Three Weeks in Japan, and What It Taught Me About Spending Less
We did Japan in a little under three weeks, just the two of us, with one set of flights booked and basically nothing locked in between them. Tokyo, Hokkaido, Hiroshima, Onomichi, Kyoto, Osaka, Okinawa. We knew the order and we knew the dates we had to be on a plane. Everything else we figured out as we went.
This isn’t a highlight reel. There are plenty of those already, and most of them just point you at the same fifteen spots everyone else hits. What I actually want to get down is what this trip taught me about traveling well without spending like a tourist, because the longer we were over there, the more obvious it got: the best parts of the trip and the most expensive parts of the trip were almost never the same thing.
Some of the days were straight-up chaos. We missed trains, had an Uber cancel on us, sprinted through an airport, and at one point stood in front of a completely empty check-in desk reading a sign about a typhoon. I’ll get to those, but I’ll keep them quick, because they’re not really the point. The point is the seventy-dollar inn outside Kyoto that smoked the reservation-only omakase in Tokyo. The walk-in tempura counter in Kushiro run by literally one guy. The bike route nobody told us about except one friend who’d actually lived there.
Here’s roughly where we went and in what order. The back-and-forth is real. We did not optimize this one.
Jump to a region: Tokyo · Hokkaido · Hiroshima · Onomichi · Kyoto · Osaka · Okinawa · What stuck with me
Tokyo
We gave Tokyo about three and a half days, and honestly the first night barely counts. Getting from the airport to our Airbnb was its own little adventure. We ended up on a late train because Everett left a bag sitting in customs, we’d been traveling for something like twenty hours, and by the time we actually got in we were way behind whatever loose plan we’d made. The smart move would’ve been to crash. We did not do the smart move. We dumped our stuff, went and walked around Shinjuku and Shibuya for a couple of hours anyway, found soba at a place called Ramen Torisoba, and then forced ourselves to stay up until eleven so the jet lag couldn’t get a foothold the next day. It worked, mostly.
The next morning we did the full tourist thing, and I’m not going to apologize for it, because some of that stuff is famous for a reason. Imperial Palace and the gardens early, then we bounced around a few shrines, Meiji Jingu and Senso-ji being the big ones. By around four we’d switched into full shopping mode and basically didn’t stop until the stores kicked us out. Muji, Onitsuka Tiger (yeah, basic, still great), Uniqlo, a couple of tiny Tokyo-only shops you can’t find anywhere else. We spent real money and an absurd amount of time just standing in lines. Worth it. Mostly.
That night was the big reservation, the one we’d basically planned the whole day around: omakase at Sushi Hajime in Shibuya. And look, it was genuinely good. I want to be clear about that part. But it wasn’t close to the best meal of the trip, and I kept chewing on that for the next two weeks. We built a whole evening around the fancy thing, and the fancy thing was just fine. File that away, it comes up again.
Our last Tokyo day we kept totally loose on purpose, and that ended up being the move. We wandered Ginza, poked around the electronics district, I grabbed a few camera bits I’d been needing, and we landed at Age 3, this pastry cafe that blew up on TikTok. No agenda, no list, just walking around seeing what we’d run into. Easily the best of our three days there, and we didn’t plan a single minute of it.
Hokkaido
Hokkaido is where the trip got harder and better at the same time. Day one was the single most stressful stretch of the entire three weeks. We had a 7:30 flight, and somewhere in there we missed two different trains, our Uber cancelled, we were dragging way too many suitcases, and we cleared the security line at the exact moment they started boarding. We made that flight on pure Japanese efficiency and nothing else. I won’t dwell on it. It worked out, it turned into a good story, and honestly that’s what most of those days are for anyway.
Once we picked up the rental car, the whole island kind of opened up. We posted up at Lake Shikotsu for an hour just taking it in, then drove three and a half hours out to Furano and crashed at the Prince Hotel. Most things were closed by the time we rolled in, so we ended up just eating at the hotel bar, which was unexpectedly great. The next day was Daisetsuzan National Park and the top of Mt. Asahidake, where you’re walking around actual geothermal vents steaming out of the ground at the summit. Then we crossed over to Sounkyo Gorge for the Ryusei and Ginga waterfalls. Completely different world, and it’s only a couple of hours from where we’d just been standing.
Then came Abashiri, and we took our sweet time getting there. We stopped at a local fox farm (a lot of foxes, a few raccoons, genuinely no notes), hit some farmers’ markets along the way, and pulled into this cape called Notoro Misaki that I ended up loving. Barely anyone around, trails running out past a lighthouse, and we straight up took a nap in a field next to it. Quick PSA from that nap: my buddy left his expensive drone somewhere out there and we never found it again. So yeah, build a little slack into the plan, but maybe also keep track of your drone. Dinner that night was at Yoshida Mihachi Shouten, and it’s on my Beli if you want the actual breakdown of what we ordered.
The Airbnb that night is one I keep thinking about. It was a handmade home, built by local people, all earthen and natural shapes with these outdoor-facing spaces, and modern in all the right spots. It’s one of those places where you remember the actual building, not just the view out the window.
Our last real Hokkaido stretch was Shiretoko, and it started with a dilemma. There was a forest walking tour and a nature cruise, but bear sightings and weather had thrown the whole schedule off, and the timing meant we basically had to pick one. We went with the forest walk first just to get something under our belt for the day. Five lakes, some cool birds and plants, perfectly nice, though honestly a little underwhelming next to everything else we’d been seeing. So we pushed the cruise to the next day, and that one was absolutely worth the shuffle: a whole pod of orcas plus some whales off in the distance, even with the rain coming down hard enough to wreck the visibility. The Airbnb that night had a private onsen out back, and you can probably guess where most of the evening went.
The night before we flew out, in Kushiro, we walked into what might genuinely be the best meal of the whole trip. It’s a tempura omakase spot called Tempura Ryori Sakura, and it’s basically one guy running the entire thing. We didn’t have a reservation, didn’t really know what was going on, and he waved us in anyway, poured us a local sake, and proceeded to take us through ten to fifteen courses of locally caught seafood and local meat. We lost count somewhere in the middle. It cost a fraction of the Tokyo omakase, and it wasn’t even a contest.
Hiroshima
Hiroshima was mostly a travel day, so I’ll keep it like one. Three or four hours in the car to New Chitose Airport, a flight south, then a bus to the hotel, some really solid Japanese barbecue downtown, and an early night. That was kind of the whole point of Hiroshima for us. It was the hinge between the north and one of the best days of the entire trip, which was waiting for us the next morning.
Onomichi
If a budget traveler asked me for the one day to copy off this whole trip, I’d send them straight to Onomichi. And the funny part is that almost nobody told us about it. One friend, who’d actually lived in Japan for a few years, mentioned that this little town east of Hiroshima basically runs on a cycling economy, and that was the entire recommendation. No listicle, no guidebook, no top-ten anything. Just one person who genuinely knew what he was talking about.
We took an early Shinkansen over, dropped our bags at Hotel Cycle (which is a very cool spot in its own right), and picked up a commuter bike I’d reserved a month or two in advance. The route is the Shimanami Kaido, about 70 km across six islands, and we did roughly half of it, three islands worth. You’re riding over these bridges that string the islands together, cutting through forest and tiny villages, stopping whenever you feel like it for ice cream or fresh lemonade somebody’s selling on the side of the road. Mukai Shima first, which is mostly city. Then a climb up to the Innoshima bridge and into the best stretch of the day, all jungle and forest and little villages. Then over to Ikuchijima, where the inclines finally pay off and you get these long fast descents, and we wrapped up at Setoda Port with its sunset beach and the Kosanji temple, which has some genuinely wild Buddhist architecture and pagodas.
The town itself is packed with little shops worth poking around in, and you keep running into cyclists from all over the world who came for the exact same thing you did. We capped the night back at Hotel Cycle with some local lemon craft beer, because this whole area is completely obsessed with lemons and honestly it works, and a conversation with my buddy that just kept going for a couple of hours. Easy day to recommend, basically impossible to forget. I’d come back and do the full 70 km in a heartbeat.
Kyoto
More early starts, because that was just the theme of this whole trip. We were out the door at 5:45 to catch the Shinkansen, picked up a rental car once we got into Kyoto, and spent the day working through the temples. Nanzen-ji, Toji, then out to Arashiyama. The bamboo grove is absolutely worth seeing, and it’s also the one spot on the whole trip I’d actually warn you about, because it was packed. The crowds were genuinely the only downside. Go early, or go off-season if you can swing it. Same exact place, totally different day, and it mostly comes down to what hour you show up.
Since we had the car, we kept driving out to Kayabuki no Sato, this small thatched-roof village out in the middle of nowhere, and that’s the part I’d really send you to. The drive out there was gorgeous. The drive back was something else entirely. We came back a different way, through an emptied-out stretch of Kyoto with abandoned towns and old temples, and then onto what was technically a two-way highway through the forest but was realistically wide enough for maybe one car. Easily the scariest and most fun stretch of road we drove the entire trip.
We ended that night at Ryoso Chatani, and this is the one I tell people about. On paper it’s a two-star hotel that ran us about seventy bucks. In reality it was the best stay of the trip, full stop. It’s run by an elderly couple and their son, and at dinner they called us down and cooked us hot pot, we soaked in their own homemade onsen, and we slept on tatami mats. They didn’t speak much English and still bent over backwards to take care of us. This is basically the entire thesis of the trip wrapped up in one booking: the cheapest room we paid for was the one I’d go back for first.
After dinner we drove out to Fushimi Inari Taisha, the thousand torii gates you’ve definitely seen on Instagram. At night it’s a completely different place. Almost nobody around, dead quiet, and you can hike all the way up to the overlook with Kyoto lit up below you. Same gates, same price (still free), completely different experience, purely because of when we showed up. If you do one thing in Kyoto after dark, make it this.
If I did it over I’d give Kyoto two or three nights instead of cramming it into one. We’ll be back for it, probably off-season.
Osaka
Osaka was our one fully planned splurge day, and no regrets. After dropping the rental car and spending a solid chunk of time figuring out why Everett’s transit card refused to work, we checked into the Candeo Tower Hotel and headed straight for Universal Studios Japan. It was pouring rain, which actually played out in our favor. We’d bought tickets with eight fast passes built in, and rain plus skip-the-line meant we were walking onto most rides in ten or fifteen minutes.
A few of the bigger rides were closed because of the weather, and Nintendo World was fine but a little oversold for what it is. The real fun was Harry Potter world and the Hollywood section, just pure childhood nostalgia hitting all at once. We closed the night out on the hotel’s rooftop, starting with a couple of matcha milks that turned out to be alcoholic (good to know), and then the highest infinity pool in the world, plus saunas and a bunch of indoor and outdoor pools at different temperatures. After two straight weeks of go, go, go, that was exactly the right way to just stop for a night.
Okinawa
Getting to Okinawa kicked off with a bit of a scare. We showed up to a completely unstaffed Jetstar check-in desk with a sign taped to it about a typhoon cancelling flights. Ours wasn’t on the list, so we were just kind of stuck there, confused, waiting it out with a handful of equally confused passengers until staff finally showed up (thank god). After that it was a short flight, a rental car, and a hidden little Airbnb tucked into the forest near Nanjo on the eastern side of the island, with a host who walked us around the whole place himself. We grabbed takoyaki and udon for dinner, stocked up on snacks for the morning, and called it early, because the next day was the thing I’d been most nervous about the entire trip: our first real day of diving since getting certified.
The diving turned out to be the best thing we did, full stop. I was nervous going in, because everyone else on the boat looked like they’d done this a hundred times and I very much had not. But our guide George completely flipped that and made the whole thing fun instead of terrifying. We dove off the Kerama Islands and it was just unreal: massive coral, swim-throughs, little caves, and a full day of slowly getting comfortable with the gear and dialing in my buoyancy.
The second dive day was somehow even better. It started off cloudy and humid and a little ominous, then cleared up the second we got on the boat. George had his twenty-year-old assistant Taron along this time, and the two of them clearly have this whole big brother, little brother dynamic going, cracking jokes the entire way out. We saw turtles, sea snakes, slugs, anemones, and more reef fish than I could possibly name. At one point we spent a solid ten minutes and an absolutely irresponsible amount of our air just bouncing around a giant sand patch like astronauts goofing off on the moon.
That second day is also where the trip handed me the thing I keep coming back to.
What stuck with me
A few lessons, said plainly, because leaving them implied would feel like a cop-out.
The most expensive thing you book is rarely the best memory. The Tokyo omakase we planned around was good and completely forgettable. The seventy-dollar family inn outside Kyoto and the one-guy tempura counter in Kushiro are the two things I’d fly back for tomorrow. If you’re traveling on a budget, that’s not some consolation prize. That’s the actual strategy. Spend your attention, not your money.
Friction is part of it. The Hokkaido morning and the Okinawa typhoon desk were miserable in the moment, and they’re the stories I tell first now. You can’t optimize a trip into being memorable. Leave some slack in the plan and let a little of it go sideways.
Locals beat listicles. Onomichi came from one friend who’d actually lived in Japan, and it was the best day of the trip. Arashiyama came from everyone, and it was the most crowded. Same country, two completely different outcomes, all depending on who you listen to.
Timing is a free upgrade. Fushimi Inari at night versus in the middle of the day is the same place at the same price and a completely different experience. Picking the right hour is the cheapest upgrade you can make to almost anything.
And then there’s the one I didn’t see coming, which hit me underwater on the very last dive:
A lot of what I’ve gotten into over the last couple of years has been intense, or at least takes some level of vigilance. A hard hike, climbing up a steep boulder, that kind of thing. But this was pure meditation. Being down there watching these creatures glide through the water while you just breeze past is so calming. It’s a good reminder to actually look around and smell the roses every once in a while, which is something I constantly forget on trips like these, where I’m trying to absorb everything as fast as humanly possible because I’m afraid of missing something I might not get back to. But there’s something beautiful in the patience, and I think it’s pretty underrated. Yeah, you might miss a little of what a place has to offer. But the sheer vastness of these places, and the fact that they’re always changing, is exactly what makes them so exciting.
That’s the whole trip, honestly. We moved fast, we spent a little where it actually counted, and the best moments were the ones we almost blew right past. I’ll be back. Off-season, slower, with a little more Japanese in my back pocket. And I’ll still be the guy booking the seventy-dollar room over the one with the reservation list.