Japan, by rail
Work out what your Japan trip actually costs.
Most Japan travel writing tells you a place is beautiful. It rarely tells you which ticket to buy, what it costs this month, or when the famous advice is simply wrong. We do the arithmetic instead. Starting with Nara.
Tools
Kansai rail pass calculator
Add up your real journeys and see whether a JR or Kintetsu pass beats paying cash.
Nara cherry blossom timing
Sixteen years of recorded bloom dates. Give it your travel window and see how often the blossom actually peaked in it.
Are the Nara deer dangerous?
The injury figures, how badly people are hurt and what they were doing at the time — translated from the Japanese originals.
JR or Kintetsu? Getting to Nara
Every route in from Kyoto, Osaka and the airport, compared on fare, time and the walk at the far end.
Why start with Nara?
Nara is one of the most visited places in Japan and one of the least written about in English beyond a single park. Almost everyone arrives on a half-day trip from Kyoto or Osaka, sees the deer and Todaiji, and leaves before finding Yoshino, Asuka, Horyuji or the oldest road in the country.
It is also small enough to cover completely. That matters, because we would rather be the best source on one prefecture than a thin source on all of them.
How we work
Every price on this site carries the date it was last checked against the operator's own website, and the link we checked it against. Where we publish a number, we publish where it came from. Where we have not verified something yet, we say so rather than guessing.
Photographs are our own. If we have not been somewhere, there is no photograph, and we will tell you that too.
Some links to passes and bookings earn a commission. That never changes the recommendation — the calculator on this site regularly tells people not to buy a pass at all, and that is the point of it.