A bunch of people have asked how we planned this, so here’s the whole thing: what the trip actually looked like, what we did in each city, and the pile of stuff I’d tell myself if I could send a message back to the version of me who was doing the booking.

The Shape of the Trip

Nine days door to door, which shook out to six days that weren’t dominated by travel.

Four days in Tokyo, the bullet train to Kyoto on the evening of the fourth, two days in Kyoto with a day trip to Osaka in the middle.

Landing at 5am sounds brutal and kind of is, but it’s basically a free day. We dropped the bags, got on the subway, and had cold green tea in hand within the hour. Ten hours later we’d already seen more than I expected to see all week.

One structural thing I’d keep: sleeping near the airport the last night. Not having to solve “cross Tokyo at dawn with two overstuffed suitcases” was worth every yen.

November is peak season over there, and for good reason – the fall colors are genuinely wild. But it does mean you should book flights, hotels, and anything with a ticket as early as you possibly can stand to.

Before You Leave

Some of this is much, much easier to do from your couch than from a hotel lobby at midnight.

• Visit Japan Web – immigration and customs pre-registration. Do it before you fly. This is the one that isn’t optional.
• A Suica card in Apple Wallet. Add it from the Wallet app itself, not the Suica app. It covers subways, trains, most vending machines, convenience stores, and a startling number of arcade machines. It reloads from any card you’ve already got in there. Preload it before you land so you’re not standing at a machine at 6am doing math. Everyone in your party needs their own.
• The Go app, which is the local Uber. Set it up at home. It wants SMS verification, and mine simply would not go through on my US plan once I was in the country. Uber worked fine when we needed it, but Go is what everyone actually uses.
• Smart-EX – account and app for Shinkansen tickets. Worth having even if you don’t book anything in advance. (See below. Please see below.)
• An eSIM. Airalo was flawless. Good coverage and good speeds everywhere we went, including at 200mph and up a mountain outside Kyoto. No notes.
• This timeline is a really useful month-by-month, then week-by-week, then day-by-day checklist for a Japan trip. I used it more than any other prep resource.

Money rule of thumb while we were there: about ¥150 to the dollar. So ¥1,000 is roughly seven bucks and ¥10,000 is roughly sixty-five. Round ¥1,000 to $7 in your head and you’ll never be far off, which matters more than you’d think when you’re standing in front of a gashapon machine making decisions.

Tokyo

Four days is not enough to scratch the surface of the largest city on earth. Here’s what we got to anyway.

Shibuya. The 6th floor of Shibuya Parco is the densest concentration of good stuff we found anywhere – Nintendo Tokyo, a Sega store, the Jump store, a Jo-Jo’s pop up, and the Pokémon Center, all stacked on top of each other. It was insanely packed. Almost too much good stuff to choose from. Go on a weekday, go early.

Shibuya itself is touristy, but it’s touristy in a cool way. Shibuya 109 is eight floors of teenage-girl retail chaos and the basement snack floor is the actual destination. The Mega Don Quijote will make your head explode and you will walk out with a bag of small things you did not plan on.

Rikugien Gardens. An easy subway trip and one of the best things we did all week. The fall colors in late November were unreal. Gingko trees turn the most amazing golden yellow and apparently we got great timing.

The Imperial Palace grounds. Worth a slow walk. The old guard houses on the perimeter are great, the XXL bonsai are a genuine surprise, and yes, there is a Starbucks there. It sounds wrong. It was fine.

Akihabara. Taito Hey is five floors of fighting games and racing cabinets and it’s cheap. There are a dozen arcades in walking distance but that’s the one. Yellow Submarine nearby is a small, well-stocked game and card shop.

Tokyo Skytree. Touristy but worth it, which is a phrase I used a lot on this trip. Incredible views, and there’s a whole mall at the base.

Gotokuji Temple, the lucky cat temple, was lovely and the colors were incredible. You can buy your own cat and leave it there for whatever luck you’re in the market for. There’s a lucky-cat themed train on the way, which is a nice bonus.

Also good, in varying amounts of “did it” and “ran out of time”: Meiji Shrine, Harajuku, the Artizon Museum (beautiful, and I found a Monet I somehow had never seen), and the Samurai Ninja Museum, which is touristy but fun and lets you handle a real 700 year old sword. I did not win the throwing star competition.

Tsukiji outer market is now mostly tourists and everything is expensive, but the snacks are fun. The animal cafés are everywhere and look charming from the sidewalk, but the animals mostly don’t seem to be having a great time.

Food. Yoshinoya for breakfast is a completely different animal from the styrofoam rice bowl I had in my head from the US version. Fast, cheap, and exactly the breakfast I would like to eat every day for the rest of my life. And our first sushi, five hours off the plane, was ordered on a tablet and showed up a few minutes later and was truly delicious.

Kyoto

Two days, and it needed more.

Kyoto is beautiful and it is crowded – by a wide margin the most tourists we saw anywhere, which is saying something after Shibuya. Still go. But if I did it again I’d look harder at the other Edo-period cities, because there are several that give you a similar feeling without the crowd.

Kinkaku-ji, the gold pavilion, is exactly as good as the photos and exactly as busy as you’d guess.

The tea ceremony at Ju-an at Jotokuji Temple was one of the best things we did on the whole trip. Slots are limited and they go early, so book it well ahead.

Kurama-dera in the northern mountains is the fall-colors play. The train ride up to the mountain village is half the point, and then you walk or hike forested paths up to the temple.

Kyoto Gyoen, the Imperial Palace Park, is enormous and beautiful and free.

Old town Kyoto was really incredible and we’d love to have had more time there. Also our hotel was the best one of the trip, a perfect blend of traditional and modern, and I would go back for the breakfast alone.

Osaka

We went over for a day.

Universal Studios Japan. Go midweek, get the Express Pass, and book both as early as you can. Ours started at 9:50am and that structure made the whole day work. The Donkey Kong mine cart ride is a lot of fun. The Yoshi ride is an hour wait and worth it, if only to avoid the regret. They run the exact same Waterworld show they run in Hollywood, just in Japanese, which delighted me more than it should have.

Fair warning, our trip to the park was stressful in a way that was entirely our own fault. See the train section below.

Osaka Castle is a genuinely good museum built into a historical samurai castle. Dope.

There’s also a Nintendo Osaka on the 13th floor of Daimaru Umeda, and a Mugiwara (One Piece) store in Kita Ward with a frankly alarming amount of merch.

Things I Wish I Knew In Advance

This is the part I’d actually want someone to hand me.

Don’t book trains in advance. This was our biggest self-inflicted wound of the trip. We’d lock in a specific train, then spend the morning rushing to make it, arrive sweaty and stressed, and then stand on the platform watching trains going to exactly where we wanted to go leave every five minutes. The network is dense enough that showing up and buying a seat is almost always fine. Book ahead only if you truly need a specific departure.

Don’t assume you know whether a train needs a reservation. It varies by line, and it also seems to vary by time. A train might be free seating on a Sunday evening and reserved-only during Monday morning rush. Check the specific train you’re about to get on instead of generalizing from the last one, which is what we kept doing.

The translate app is your escape hatch. Type English, show them the Japanese. I used this when my Suica got into a weird state after I accidentally left a gate without tapping properly, and the station agent had it sorted in about ninety seconds. Nobody was even slightly fazed.

A surprising number of restaurants use tablet ordering with English menus. Way more than I expected. The language barrier at meals was much lower than I’d braced for.

AI tools with vision are extremely handy. I wanted Advil and could not identify it on a drugstore shelf to save my life. Took one photo of the entire pain relief rack and got the right box pointed out to me. Same trick worked on the indicator signs on train platforms and on menus. It was as good as the dedicated visual translation apps, plus you get an interpretation layer – not just what does this say, but what does this mean.

Anything you saw advertised in the metro has an insane line. Not shocking in retrospect. But we walked toward a couple of exhibitions we’d seen posters for and then quietly bailed when we saw the queue. Treat metro ads as a crowd warning rather than a recommendation.

Set up the Go app before you leave. Saying it twice because it bit me.

Google Maps and Apple Maps both worked well, and both led us astray. Independently, in different ways, at different times. When something feels off, check the other one. It cost us twice before we started doing it.

Kyoto is great but crowded. Next time I want to try a quieter Edo-period town.

Buy the extra suitcase. We both ended up buying bigger backpacks partway through. Either plan for it or leave the space on the way out. There was a stuffed Donkey Kong that came very close to requiring his own checked bag, and I still think about him.

Next Time

Still on the list: an onsen stay in Hakone, which comes highly recommended and has an outdoor sculpture garden that people rave about. Adventure Park Bouken in Nose, which has Japan’s longest zip lines. The Ghibli Museum, which we missed (we did find the store, but the catbus was unavailable for riding). More Osaka. And one of the quieter old towns instead of a second run at Kyoto.

It was a perfect starter trip. I’d go back tomorrow.