The main issues with hiking in Japan are – Transport, Navigation, Language and finding food suitable for hiking. Which of course are the main problems with hiking in most unfamiliar countries.
We are using the Lonely Planet – Japan and Hiking in Japan books. The hiking one is no longer in print, so we have an old copy and a pdf of the most recent one.
Transport
Hiring a car and driving is quite do-able as the road rules are pretty much the same as Oz and they drive on the left. We used an on line car hire rentalcars.com to do the booking and payment as it’s all in English. You still have to sign your life away when you pick the car up and there is a 50,000 yen ($500) excess you have pay if you have an accident. This is on top of the usual insurance. You also need an international license that you get before you leave, $80 from any RACV office.
The bus and train system is fantastic. Most of the walks are accessible by bus. The staff are all really helpful and some speak a little English. All timetables can be accessed from Hyperdia. The web site says there is an App as well. I tried this on Android – this is only available to phones set up for Japan. You basically have to reset your phone to factory defaults and pick Japan as the country for Play Store. So not really an option.
Navigation
All of the maps for Japan are in Japanese, so unreadable, by me anyway. The two scenarios we had to deal with were driving a hire car and hiking.
For driving you can hire a car with a GPS that supports English, which sounds good, and it is in English, the menus that is, the maps are NOT. To make things more complex the Japanese do not use number/street/town to create an address. They use Number/Area/Town, so your house has a number in an area not a particular street.
To deal with all of this for driving we use Google Maps as they have the English translations for most place names, shops etc. For hiking we use the OSM And+ app. This uses Open Street Maps which has contours, hill shading, points of interest and most tracks. We also use this in Oz as it is more up to date than the printed maps. It’s $10 a year subscription to access and download any map in the world.
Language
It would be really useful if we could speak some Japanese. As it is we can do the basics – hello, sorry, thank you, it was delicious. Fortunately pronunciation is not a problem, unlike Chinese, Vietnamese etc. The biggest problem for us is the written language, Kanji is just not decipherable by someone who wasn’t even good at English. Fortunately most signage is in Kanji and Romaji (English interpretation) so we can get around OK.
Food
There are supermarkets in most large towns. These are comparable to a medium Coles or Woolies. Look for Max Value, Cookie, A-Coop and others. There are 7-Eleven and Lawson stores (Competitor to 7-Eleven) everywhere, similar to their stores in Oz except they sell booze as well, which is very cheap in Japan. A bottle of spirits is about $10.00.
Supermarkets are usually under the railway station or bus station in the centre of town.
Breakfast
Cereal is almost non-existent. Powdered milk is available but you will need to speak Japanese or have it written down in Kanji to find it. Locally it’s called dried milk, we found a couple of Brits that were here to teach English that Pauline got to write it down for us. We did find some granola that is loaded with sugar and tasted like co-co pops. The best solution we have found is noodles and sachets of miso paste.
Lunch
We bought in dried dips from home and have found crackers in the supermarkets – Salada, Ritz.
Dinner
We bought in a lot of dehydrated meals from Oz. They won’t let in beef jerky or any fresh fruit or veggies. We declared that we had food with us and waffled that it was all dried and no fresh stuff and they let us through. They didn’t even look at it. We were prepared to just throw it all in the bin if needed. The main focus of customs seems to be drugs.
For carbs we bought in some Deb mashed spuds. You can also buy mashed spuds here, again you will need it written down in Kanji to find it in a supermarket. There is a limited range of Pasta available in most supermarkets.
Money
As of 2016 the best way to do money is a Travel Money Card. It has the least amount of fees. Either Visa or Mastercard. The banks in Oz all seem to have a version of it. We use Commonwealth Bank. You transfer money from your normal account to the travel money card in the currency you want. The exchange rate is what is going at the time. This makes it easy to top up as required and there is no delay. The card will work in any ATM that supports international cards. In Japan there is one in every post office and every town seems to have a post office. The ATMs are usually in a foyer at the front of the post office, they are not open late at night so you need to plan around this.
Internet
All the hotels, B&Bs etc have free Wi-Fi. You need your own device – phone, tablet, laptop.
The Japanese Govt. have a restriction on SIMs for mobile phones for making phone calls. You cannot get one without a permanent address in Japan. You can hire a phone at the airport to get around this, they are not cheap. You can however buy a SIM for data only, usually 7 or 30 days. These are available at the airports and big electronics stores in major cities. Impossible to find anywhere else – buy SIMs at the airport! The best service is NTT Docomo which is the equivalent of Telstra in Oz.Â
Places to go
Kamikoci – camp up river at www.tokusawen.com then further up the valley.
Trip over the top from below Kamikoci, good loop. Catch chair lift up
Stuff to bring
Insect repellent – Off
Anti-Histamine – Claratine
Update from most recent trip Sep-2019
Customs no longer ask about food or any declaration regarding food when arriving. So bring your own dehydrated food for all hikes.
Hiking gear is available in most major cities. It is not cheap, and only in smaller sizes, so bring all your gear from home. You can get gas canisters at most hardware stores.
We tried two different SIMs for internet. Both claimed to be re-selling DOCOMO. The unlimited download SIM I used had very poor coverage in remote areas. The 2Gb download SIM Pauline had worked pretty much everywhere. Free Wi-Fi is everywhere so no need for unlimited downloads. Avoid the third party SIMS!
Most businesses including JR (Japan Rail) now accept credit/debit cards so no need to carry around wads of cash.
We use Booking.com to book hotels. The Japanese do not like you just rocking up so much better to do the booking in advance. We also used AirBnb without any issues in major cities. Some hotels still offer smoking rooms. We don’t smoke and wanted to avoid the smells so always picked non-smoking.