Driving the Highways and Back Roads of Japan

Japan has one of the most extensive bus and rail systems in the world so that you can easily travel from one city to the next and if you choose to take busses or slow trains, the cost is relatively inexpensive. Japan also has very slow speed limits, expensive toll roads and bridges and cars that are driven on the left side of the road. All of those are very good reasons to avoid using a car, but there are many spectacular places in rural Japan that are most easily reached by car and if you aren't totally intimidated by driving in traffic or on narrow roads, you may augment some of your trip with auto travel.

When You Might Want to Rent a Car

If your itinerary is only between major cities: Tokyo, Nagoya, Sapporo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Hiroshima, avoid the stress that foreign drivers will initially experience in local traffic. The stress doesn't arrive from typical city chaos that you experience in major cities in North America or Europe; Japanese drivers are generally polite and cautious. Rather, it is simply that there are many drivers making local driving relatively slow, and never reaching anything above 30 miles an hour. For most of us, it becomes difficult to read signs written in Japanese as you approach them at 15 to 20 miles an hour, making the experience more difficult. So inside cities it is best to travel by subway, bus or even taxi. We learned from our Japenese host on our last trip to jump into a taxi for a short two to four mile ride when we were travelling as a foursome. The cost of the taxi was about comparable to the cost of bus fare for four.

The main reason to rent a car is to get to areas not along the eastern/southern Honshu corridor. If you are heading to the islands of Shikoku, Hokkaido or Kyushu, a car gives you an easy way to visit some of the most interesting sites in the region. Similarly, we enjoyed an automobile ride to the tourist resort of Amanohashidate driving through the scenic mountains that are the spine of Honshu.

Factors that influenced our decision to rent were:

• How many travelers were in the group and what rail fares to the destinations we might want to visit would cost
• How remote the locations we wanted to visit were and how much flexibility there was in public travel to those destinations
• How comfortable we felt about driving on narrow roads
• How much luggage we would be carrying.

If you aren't naturally comfortable driving, Japan may not be the best place to develop that ease. Compared to the highways and streets we drive in the US, most Japanese roads are significantly narrower. That sense is compounded by the fact that most of us are used to driving to the right of the median and the Japanese system confuses our sense of what is a safe distance. In our car, the person riding behind the driver was constantly wanting to encourage the driver to move further to the left. Unfortunately, there was usually a rail or curb that prevented the driver from doing that.

There were a handful of locations that we visited on our trip we would never have reached if we had been restricted to rail or bus travel. My husband's natural wanderlust puts us on country roads for the adventure of what we might find. When my son spotted a sign that indicated a temple was down one of those country roads, we started following the signs. We ultimately found ourselves on a dirt road with grass growing in the middle. The road ended at a small parking lot for a small, hand-hewn temple peacefully tucked among glorious pine trees. The spot makes neither tourist maps or guide books but made for a wonderful moment of relaxation and a picnic break. Similarly, the car gave us the freedom to stay at some places after the tourist crowds disappeared. You can reach virtually every significant temple or place of scenic beauty by bus, so that you don't have to feel short-changed if you decide you are not up for the drive. But when you rely on the bus, you get there during operating hours of the attraction. Not far from Kumumota, we arrived at a very popular and very beautiful gorge. Hundreds of cars and dozens of busses had delivered tourists to the banks of the stream. At every cascade, there were dozens of people enjoying the mist of the waterfalls. It is good to understand that the Japanese enjoy the grace of nature and have also learned to share those places with each other; you can't let the crowds diminish the beauty of any place. But one of the advantages of the car was that when the park officially closed, 95% of the visitors vanished. We were left standing along spectacular waterfalls glimmering in the light of a summer sunset--only us, some birds and the noise of running water.

The Cost of Driving

In general, the most expensive part of travel in Japan is transportation. We found hotels to be reasonably priced and could eat cheaply by going to family run restaurants or grabbing prepared food (Bento) from grocery or department stores. But the only way to keep transportation costs down is to get very organized in planning your routes so that you don't drive on toll roads more than you need.

A toll is collected on most of the long bridges in Japan and there is a charge for driving on the expressways. The primary reason to choose an expressway is to cover distance. Regularly, our experience was that local driving along the most populated sections of the roads (the east coast of Honshu and west coast of Shikoku) was relatively slow (under 35 miles per hour, often only twenty miles an hour) because of congestion. The toll roads, by comparison, are relatively uncrowded and the speed limit is about 55 miles per hour. The downside is that the cost is about $.50 mile on the expressway and about $1 per mile on the bridges. So it requires some careful planning to get from point A to point B at the optimal cost. When we were traveling with four people in the car, we knew we were still saving money over the cost of the train so it was easy to opt to use the expressway. The other thing to know is that you pay lower tolls if you are driving one of the subcompact cars. You also will find preferred parking for the mini-vehicles, and the added space you'll have driving through tight traffic lanes may be enough to encourage you to drive one of those little gas-efficient vehicles.

There are many Japanese car rental firms, most located at airports or train stations. Generally, the prices you pay will be about $65 per day for a compact. from an international firm like Avis, National or Budget . You can also make reservations through local firms who will charge about 30% less.

Whenever you are renting a car, you may be concerned about whether you need collision damage waiver insurance which costs about $10 per day if you buy it through a car rental agency. It is often offered through your credit card as either a free service or in the case of American Express, they will charge you a set amount per car rental if you charge to their card. Be sure you know what your credit card company offers, what coverage you have through your own auto insurance and what charges are tied to the various option; then make an appropriate decision.

You also need an international driving permit, which costs about $18.00 in the US and can be purchased at any AAA office, even by non-members. This document translates the general terms of your license into a dozen different languages and is valid for one year from the date it is issued.

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