Weak Yen Makes Japan Travel Cheap

By xy @ Adobe Stock

According to Dave Seminara, Americans suffering from years of Bidenflation can find some vacation relief in Japan, where a weakened yen has made prices cheaper in dollar terms. He writes:

I spent my last afternoon in Tokyo stocking up on snacks and feasting on cheap and delicious conveyor belt sushi, in anticipation of characteristically criminal airport concession prices. But when I made my way past Haneda Airport’s Rodeo Drive-esque esplanade of luxury shops — does anyone really buy a $10,000 Omega watch on their way to their gate? — I was in for a surprise.

Bottles of water, iced tea and other soft drinks were less than $1 in airport vending machines, just like everywhere else in the country. I wasn’t hungry, but when I realized that I could buy a plate of yakisoba with shrimp, pork and squid for the yen equivalent of $6 and six takoyaki (essentially balls of fried octopus) for $4.75, I ordered both. Like everywhere else in Japan, I wasn’t asked to tip, and if I’d left one, it would have been considered an insult. The airport food court even had cups of free ice water. Boarding a flight home was never so difficult.

I’m a self-described pathological traveler who has been traveling the world for three decades. But I’d purposely avoided Japan because of its reputation for high prices until I finally pulled the trigger this year, as the yen has fallen to historic lows against the dollar. Traveling with my wife and teenage sons in June, we spent eight nights in Tokyo and nearly three additional weeks riding the rails to other destinations around Honshu, Japan’s largest island. I expected to love the snowcapped Japanese Alps in Kamikochi and the UNESCO World Heritage sites we visited in Kyoto, Nara and Koyasan, and they didn’t disappoint. But what surprised me was how addictive Tokyo is and how well we ate for so little there and everywhere else in Japan.

I rarely prioritize spending time in big cities, and megacities have never been my thing, so my Tokyo expectations were modest. With a metro-area population of 37 million, it’s the world’s largest city, and planning a visit there can be intimidating given the dizzying array of attractions and the distances between them. We tackled Tokyo’s geography problem by spending the first four nights of our trip in Ueno at the family-friendly Mimaru hotel chain, near the city’s best museums and the historic Asakusa neighborhood, and the last four nights in buzzing Shibuya, in West Tokyo, where we enjoyed some of the best people-watching and aimless wandering we’ve experienced anywhere.

Tokyo’s subway, with its startlingly punctual, air-conditioned trains, is arguably the best in the world. Thanks to the weak yen, a seventy-two-hour subway pass currently costs less than $10 and, with a little help from Google Maps, we were able to get nearly anywhere we wanted to go. Even better, the trains are spotlessly clean, quiet (the Japanese, bless them, don’t yak on their mobile phones or converse loudly in public), and I never once encountered a panhandler, a busker or any other public nuisances. There are comparatively few homeless people in Tokyo, and those who do sleep on the streets aren’t allowed to run amuck as they are in some US cities. We wouldn’t let our kids ride the subway in New York or other big American cities alone, but we did so in Tokyo several times because the city seemed very safe.

I’m lukewarm on sushi in the States, but I couldn’t get enough of it in Japan. I fell in love with three sushi chains in Tokyo — Sushizanmai, Kura and Sushiro. At the latter two, we could feast on a dizzying array of nigiri for less than $10 a head, all ordered via iPad and whizzed out to us on conveyor belts at about twenty to thirty mph. One night, I walked by a Kura branch at around 11 p.m., and when I noticed it was open, ate a second dinner alone, consisting of seven plates of sushi, a beer and a dessert. It cost the equivalent of $12 and took about fifteen minutes: I was in and out before my family suspected a thing! Plates of katsu, soba, udon, ramen and other mouthwatering Japanese treats rarely cost us more than $10 per person anywhere we went.

Read more here.

Recent yen-dollar exchange rates have been at levels not seen since the early 90s.