Tokyo drift: Japan’s once-pricey capital is now cost-effective… for Americans

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 pub- lic), 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 convey- or 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.

Tokyo was once reckoned to be one of the world’s most expensive cities but not now — if you have US dollars. Hotels still aren’t cheap, though if you only need one double bed or two twin beds, you’ll likely find the prices a bit cheaper than in comparable hotels in New York or LA. Even better, there were no expensive attractions in Tokyo or anywhere else in Japan. For example, I visited Tokyo’s outstanding National Museum of Western Art one morning for 500 yen, or just over $3. Almost every temple, shrine, palace, museum and castle in the country is similarly priced.

My wife took the boys to Universal Studios, near Osaka, one day while I went to Nara, the ancient capital, and she reported that the tickets and concessions are about half the price that they are at Universal Studios in Orlando. Aimless wandering in Tokyo, particularly after dark, was even more fun than sightseeing. I never got tired of people-watching on the bustling, neon-clad pedestrian boulevards and the smoke-filled alleyways of Shinjuku and Shibuya. There’s an infectious energy on Tokyo’s streets after dark that’s unlike anything else I’ve experienced elsewhere. I’m usually claustrophobic in crowds, but in Tokyo, the city is orderly enough that it all somehow works without ever feeling chaotic. And while Kyoto’s most popular attractions can feel overwhelmed by tourists, the Japanese always seem to outnumber tourists in Tokyo.

The highlight of our trip wasn’t just stuffing our faces and sopping up bargains though; it was the many remarkably kind Japanese people we met. The Japanese are famous for their manners, but the people don’t always get the credit they deserve in the West. After all, there is no legal gay marriage in Japan, and immigration levels are kept comparatively low (though rising at about 200,000 this year) for an affluent country.

I’ve often read that Japan’s immigration policy is indicative of a kind of national xenophobia. Every country has its share of xenophobes, but to paint the Japanese with that brush is unfair. Almost every Japanese city has volunteer guide clubs that match foreigners with free local guides. We took advantage of these free guides, who offer their time and knowledge because they enjoy meeting foreigners, in several cities, including Tokyo. Meeting local guides Michiko Kitaguchi in Kanazawa, Tommy Otsuka in Nikko, Yayoi Uchikata in Kyoto and Mitsuo Hattori and Yuko Hikimoto in Tokyo gave us an opportunity to get to know local people, see their favorite haunts and experience cities through their eyes.

The American media is currently pushing an “overtourism in Japan” line, particularly Kyoto, obsessing over the backlash to rising tourism numbers. But almost everyone we met in Japan was exceedingly helpful and welcoming. It’s true that Kyoto’s most popular attractions are jammed with tourists, but the city has 1,600 temples and 98 percent of them are virtually empty, so resourceful travelers can always find unspoiled treasures.

I was particularly impressed with Tokyoites because so often they didn’t just point us in the right direction when we were lost in places like Shinjuku Station, the world’s largest train station —they took the time to walk us right to the correct platform or the restaurant we were searching for. Even though waiters and waitresses had no hopes of garnering tips, we got better service than we typically do in Florida. Sometimes staff thanked us so profusely that we almost wondered if they were on some sort of happy pills.

I asked my wife after one such experience how staff are trained in Japan, and she said, “It’s not training, it’s their culture. They’re taught to be kind, work hard and do a good job from the time they’re born.” And she was right. You can’t teach nice, but the Japanese do it better than almost anyone else.

Tokyo bills itself as the place where old meets new. Most tourism slogans are as empty as the Aral Sea but Tokyo’s is apt in many ways. It’s a futuristic place where tech is revered — you may need help just figuring out how to use Japan’s complicated toilets — but traditions are strictly preserved, even by the young. Nowhere was this more apparent to us than in the world of Japanese sumo, which has adapted to allow in foreign rikishi (wrestlers) but has otherwise remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years.

We attended a sumo retirement ceremony in Tokyo’s national arena, which involved plenty of pageantry along with a host of matches and a slow-motion haircut. Rikishi don’t cut their hair during their careers. They live and train in stables where there are strict, seniority-based rules governing their conduct. At their last match, dignitaries cut their hair — one strand at a time. In our case, we watched all the match- es and then watched one notable after another cut the hair of the retiring wrestler, Ishiura Shikanosuke. I have no idea how long this haircut took, because we lost patience with it after an hour.

A day later, we visited the Ajigawa stable and met two of their top rikishi, Anosho Yamato and Danylo Yavhusishyn, a twenty-year-old Ukrainian who wrestles using the Japanese name Aonishiki and speaks fluent Japanese. They live and work in the same building on the east side of Tokyo and the smell of sweat overwhelmed us when we entered their training studio. They trained to the brink of collapse — it was almost uncomfortable to watch — and later told us that the hardest thing about their jobs was gaining weight. Go figure.

We attended two baseball games, one at the Hanshin Tigers stadium near Kobe, and another, a Giants game, at the Tokyo Dome. Both experiences were infinitely more fun than attending baseball games stateside. The fans chant and sing songs, there are bands and cheerleaders and adorable vendors who bow to their sections as they make their way up the aisles selling draft beer for about $5. I feasted on sushi, kalbi beef and yakisoba in both stadiums for about the price of a lunch at McDonald’s in the US.

If you’re already packing your bags for Tokyo by the time you finish reading this, understand that Japan is no place for anarchist and libertarian types. I had several cashiers critique me for not standing exactly where I was supposed to while lining up. We had to revamp our itinerary, adding time in Tokyo and cutting a few small towns, because the only two companies who offer one-way car rentals wouldn’t accept my American driver’s license or a copy of my international driver’s license (originals only!). Rules are enforced strictly. You may have to carry garbage around, even dirty diapers, for hours or perhaps all day. Tokyo is spotless, but there are very few public trash cans. And children are charged as adults at age twelve. It’s no wonder the country has a low birth rate.

After my low-cost feast at Haneda airport, we spent eleven and a half hours on a Delta flight back to Atlanta, where we were welcomed back to the United States by hectoring TSA officials who found fault with everyone. I was berated for not taking my camera out of my carry-on before going through security. Then we paid $16 for terrible airport fast food and were prompted to tip the employees for essentially nothing. Cups of ice water were $3.50, the same price as soda. At our gate, one woman was enjoying a loud program of some sort with no headphones while a man nearby made a series of phone calls we were forced to overhear. It was all enough to make me want to get right back on a plane to Tokyo, the world’s biggest and best-run city where good manners and meals are never hard to find.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.