Japan for Backpackers & Budget Travelers

About this book

Japan has a reputation as an expensive country — earned almost entirely by its most expensive version: the famous hotel, the fastest train, the celebrated restaurant, the peak week. Underneath that version runs another Japan, the one its own students, pilgrims and grandparents use: cheap, punctual, nourishing and kind. This guide maps it in 200 scenes, each audited on a single measure — fit for travelling far on little. Hostel dorms and capsule pods, night buses and slow tickets, supermarket discount hours and standing noodle counters, free observation decks and riverbank evenings, prefectures where yen goes further and the calendar weeks when prices fall: every entry shows what is at stake, how the cheap version works in practice, and the seasons and hours when it costs least. Prices and rules change, so no fare or fee is asserted as a fixed fact; instead, every entry points to the official source for its subject — while the durable part, the design of a cheap trip, is guaranteed in full.