Last week, I handed the Daily Drop writing team a formidable challenge: get travelers of different party sizes to the destinations you ask about most. Japan came up, the way Japan always comes up.
Then Miho wrote to me.
Miho grew up in Japan and she's an empty nester like me. Her email was long and specific, and she opened it by telling me that seven days is nowhere near enough time to see her country. She's right about that. She also knows exactly what most of you are working with, which is a limited number of days and somebody who has to approve them. So she built the version that fits inside the constraint and sent it over anyway.
I'm running it because it’s one of my favorite reader interactions I’ve had in my tenure here at Daily Drop.
Seven Days in Japan Is Really Five Nights
One sentence in her email articulated something all of my writers struggled with for this destination:
"As you can see, a 7-day itinerary is really FIVE nights in Japan with almost two and a half days taken up entirely for travel time..."
West Coast flights to Tokyo land in the afternoon of the next day, so the day you leave is gone and the day you arrive is mostly gone.
Miho didn't even build an East Coast version; she said the transit time would eat more of the trip than it could survive. If you're flying out of Seattle (SEA), San Francisco (SFO), or Los Angeles (LAX), your seven-day Japan trip holds five usable nights, and two of those you'll spend at about sixty percent because of the thing she mentions next.
The Jetlag Nobody Plans For
"Oh, one thing I noticed is that nobody addressed the jetlag! It is VERY real and you stop functioning around mid-day... so you can't be too ambitious and need to go easy on the activities for the first 2-3 days of arrival."
Miho plans around the jetlag instead of scheduling over it. Her third day starts before dawn at the Tsukiji Outer Market, on the theory that your eyes are going to open at 4 a.m. whether you like it or not, so you may as well be somewhere worth being awake for.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
Miho's Seven-Day Japan Itinerary
Day 1: Fly.
Out of SEA, SFO, or LAX, aiming for Tokyo Haneda (HND) if you can get it. Tokyo Narita (NRT) works only if the arrival is early enough in the evening to be worth anything.
Day 2: Land in Tokyo and do very little.
Check into a hotel in the Ginza or Shinbashi area. Walk Ginza, which Miho calls "the Champs-Élysées of Japan.” Then, go down to the food halls in the basement of a big department store like Mitsukoshi for what she describes as eye-candy displays of a wide variety of foods. That's the entire day, and it's deliberate; she would rather you arrive slowly than see one more thing.
Day 3: Tsukiji early, then one neighborhood.
The Outer Market is best between 7 and 10 a.m., and the eateries are still there even though the fish market itself moved years ago. After that, pick a single area and stay in it: Asakusa and Kappabashi, or the Shibuya through Harajuku through Omotesando to Meiji Shrine stretch, or the Imperial Palace. Pick one and let the other two go.
Day 4: Odawara, then a hot spring inn in Hakone.
A bullet train out of Tokyo Station reaches the castle town of Odawara in about half an hour. Miho's preferred alternative is the scenic Romancecar train from Shinjuku, which takes roughly an hour and a half and costs meaningfully less; she thinks the ride earns the extra time.
Odawara Castle is a reconstruction of a 15th-century original that reads like a history museum, with good restaurants and sweet shops all around it. Then, take a short train into Hakone Yumoto for a night at an onsen ryokan, which is a traditional hot spring inn.
Her instruction here is the one I'd underline twice for anyone doing this the first time: look for a ryokan that serves regional dinner and breakfast in your room. That in-room service is most of what makes it a ryokan stay rather than a hotel with a very nice bath, and she calls it the full omotenashi experience.
Day 5: Bullet train to Kyoto
Check in for two nights.
Day 6: Kyoto
Kyoto all day, and nothing else.
Day 7: Out through Osaka, or back to Tokyo.
From Kyoto Station, the Haruka airport train runs direct to Osaka Kansai (KIX) in about an hour and a half. Miho notes the KIX departures for the States leave in the early evening, so it's a workable last day.
If your return flies out of Tokyo instead, there's time to take the bullet train back and catch a late departure from HND; she'd skip NRT here, since it adds an hour to the back end of a day that's already long.
Why She Still Sends You to Hakone
Miho's own twist on the standard route is the Odawara and Hakone detour. "Japan being a volcanic archipelago, you can find lovely onsen ryokan EVERYWHERE in Japan and there are so many other places I would recommend."
Hakone isn't her favorite. It's the one closest to Tokyo by bullet train, and it happens to sit on the way to Kyoto, and on a five-night trip that's the whole argument.
The Shortcut She Turns Down
You can fly Tokyo to Osaka in about an hour for roughly what the bullet train costs, which buys you more time in Kyoto. Miho knows that and turns it down anyway, and her reason has nothing to do with money:
To visit Japan and never feel "the thrill of Shinkansen," or watch Mt. Fuji go by out the window, "would be like not going to Japan at all."
I love trains. I 100% get what she’s saying.
Bottom Line
This one is for a first-timer with one week, no flexibility, and a West Coast departure. It's a conventional route with one good detour, and Miho would be the first to tell you it's the bare minimum.
If you take two things from her email, take these. One: count the nights instead of the days, because seven of them turns into five. And two: leave the first two mornings alone until you know what your body is going to do with a nine-hour time change.
Thank you, Miho. 🙇‍♀️
