Practical

Arriving in Japan

The first two hours decide how the first two days feel. Paperwork to do before you fly, what to set up in the terminal, and the fastest way out of each of the three main airports.

Nothing about arriving in Japan is difficult. It is simply a sequence, and doing it in the wrong order costs you an hour at the end of a long flight — usually in a queue for a train ticket you could have bought on the plane.

This is the order that works.

The paperwork is one QR code

Visit Japan Web is the government's online arrival service. You enter your passport, flight and customs declaration before you fly, and it produces a single code that covers immigration and customs. It is free, it is run by the Digital Agency, and it is not compulsory — paper forms still exist, and the cabin crew still hand them out.

Use it anyway. The queue for the paper customs counter is reliably longer than the queue for the kiosks.

Set up connectivity before you leave the terminal

Japan has very little usable public wi-fi outside stations and chain cafés, and the train apps you will live on need a connection. An eSIM installed at home and switched on when you land is the cleanest version of this: no counter, no deposit, no returning a pocket router to an airport post box on the way home.

Pocket wi-fi still makes sense for a group of four sharing one connection, or for a laptop. For one or two people it is a device to carry, charge and give back.

Narita: take the Skyliner

Narita is 60 kilometres from central Tokyo, which is the single fact that catches people out. There are three ways in and they are not equivalent.

The Keisei Skyliner is the fast one: 36 minutes to Nippori, 41 to Keisei-Ueno, on a reserved seat. If you are staying anywhere on the north or east side of the Yamanote loop — Ueno, Asakusa, Akihabara, Nippori — this is the obvious answer, and it is cheaper than the JR alternative.

The Narita Express takes about an hour to Tokyo Station and continues to Shinjuku and Yokohama. It costs more and is slower, and it is worth it only if your hotel is at the far end of one of those runs, or if a rail pass is covering it.

The cheap route is the Keisei Access Express, which is a normal commuter train with no reservation and nowhere to put a large case. It saves about ¥1,300 and costs you twenty minutes and a seat.

Haneda: you are already in Tokyo

Haneda sits inside the city. The Keikyu line reaches Shinagawa in about fifteen minutes and runs through onto the Asakusa subway line, which puts Ginza, Nihonbashi and Asakusa within one ride. The Tokyo Monorail reaches Hamamatsucho in a similar time and connects to the Yamanote loop there.

Either costs a few hundred yen and needs no reservation. If you have a choice of airports and a choice of fares that are close, Haneda is worth a meaningful premium for this reason alone — it removes an hour from each end of the trip.

Nagoya and Kansai

Chubu Centrair, south of Nagoya, is 28 minutes from Nagoya Station on the Meitetsu μ-Sky. Kansai International, for Osaka and Kyoto, is about 75 minutes to Kyoto on the Haruka and 35 to Namba on the Nankai Rapi:t.

Both are far quieter than Narita, and both are legitimate ways into the country if you are starting in the west. Flying into Tokyo and taking the shinkansen west on day one is the more expensive habit, not the faster one.

The IC card is the last step

Suica and Pasmo are the stored-value cards that open every ticket gate in the country, and they also pay at convenience stores, vending machines and most city buses. They are interchangeable; buy whichever the machine in front of you sells.

If your phone supports it, add Suica to the wallet at home and top it up with a card. That removes the one genuinely slow queue at the airport — the JR ticket office — from your arrival entirely. If it does not, the airport JR office sells the Welcome Suica, an unregistered card for visitors that needs no deposit and expires after 28 days.