Buy one rechargeable card at the airport, touch it on the gate, and stop thinking about fares for the whole trip.
Japan’s trains are the best reason it is easy to travel here. The fare system is the only confusing part. The answer is a rechargeable IC card. One card is sold at every station and works on almost every line in the country.
The cards have several names — Suica, Pasmo, Icoca and others. Any of them works almost everywhere in the country. They also pay for convenience stores, vending machines, lockers and many buses.
1. Buy it at a station machine and put ¥3,000–5,000 on it · 2. Touch the panel at the gate going in · 3. Find your platform number on the signs, which are in English · 4. Let people off before you get on · 5. Touch again on the way out. If you forget to touch in, the gate will stop you on the way out — go to the window and they will fix it, no fuss.
| Type | What it means | Extra ticket? | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local (kakueki) | Stops everywhere | No | Short hops within a city |
| Rapid (kaisoku) | Skips small stations. Same fare | No | Free speed — take it when it goes your way |
| Limited express (tokkyu) | Long distance, reserved seats | Yes — a surcharge on top of the fare | Reaching places with no shinkansen |
| Shinkansen | The high-speed network | Yes — separate ticket, not covered by an IC card alone | Between regions: Tokyo–Kyoto in about 2h 15m |
Rail passes can be excellent value or a waste, and it depends entirely on your route. A pass pays for itself on long journeys, not on city travel.
Two exclusions that catch almost everybody:
1. The Japan Rail Pass is not valid on Nozomi or Mizuho trains. Those are the fastest services on the Tokaido, Sanyo and Kyushu lines. With a pass you take a Hikari, Sakura or Kodama instead, which is slower, sometimes by an hour or more on a long run. Every journey time on this site is the fastest service; check which train your pass allows before you plan the day.
2. The pass covers JR only. It is not valid on any private railway — Kintetsu, Nankai, Meitetsu, Hankyu, Hanshin, Keio, Tobu, Odakyu, Nishitetsu and others — nor on the Tokyo Metro. Several places visitors most want to reach are on private lines: Ise, Nara, Hakone, Koyasan, the Fuji lakes and the Nagano monkeys among them. Some have a JR alternative that takes about the same time; some do not.
Roughly: one Tokyo–Kyoto return is close to the price of a short national pass; if you are staying in one region, a regional pass is usually better than a national one — Checked 2026-08-16.
City trains generally stop around midnight, and country lines stop far earlier — some rural and mountain lines have their last service in the early evening.