Day 0 – Arrival in Tokyo – Part 1
Well, the most important/difficult thing for people who do not reside in Japan is actually getting to Japan. For me this happened flying to Haneda International Airport in Tokyo with Air France trough KLM from London to Tokyo via Paris.
I ended up booking my trip last minute as I was at point of my life in which I had two weeks free and did not have any major projects or work to be done. So as everyone I hopped onto Google and started to explore where I should go to.
Regarding the actual flight – let just say that it was long! However, one thing that turned out to be a positive for me was the arrival time in Haneda (HND) airport in Tokyo which happened to be midday; I will come back to the reason why this was the case shortly.
All in all, it took about 1 hour from landing and collecting my bags and clearing immigration. Although there was one pesky thing that annoyed me was that as a tourist which you will know if you travel a lot to foreign countries is having to fill out an arrivals card – Japan is a such a modern country but having to fill that form albeit short was something unexpected. To end on a positive note regarding the arrivals form – the visa stamp had a picture of Mt Fuji on it.
Moving on, the first thing anyone should do after collecting bags and clearing immigration is to either have printed out or screenshots of directions already on their phone to their accommodations. Roaming is expensive in Japan! If you did not do that prior to your arrival, you can connect to the free Wi-Fi or as second option which I highly recommend is to get yourself a data SIM card from the airport shop or any convenience store you come across.
At this point I have been awake for 16 hours since after getting out of the airport I decided to get myself a “SUICA” card – which essentially is a prepaid credit card. You load up money on to it via the ticket machines and use it for the Metro in Tokyo. But the SUICA card is more than that! It can be used in shops, vending machines, restaurants, and any other places you can imagine. Of course, the drawback is that these cards are limited to regions – SUICA & PASMO will work within Tokyo but if you go outside of it you will need to purchase the regional card. In a sense it’s a weird situation, Japan is very cash dependent but at the same time very integrated with these cards but not regular credit/debit cards such as VISA, Mastercard or AMEX.
Getting around Tokyo is not too difficult, most street signs and directions are written in English and with Google Maps it is very difficult to get lost. I ended up taking the Monorail into central Tokyo to get to my accomondation at Wise Owl Hostel in Hatchobori neighbourhood in Tokyo (unfortunately this location is now closed as of November 2021 due to the pandemic, but they have other branches across Tokyo).
