Japan: How Much Does It Really Cost?

This is the first of three posts on traveling in Japan on a budget. Come back tomorrow and Wednesday for parts two and three.

One of my biggest concerns before leaving for Japan last month was how much it would cost. The country is famously expensive, and since I make my living teaching in China, I’m not exactly rolling in dough. My traveling companion is in the same situation, so we knew we would have to really stick to a budget. And we basically succeeded — in the end, I spent a bit less than I had expected/feared.

Excluding the cost of getting to Japan, the total cost of the 15-day trip was ¥146,187***, or about $1,640 (USD). The Japan Rail Pass was a fixed cost, and on Wednesday, I’ll look at whether it paid off or not. Taking that out of the equation, I was spending an average of ¥4,000 ($45) per day on sightseeing and daily expenditures and another ¥2,600 ($29.50) on accommodation. That turned out to be a bit less than had been suggested by online sources. Posts on Lonely Planet’s Thorntree forum suggest a daily budget of ¥90,000 to ¥110,000 per day, excluding the cost of the Rail Pass.

Here’s what we did to keep costs down:

• Food & Drink: I spent an average of ¥2,960 each day on food.
  • We ate virtually every breakfast at Japan’s ubiquitous convenience stores, where it was possible to fill up (even for a very hungry boy) for less than ¥500. I will admit that I caved a couple of times and had Starbucks because it’s something I miss terribly on in Changsha.
  • Although we had a few more expensive meals, we also ate a lot of noodles and rice bowls for lunch and dinner. And when we wanted to have something pricier, like sushi, we would eat a little less than we wanted and fill up somewhere else on cheap food. (Probably more important for the aforementioned hungry boy than it was for me.)
  • We didn’t drink any alcohol.
  • I couldn’t cut my coffee habit just for this trip, but I did drink a lot of instant and canned coffee. Cafes charge ¥300-¥400 even for a plain coffee, making McDonald’s look like a bargain at ¥220 for a medium.
• Hostels: On average, our hostel cost ¥2,581 per person per night.
  • Japan has a ton of youth hostels, and while they are expensive compared to those elsewhere in Asia, they are still the cheapest option. On the plus side, each place we stayed was scrupulously clean and had a great staff.
  • Prices can range considerably, especially for private rooms, so it pays to comb through Hostelworld and Hostelbookers pretty carefully. This is especially true in Tokyo and Kyoto.
  • We did opt to spend ¥200-¥300 more per person per night for our own room (with a shared bathroom) instead of staying in dorms.
• Intracity Transportation: Our daily intracity transportation costs varied wildly from place to place. Some cities were very walkable (Hiroshima, Takayama) while others required that we take buses or subways everywhere (Kyoto, Osaka). In Tokyo, which is definitely not walkable on a large scale, we took advantage of the Japan Rail Pass as much as possible and got around the city mainly on its intracity JR lines.

***Yes, I really did write down every yen I spent in Japan and then typed it all into Excel to produce this graph. I was pretty careful, but it’s possible that I forgot about a water bottle or two over the course of two weeks. The act of writing everything down had its own budget-enforcing effect — I definitely thought a little more carefully about whether or not I should make certain purchases.

Related posts:

1. Japan Rail Pass: To Buy or Not to Buy?
2. Two Days on the Sea of Japan
3. Coffee in the Jelly, Jelly in Your Coffee
4. 3 Hours on the World’s Fastest Train
5. Expense Report: Ten Days in Sichuan

Tagged as: budget travel, Japan, Japan budget