Your first day

What went wrong, in their order

1. 1 How few rubbish bins there are ごみ箱の少なさ 17.2%
2. 2 Communicating with staff 施設等のスタッフとのコミュニケーション 15.4%
3. 3 Crowding at sights and in neighbourhoods 観光地や地域の混雑 12.9%
4. 4 Using the transport 交通機関の利用 11.3%
5. 5 Too little signage, or signage that is hard to read 多言語表示の少なさ・わかりにくさ 10.9%
6. 6 Paying by credit or debit card クレジット/デビットカードの利用 10.7%
7. 7 Immigration 入国手続き 10.3%

観光庁, Survey on the reception environment for inbound visitors, FY2025 edition — 4,110 responses collected between 18 November 2025 and 13 January 2026 at Narita, Haneda, Kansai, Fukuoka and New Chitose. Percentages are the share naming each item.

1 · The bins

The single most common answer, and the one that surprises people most: there are almost none on the street. You finish a coffee and then carry the cup for an hour.

What people do instead: carry a small bag and empty it at the hotel. Where bins exist they are beside vending machines — for the can you just drank — inside convenience stores, and on station concourses. A convenience store's bins are for things bought there; emptying a whole day's rubbish into them is the thing that gets bins taken away.

2 · Talking to people

Second on the list, and the one where a little preparation goes furthest. Station staff and shop staff are used to being asked and will help; the friction is vocabulary, not willingness.

The thing that works better than any phrase: point at the thing. A station name written down, a photo of the dish, a map on your phone. Every station name on this site carries its Japanese — 銀座 beside Ginza — so a page you already have open is something you can show to someone.

3 · The crowds, and 4 · the trains

Third and fourth, and in Tokyo they are the same problem at 08:00 and 18:00. The rush is real and it is not the time to move a suitcase across the city.

Which is what the lockers are for. Coin lockers inside the gates at 28 Toei stations are listed on those stations' own pages, door by door and size by size, so you can leave the case near where you are going rather than dragging it. They fill up, especially at weekends — if the first bank is full, the next station usually has more.

5 · Reading the signs

Tokyo's subway is better signed than almost any network on earth, and the thing that makes it legible is the station numbers: every stop carries a letter and a number on every sign — G-09, M-16, H-09 — and they do not change with the language.

That is why this site leads with them. If you can hold "G-09" in your head you do not need to read anything else on the platform. Every line and its numbers are here.

6 · Cards, and cash

Sixth on the list. Tokyo takes cards in most places a visitor goes and cash in all of them; the gap is small restaurants, older shops and the machine at the end of a market street. Carry some cash and the problem disappears.

The whole money question — IC cards, what a ride costs, whether a day pass pays for itself, and what changes for tax-free shopping on 1 November 2026 — is on Fares & tickets.

7 · Immigration

Last of the seven. The queue at Narita and Haneda is the queue and nothing here shortens it. What you can do beforehand is the paperwork: Visit Japan Web, run by Japan's Digital Agency, takes your immigration and customs-declaration details in advance so you arrive with a code rather than a form. It is the government's own service, and it is worth doing on the plane if you have not already.

And the thing the survey does not ask about

Trains stop. The last one goes somewhere around midnight, earlier than in most cities a visitor will have come from, and there is no night service underneath it. The fallback is a taxi, and Tokyo taxis add a late-night supplement between 22:00 and 05:00 — which is exactly the window in which you would be needing one.

Every station page on this site carries its own first and last trains, and between 22:00 and 02:00 Tokyo time it counts down the ones still to come. It knows about public holidays, which run the weekend timetable — on those nights the last train is often earlier than the weekday one you were expecting.