7 Days in Japan: Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto, Nara and Osaka
Seven days in Japan is the classic Golden Route: two nights Tokyo, one in Hakone, two in Kyoto, then Osaka, with Nara as a half-day from Kyoto. It is the shortest trip that covers all of it without a wasted day. Skip the 7-day JR Pass at ¥50,000 — this route's fares come to roughly ¥17,000.
7 days in Japan at a glance
| Day | Based in | What you do | Getting there |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tokyo | Arrive, Get Moving, and Spend the Evening in Asakusa | Airport to central Tokyo: Haneda 30–45 min by Keikyu or Tokyo Monorail |
| 2 | Tokyo | One Long Loop Across Tokyo, Then the City at Night | — |
| 3 | Hakone | Out to Hakone: Lake Ashi, Owakudani and the First Sight of Fuji | Tokyo → Hakone: Odakyu Romancecar, Shinjuku to Hakone-Yumoto in about 85 min |
| 4 | Kyoto | Down the Tokaido to Kyoto, and Fushimi Inari After Dark | Hakone-Yumoto → Odawara 15 min |
| 5 | Kyoto | Kyoto at Both Ends of the Day, With the Middle Left Alone | — |
| 6 | Osaka | Nara in the Morning, Osaka by Evening | Kyoto → Nara about 45 min on the Kintetsu limited express from Kyoto Station |
| 7 | Osaka | Osaka Castle, One Last Meal, and Out Through Kansai | Osaka → Kansai International: Nankai Rapi:t from Namba about 38 min, or JR Haruka from Shin-Osaka about 50 min |
Seven days is the shortest trip that lets you see both halves of Japan properly — the modern eastern capital and the old imperial one — without spending your holiday on platforms. It works because the Tokaido corridor is the best-connected 500 kilometres of railway on earth: Tokyo to Kyoto is a little over two hours, Kyoto to Osaka is under half an hour, and Nara sits forty-five minutes from either. You move base three times in a week, which is the right number. Four would be too many.
The plan below gives you two full days in Tokyo, a night in Hakone under Mount Fuji, two days in Kyoto, a half-day in Nara and a final day in Osaka before you fly home from Kansai. It is built around one unglamorous decision that makes the whole week work: you send your suitcase from your Tokyo hotel straight to your Kyoto hotel and cross the country with a day bag. That single move is why the Hakone night is a pleasure rather than a logistical problem, and it costs about the price of two coffees and a beer.
We have been honest about pacing. Day three and day six are the two long ones, and we say so. Nothing here assumes you are up at six every morning or that you will enjoy your ninth temple. If a day looks thin to you, the tours linked under it are the ones we would actually add — not filler. And where seven days is genuinely not enough for something — Hiroshima, in particular — we tell you to leave it out rather than ruin two other days trying to squeeze it in.
First-time visitors with a standard week of annual leave who want Tokyo and Kyoto done properly, plus a real look at Mount Fuji, rather than a checklist sprint through six cities.
Arrive, Get Moving, and Spend the Evening in Asakusa
Almost every long-haul flight lands in Tokyo in the afternoon, which means day one is really a half day, and the fastest way to ruin a seven-day trip is to plan a full one. Clear immigration, pick up a pocket wi-fi or activate your eSIM, and get straight into the city. From Haneda you are in central Tokyo in thirty to forty-five minutes. From Narita it is a real journey: the Keisei Skyliner reaches Ueno in about forty-one minutes, the Narita Express takes roughly eighty-five minutes to Shinjuku, and the airport limousine bus is slower but drops you at your hotel door with your bags, which after eleven hours in a seat is worth something.
Drop your luggage, shower if the room is ready, and then go outside before jet lag decides for you. Asakusa is the right first stop: Senso-ji is Tokyo's oldest temple, the Nakamise approach is at its best after the day-trip coaches have left, and the whole area is compact enough that you can walk it slowly. A guided half-day is genuinely useful on this particular afternoon because it removes every decision from a brain that is running on airline sleep, and a local guide will steer you to the Sumida riverbank for the Skytree view rather than the queue everyone else joins.
Eat early and badly-timed — a standing soba counter or a conveyor sushi place near your station — and go to bed when it is dark rather than when you are tired. Waking at four in the morning on day two is normal and not worth fighting; it is also the only week of your life you will happily be at a fish market at six.
Add a Suica to Apple Wallet on the plane and top it up with your card before you land — you walk straight past the ticket machines, and the same card works on Kyoto buses, Osaka's subway and Hiroshima's trams later in the week.
One Long Loop Across Tokyo, Then the City at Night
Tokyo is not a city you ‘do’ — it is thirteen million people spread across dozens of centres, and the mistake first-timers make is trying to tick off six districts by subway and seeing nothing but stations. The better version of day two is a single guided line drawn across the city: the old east around Asakusa and the low-rise Yanaka backstreets, the moat and pine trees of the Imperial Palace grounds in the middle, and then west to Meiji Shrine's forest and the teenage chaos of Harajuku. Done as one continuous route with someone who knows the connections, that is a six-hour day and it makes sense of the map in a way that a list of sights never does.
Break in the middle rather than pushing through. A department store basement — the depachika under Isetan in Shinjuku or Takashimaya in Nihonbashi — is the best cheap lunch in the city and an attraction in its own right. If the weather turns, swap the afternoon leg for a neighbourhood you can eat your way along: Togoshi Ginza in the south is Tokyo's longest shopping street and about as far from the tourist trail as you can get while still being twelve minutes from Shibuya.
Save the night for the thing Tokyo does better than anywhere: itself, lit up. A go-kart run through Shibuya Crossing and past Tokyo Tower is not a temple tour and we would not pretend otherwise — it is loud, touristic and completely brilliant, and it is the single most requested evening in our Tokyo inventory. The quieter alternative is a two-hour night bike ride through Omotesando, Roppongi and the Aoyama cemetery, which is the version we send couples on.
Street karting is only legal with a Japanese licence or a 1949 Geneva Convention International Driving Permit — and you must get the IDP in your own country before you fly, because it cannot be issued in Japan. If you did not bring one, book the night bike tour instead.
Out to Hakone: Lake Ashi, Owakudani and the First Sight of Fuji
This is the day that turns a city break into a trip. Hakone is a volcanic caldera an hour and a half from Shinjuku, and the classic loop — switchback mountain railway, cable car, ropeway over the sulphur vents at Owakudani, pirate ship across Lake Ashi, red torii standing in the water at Hakone Shrine — is one of the great half-days of Japanese travel. Go out mid-morning rather than at dawn; the loop takes four to six hours and the light on the lake is better in the afternoon anyway.
The comfortable way in is the Odakyu Romancecar from Shinjuku, which runs to Hakone-Yumoto in about eighty-five minutes with a reserved seat and, if you book early, the front row behind the driver's windscreen. The alternative is a Kodama or Hikari Shinkansen from Tokyo Station to Odawara in roughly thirty-five minutes, then fifteen minutes up the Hakone Tozan line. Either way, do not carry your suitcase up a mountain — see the tip.
Stay the night. Hakone as a Tokyo day trip means eleven hours of moving, and the entire point of the place is what happens after the day-trippers leave: a ryokan dinner served in your room, and an outdoor onsen bath in the dark. If Fuji has been hiding behind cloud all afternoon, look again at first light on day four — the mountain is most often visible in the first two hours after sunrise, and far more reliably in the dry, cold air of December to February than in a humid summer, which is the opposite of what most people assume.
Send your suitcase from your Tokyo hotel directly to your Kyoto hotel by takkyubin (Yamato TA-Q-BIN) the morning of day three — around ¥2,000–2,500 for a large case, arriving next day. You do the Hakone ropeways, the ryokan and the Shinkansen with a day bag, and the case is waiting at the Kyoto front desk when you check in on day four.
Down the Tokaido to Kyoto, and Fushimi Inari After Dark
Have breakfast, take one more bath, and use the morning for the part of Hakone the loop skips: the Open-Air Museum's sculpture lawns, or a marquetry studio in the hills where the yosegi-zaiku inlay work Hakone has made for two centuries is still cut by hand. Then come down to Odawara and turn west. Odawara to Kyoto is about two hours on a Hikari; the Nozomi is faster but not by enough to matter here, and the Kodama stops everywhere and is worth avoiding.
Sit on the right-hand side, Fuji passes about forty minutes out of Odawara, and you are in Kyoto by mid-afternoon. Check in, collect the suitcase you sent ahead, and resist the urge to start on temples — almost every major Kyoto site shuts its gates between four and five, and arriving at Kiyomizu-dera at 16:40 is how people end up saying Kyoto disappointed them.
Instead, do the one great Kyoto sight that has no closing time. Fushimi Inari's tunnel of vermilion torii is open around the clock and free, and after dark, lit by the shrine's own lamps with the crowds gone, it is a completely different place from the shoulder-to-shoulder photograph everyone brings home. Follow it with Nishiki Market's evening end or a food walk through the lanes off Pontocho, and you have had a proper first Kyoto night without pretending you had a full day.
Book the Odawara–Kyoto seat the night before through the JR Central smartEX app rather than queuing at the Odawara machines, and pick a D or E seat — the Fuji side going west.
Kyoto at Both Ends of the Day, With the Middle Left Alone
Kyoto has a crowding problem, and the honest answer to it is not a longer list of temples — it is different hours. The bamboo grove at Arashiyama, the approach to Kiyomizu-dera and the stone lanes of Ninenzaka are quiet, beautiful and photographable before eight in the morning, and close to unbearable between eleven and three. So take the city early: out at first light, two or three sites done properly while the coaches are still loading, and back to your hotel by lunchtime having seen more than most people manage in a day.
Then — and this is the part most itineraries will not tell you — stop. Take the early afternoon off. Sleep, sit in a kissaten with a hand-drip coffee, walk the Kamo riverbank, browse the knife shops on Teramachi. Kyoto in the middle of the day is the worst version of Kyoto, and you have a long day tomorrow. Trying to fill the gap with a fourth temple is exactly the over-packing that makes people come home from Japan exhausted.
Come back out in the evening. Gion Shirakawa's willows and lanterns along the canal, the alley kitchens of Pontocho, standing counters where the ordering is done for you — a food-led evening walk is the single best use of a Kyoto night, and unlike the daytime sights it improves as it gets darker. If you would rather be moving, an e-bike loop through the Higashiyama slopes covers ground the buses cannot at a time when the streets are finally empty.
Kyoto's city buses are the slowest way to move around Kyoto and the most crowded thing in the city. Use the Karasuma and Tozai subway lines, the Keihan and Hankyu railways along the river, and take taxis for the last kilometre — a cross-town fare is usually ¥1,000–1,500 split between two people.
Nara in the Morning, Osaka by Evening
Nara is a half-day, not an overnight, and anyone who tells you otherwise has a hotel to fill. Everything you came for sits inside one walkable park: Todai-ji's Great Buddha, fifteen metres of eighth-century bronze in the largest wooden building most people will ever stand in; the three thousand stone and bronze lanterns on the approach to Kasuga Taisha; the five-storey pagoda at Kofuku-ji; and roughly twelve hundred deer that have had the run of the place for a thousand years and will mug you for a cracker without embarrassment.
Go early, and mean it. The Kintetsu limited express from Kyoto takes about forty-five minutes and puts you a five-minute walk from the park, whereas the JR line leaves you further out. Deer Park at eight in the morning with mist still on the grass and the Nandaimon gate empty is one of the quiet highlights of a Japan trip; the same spot at noon is a coach park. A guided morning walk is worth it here specifically because the three sites are further apart than the map suggests and the connective tissue — why the deer are sacred, what Naramachi's merchant houses were for — is the interesting part.
By early afternoon you are done. Take the Kintetsu south to Osaka Namba, about forty minutes, drop your bag and let the city do the rest. Osaka is louder, flatter and much less polite than Kyoto, and after five days of shrines that is a relief. Dotonbori's neon and the covered arcades running north from Namba are a twenty-minute walk from most hotels, and dinner does not need booking.
This is the longest day of the week. If you are travelling with children or anyone who tires, cut Kasuga Taisha rather than Todai-ji and take the earlier train south.
Leave your suitcase in a coin locker at Kintetsu Nara station, not at your Kyoto hotel — the station sits at the park entrance, the large lockers take a cabin case for ¥700, and you collect it on your way through to Osaka instead of doubling back.
Osaka Castle, One Last Meal, and Out Through Kansai
Fly home from Kansai, not Tokyo. An open-jaw ticket into Haneda or Narita and out of KIX costs little or nothing more than a return, and it saves you the two-and-a-half-hour backtrack to Tokyo that otherwise eats your entire last day. If your airline has forced a Tokyo return on you, treat today as a travel day and do the castle first thing.
Osaka Castle is the right final sight: the reconstructed keep sits on the genuine seventeenth-century stonework, some of the base blocks weigh over a hundred tonnes, and the whole story of how the country was unified and then locked down for two and a half centuries happened here. Two to three hours with a guide covers the grounds, the shrine and the museum floors, and the plum and cherry groves in the outer moat are worth the walk in either direction.
Then eat. Osaka's own claim is kuidaore — to eat yourself into ruin — and the backstreet food walks off Namba do in three hours what would take you three days to find alone: takoyaki cooked properly rather than for tourists, kushikatsu with the no-double-dipping rule enforced, okonomiyaki that separates Osaka from Hiroshima. Do it as a late lunch and you will still make an evening flight.
From Namba, the Nankai Rapi:t reaches Kansai Airport in about thirty-eight minutes; the JR Haruka takes roughly fifty minutes from Shin-Osaka. Both need less padding than you think, but KIX check-in queues are long, so aim to be airside three hours before a long-haul departure.
If you are flying out of Tokyo, send your suitcase from your Osaka hotel to the airport by takkyubin the day before — same ¥2,000-ish, and you make the trip back up the Tokaido with a day bag and no fight for the oversized-luggage space behind row 20.
Planning this trip
The JR Pass does not pay for itself on this route
This is the single most expensive mistake made on a seven-day Japan trip. Price the actual legs: Tokyo to Odawara is roughly ¥3,700, Odawara to Kyoto about ¥11,000, Kyoto to Nara is on the Kintetsu (not JR) at about ¥1,200, Nara to Osaka around ¥600, and Kyoto to Osaka ¥580 if you do it. That is somewhere near ¥16,000–18,000 of long-distance travel for the whole week. A seven-day nationwide Japan Rail Pass costs ¥50,000 since the October 2023 price rise. It is not close. Buy individual tickets through the smartEX app, use an IC card for everything local, and put the ¥30,000 you just saved into a ryokan dinner in Hakone. The pass only starts to make sense when you add a Hiroshima return leg and then travel back to Tokyo to fly home — see our 9 and 10 day itineraries, where the maths genuinely changes.
Takkyubin: send the suitcase, carry a day bag
Yamato's TA-Q-BIN service will collect a suitcase from any hotel front desk and deliver it to any other hotel front desk in Japan, usually next day, for about ¥2,000–2,500 for a large case. Hand it over before about 15:00 and fill in the form at reception — staff at any business hotel will do it with you, and no English is required beyond the destination hotel's name. On this itinerary you use it once, on the morning of day three, sending Tokyo → Kyoto so that Hakone happens with an overnight bag. It removes the two genuinely miserable moments of a Japan trip: dragging a case through Shinjuku at rush hour, and discovering that Shinkansen seats behind row 20 with oversized luggage space must now be reserved in advance. Allow two days rather than one for anything sent to or from a mountain address such as Hakone.
IC cards work everywhere now
Suica, Pasmo and ICOCA are interchangeable across the whole country — a Tokyo-issued Suica taps you onto Kyoto buses, the Osaka Metro, Hiroshima trams and most convenience stores, and there is no reason to buy a second card. The easiest route is a digital Suica in Apple Wallet, which you can create and top up with a foreign card before you even fly; Android needs a Japanese-market handset to do the same, so Android users should buy a physical card at an airport machine on arrival. IC cards do not cover the Shinkansen fare itself — book those separately — but they do cover every local leg in this itinerary.
Hakone Free Pass and the Romancecar
The Hakone Free Pass covers the entire loop — Tozan railway, cable car, Owakudani ropeway, the Lake Ashi boats and the local buses — on one ticket, and the two-day version bought at Shinjuku is the one you want since you are staying overnight. The Odakyu Romancecar from Shinjuku is a separate reserved-seat supplement of around ¥1,200 on top and worth every yen: it is the comfortable, direct, no-changes way into the mountains, and the front-row seats behind the driver's windscreen sell out first. Book them online through Odakyu a few days ahead.
When to go, and the three weeks to avoid
Cherry blossom runs late March into the first week of April, and it is genuinely as good as promised — also the most expensive and crowded fortnight of the year outside the holidays. Autumn colour peaks in Kyoto in mid to late November and is, for our money, the better season: clearer skies, cheaper flights, fewer people than April. Avoid Golden Week (late April into the first week of May) and Obon (mid-August), when the whole country travels at once, Shinkansen reservations vanish and hotel prices double. Winter is the underrated choice: cold, dry, cheap, and by far the most reliable time to actually see Mount Fuji, because the summer haze that hides it for weeks at a time simply is not there.
What to book ahead, and what not to
Book: hotels (Kyoto sells out months ahead in April and November), the Hakone ryokan, any guided day with a private guide, and the Romancecar seats. Book about two to three months out for spring and autumn, three to four weeks is fine the rest of the year. Do not bother pre-booking: Shinkansen seats more than a few days ahead (there are trains every ten minutes and smartEX handles it from your phone), restaurants outside the very top tier, or any temple entry. The one non-obvious reservation is teamLab in Tokyo, which is timed-entry and does sell out.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is 7 days enough for Japan?
For Tokyo, Kyoto and one or two things either side of them, yes — comfortably. What seven days is not enough for is adding Hiroshima, Kanazawa or Takayama on top. Each of those turns a well-paced week into two days of travel plus a rushed look at everything else. If Hiroshima matters to you, take nine or ten days rather than trying to force it into seven.
Should I buy a 7-day JR Pass for this itinerary?
No. The individual fares for Tokyo–Hakone–Kyoto–Nara–Osaka come to roughly ¥16,000–18,000, against ¥50,000 for the nationwide pass. Buy point-to-point tickets in the smartEX app and use an IC card locally. The pass becomes worth considering only if you add Hiroshima and return to Tokyo to fly home.
Which direction should I travel, Tokyo first or Osaka first?
Tokyo first, almost always. Jet lag is worst on days one and two, and Tokyo is the easier city to be tired in — more English signage, more late-night food, and nothing that has to be done at dawn. It also lets you fly home from Kansai Airport, which saves a wasted final day backtracking.
Do I need to stay overnight in Hakone, or can I day-trip it from Tokyo?
You can day-trip it, and plenty of people do — it is about eleven hours door to door and you will be tired. But the ryokan dinner, the outdoor bath after dark, and the chance of a clear Fuji at sunrise are the reasons to go to Hakone at all. On a seven-day trip we would keep the overnight and cut something else.
Is Nara worth a whole day?
Not for most people. Todai-ji, Kasuga Taisha, Kofuku-ji and the deer sit within one walkable park and a strong half-day covers them. Nara only justifies a full day if you want the outlying temples — Horyu-ji, Yakushi-ji — or Naramachi's merchant quarter at a slow pace. Going early is what actually improves the visit, not going for longer.
How much should I budget for a week in Japan?
Excluding flights, a mid-range trip runs roughly ¥18,000–25,000 per person per day: ¥8,000–12,000 for a business hotel room split two ways, ¥5,000–7,000 on food if you eat well but not extravagantly, and the rest on transport and entries. Ryokan nights in Hakone with dinner and breakfast run ¥25,000–50,000 per person and are the one deliberate splurge in this plan.
What is the best month for this 7-day route?
Late November for autumn colour in Kyoto, or late March to early April for cherry blossom, with the caveat that both are busy and expensive. If you specifically want to see Mount Fuji from Hakone, come between December and February — the dry winter air makes the mountain visible far more reliably than in the hazy summer months.
Can I do this itinerary in reverse, flying into Osaka?
Yes, and it works well if your flights are cheaper that way — Osaka, Nara, Kyoto, Hakone, Tokyo, out of Haneda. The one thing that changes is jet lag: you will be at your most disorientated in Osaka and Kyoto rather than Tokyo, so keep the early-morning Nara and Kyoto starts for later in the week and put the easy days first.
Book the guided parts of this trip
Every tour above runs with a verified local operator.
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