We decided to visit Japan for our family holiday this year as our youngest is obsessed with Japan culture and Anime. We first spent 5 days in Tokyo before boarding a cruise with Celebrity Cruises on their Celebrity Millennium Ship. This documents the days spent in Tokyo with the best advice I can give on how we navigated the city and what worked for us. These are purely my own experiences on our trip.
Flight
We chose to fly direct from Heathrow to Tokyo which was due to be a 13 hour flight but the flight took 12 1/2 hours in total. We flew with British Airways as they aren’t our favourite airline but they were the most reasonable and offered the direct London to Tokyo flight.
Pros – Direct and reasonably priced.
Cons – BA seem to think it is acceptable in economy class to serve a meal in the first hour and another equally un appealing small meal in the final hour of your flight, leaving you pretty hungry towards the end of the flight. My advice would be to get a meal deal from WH Smiths etc in the airport to take on the plane to eat at the mid point of the flight.
Airport Transfers
We flew into Haneda airport and we chose to make things easier for ourselves and book a taxi in advance to take us straight to our hotel as we had 5 large suitcases and didn’t want to take them on the train.
We booked the taxi through Klook, which I will refer to quite a bit as the blog goes on as its an ideal place for booking most things in Japan. Klook can be downloaded as an app from the app store of your choice.
The cost of the taxi was £53.99 for a 7 seater minivan to take 4 passengers and 5 suitcases which I thought was fairly reasonable for the 40 minute journey. The instructions were clear on where to find the driver and he even kept in touch with WhatsApp as our flight was slightly delayed.
Mobile Phone
I chose to order an e-sim as this was much cheaper than paying the roaming charges. Again I sued Klook to purchase this and it cost £26.35 for 20gb of data. The e-sims can be a bit fiddly to install and make sure all the settings were correct but the instructions got me to where i needed to be and I only used about 2/3 of the data in the whole 2 1/2 week trip so pretty good value as EE would have probably charged about £150 for the equivalent roaming fees.
Transport around Tokyo
Our favoured choice of getting around Tokyo was the train/metro/subway lines as these were cheap and of course extremely reliable. We uploaded Suica to our apple phones in order to tap in and out of the train stations in order to pay for the train.
Suica can be uploaded directly to the apple wallet by clicking the ‘plus’ symbol and searching for Suica then uploading credit onto the card. There isn’t any point downloading the actual Suica app as thats more difficult than loading it directly to your phones wallet.
We did find that in some circumstances the walk to the train stations was a lot longer than just jumping in an a taxi but we only did this when the journey was up to a max of say 15 minutes too.
We used both Uber and Go and both were fine but we went with Uber more than Go generally as we have used Uber for a while. The taxis are of course more expensive than the train but we always found the taxi costs to be fairly reasonable and never really encountered many traffic issues.
Google maps was a godsend in ensuring we got the correct lines/trains and where to go in the stations, without this I’m pretty sure we would have got lost or got on the wrong train a lot. Google maps also lets you know the best entrance/exit to/from the stations, which is advisable to follow as this will save a lot of time.
Walking Around
We found Tokyo to be very pleasant to walk around (apart from the August heat and humidity). The main things we found with walking is there is a serious culture of not jaywalking, so even if there are no cars in site you should be waiting for the green person on the crossing to show up.
There was also a thing where walking in the street with food or drink is a no-no and should not be done as you are likely to be informed by a local that this is not the done thing.
There aren’t any rubbish/trash bins around Tokyo and everyone is expected to carry their rubbish with them either back home or to the hotel to dispose of it. The streets are extremely clean and everyone appears to adhere to this rule.
Tattoos
I have tattoo sleeves on both my arms and heard that I wouldn’t be welcome in a lot places in Tokyo before I travelled, however I found there to be no issues at all, wherever I went. I got a couple of looks from local people but never felt uncomfortable at all.
I was told that bath houses wouldn’t allow me in, but I had no interest in going anyway and legally they cannot stop you going either.
The only thing I did which is a personal choice was that I covered my arms when I went to any temples as I wanted to be respectful, but I saw other people entering with tattoos with no issues.
Money
We were advised that cash is more widely used in Tokyo still and some places don’t accept card, however on arrival we found that almost everywhere accepted bank/credit cards. The only issue we found was that apple pay in smaller places wasn’t used and that the physical card needs to be used to pay.
Yorkshire Travel Man Tips 