets you can buy as a foreign visitor in Japan, and that might be a better option for you if a Rail Pass isn’t a good fit.

With the lack of great train travel options in North America, I get this romantic notion about trains whenever I travel to places with good train systems. In that sense, there are some intangible values to getting a train pass that I can’t put a dollar amount to. Overall, Kait and I were both really happy with our JR Pass experience, riding trains for over 2000km around Kyushu and Honshu.

(I await the day we have high speed rail down the west coast from Vancouver to San Diego)

April 7, 2016

We didn’t fall asleep until around 2am last night so this morning we woke up around 10:30am. We still planned on going to Nagasaki, despite sleeping in, but were going to catch a later train. After getting everything together, we left the hotel for Tenjin Station to catch the subway to Hakata Station (where the Japan Rail Station is).

Before our trip, we bought a 14 day Japan Rail Pass (JR pass) from the JTB office in the basement of Hotel Vancouver for $558 CAD each. The JR pass is offered to foreigners traveling into Japan, where you can pay a set price for unlimited train rides. The pass is offered at a significant discount and must be bought before coming to Japan. You have to show your passport to prove that you are visiting Japan as a temporary visitor and not on any work visa.

When got to the JR office at Hakata Station, there was a long line up for the JR pass. There were probably over 50 people ahead of us and we only had about an hour until the 12:55pm train we were planning on taking to Nagasaki departed. The line up didn’t seem to move at all for the first 15 minutes, but then they started opening more wickets and the line up moved a bit faster. We had to bring the papers we got from the JTB office in Vancouver as well as our passport to redeem our JR pass. The lady checked our passports to see that the sticker (Japan doesn’t stamp passports) said temporary visitor. At this point, we could also reserve seats for trains that we knew we were going to take in the next few days.

After the lady processed our JR pass, she told us that the train we were hoping to catch to Nagasaki was cancelled due to severe rain. The forecast for today was rain but we didn’t realize how heavy it started to rain because we had been indoors most of the morning. She said the next train would be 1:55pm, which didn’t really work out for us because the main point of going to Nagasaki was to visit the Atomic Bomb Museum and it closed at 5pm. We decided to change our plans and stay in Fukuoka since the weather was bad. Now we know that the JR pass line ups can get really busy, so we should make sure if we need to reserve any tickets from now on we should make arrangements the day before if possible.

Although it would have been nice to see Nagasaki, I was also glad we could just stay in Fukuoka and take it easy. I was behind on blog posts and we needed to do a bit more Japan planning and research on things (plus I’ve been a bit tired trying to fight off a cold). I think one of the biggest things that I have to get over is that we won’t be able to see everything, eat all the “must eats”, or buy all the things I would have bought on a normal trip. I’m used to short trips and I know if we travel the way I would on a two week trip, we’ll burn out quickly and I could already feel it a bit.

So I suppose the train getting cancelled is a blessing in disguise. We headed to the other famous Fukuoka ramen place called, Ichiran, for lunch. There is a location attached to the Hakata train station, which was perfect. When you get there, you have to use a machine to pay for your order and it prints out a ticket. Once you’re seated you give the waitress your ticket and your food comes. It was a neat yet very anti-social process and eating experience (Tim: the ticket machines are pretty common throughout Japan).

And the winner between Ichiran and Ippudo is (in our opinion) Ippudo! Ichiran is very good too but their meat was the weakest link, it wasn’t that tender and it was sliced very thin. Ichiran is also just over 100 JPY more expensive and they charge for kikurage mushrooms that are already included in Ippudo’s bowl. Although the Ichiran experience is novel, I enjoyed my bowl of Ippudo ramen more.

After we finished eating, we went outside and it was raining very hard. We decided to go back into the station mall and buy an umbrella. Japanese people all carry clear umbrellas here, so we thought we’d join in. We found a store that was relatively cheap in the basement and sold an umbrella for 410 JPY = $5 CAD (Tim: More expensive than what I remember umbrellas going for the last time I was in Japan in 2009). Despite having waterproof rain jackets, this type of rain needed an umbrella and I also had my laptop in my backpack today (I was planning on writing while on the train).

We decided to have a leisurely walk back to our hotel from the train station, but first stopping by Hakata’s Canal City Mall. Since it was pouring, the best place to be is inside a mall. The Canal City Mall is the mid-way point between Hakata and Tenjin Station (where our hotel is). Once we arrived, I was excited to browse around at Uniqlo and Muji, stores that I’ve been in many times but never in Japan!

As expected, Uniqlo is about 20% cheaper than what it is in Taiwan and Muji is also slightly cheaper. While browsing through Uniqlo, there are a lot of things I would like to buy but I don’t have any room in my luggage. They’re clothes I would want to have when I get back to Vancouver, not necessarily clothes I need on this trip. I’ve made notes to myself that I would like to go back to Seoul and Japan just to shop in the future and I’ll bring an empty suitcase (Tim: because clothing is so different around the world it necessitates travelling across an ocean to get what you need…).

Every hour the canal in the mall has a water show. We caught half of one that was happening at 4pm. The water show was choreographed to”Be Our Guest” from The Beauty at the Beast. The show was better than the one we waited for in the cold in Seoul at the Danpo Bridge (Tim: I decided it was better within the first 5 seconds).

We headed back to Tenjin Station and figured we would have an early dinner and just go back to the hotel. It was such a wet day out that we thought once we got back inside we wouldn’t want to go back out again.

Tenjin Station has a large underground mall that connects all the department stores to office buildings, City Hall and the subway station. We’ve been to a lot of underground malls in Seoul, but this one was a lot nicer. The stores were mainly Japanese clothing stores along with a lot of French bakeries. I noticed that a lot of Japanese stores are named in French, although some spelled incorrectly. (Tim: is “Flench” the equivalent to “Engrish”?)

After going through part of the mall, we left to go find something for dinner. It started to get very stuffy inside and I think the dim lights and being underground made me feel a bit uneasy. I find that in Korea and Japan, when it’s a bit colder outside (it wasn’t actually that cold today at 18 degrees) they blast the heat inside too much. So whenever we went inside a mall or department store, Tim and I would be sweating.

We went to one of the shopping plazas connected to the underground mall and found that on their basement level there were several restaurants that looked quite good. We picked one called, Kisuimaru. Tim ordered their chirashi don (Tim: they called it Kisui-don) and I had a dinner set.

At first we were hesitant because it wasn’t that busy (but I guess it was only 5:15pm after all), but the food was good. When we were finishing up, more people (what seemed like locals) started to come in. I feel like we won’t have any horrible dining experiences in Japan (*knock on wood*).

We came back to the hotel after dinner and caught up on our blogging and did some more research on the town we’ll be going to tomorrow, Beppu (the onsen capital of Japan). Our wedding videographer, Henry, just went to Japan for a bit and told us the whole town is steaming, sounds pretty cool to me!

Our train tomorrow is at 9:21am, so we’ll get a good night sleep tonight!

Steps today: 14,600

Tag: JR Pass

Is it Worth Buying a JR Pass?

Fukuoka (Day 38): Change of Plans