A 2-week Japan itinerary for a first trip, day by day

Two weeks is the right length for a first trip to Japan, and the right shape is a line, not a loop. Fly into Tokyo, ride south through Hakone, Kyoto, Nara and Hiroshima, and fly home from Osaka. You unpack five times in 13 nights, you never backtrack, and the one question everyone asks, whether to buy the rail pass, has a clear answer on this route. No. The sums are below.

The shape: 13 nights, five beds, one direction

Here is the version we’d hand a friend. It assumes you land at Narita or Haneda on day 1 and leave from Kansai Airport on day 14. Book the flights as an open jaw (into Tokyo, out of Osaka); it often costs about the same as a return and saves you a half-day and a ¥14,500 train back to Tokyo.

Days	Where you sleep	What the days are for
1 to 4	Tokyo, 4 nights	Arrive, then one neighbourhood a day
5	Hakone, 1 night	The loop of trains, ropeway and boat, an onsen stay
6 to 9	Kyoto, 4 nights	Three Kyoto days and a day in Nara
10 to 11	Hiroshima, 2 nights	The Peace Park, then Miyajima
12 to 13	Osaka, 2 nights	Food, Dotonbori, a slow last day
14	Fly home from Kansai

Four Tokyo nights sounds short and is right. The city is better in a second trip than a longer first one, and our Tokyo guide has the four days laid out hour by hour. Kyoto gets the same four nights because its best things are spread across the edges of the city and each one is a half-day. If you’d rather cut somewhere, cut Osaka to one night, not Kyoto or Hiroshima.

A Kyoto day that actually works

Kyoto is where two-week plans fall apart, because people try to do east, west and south in one day. Here is one that doesn’t. It starts at the one place in Kyoto that is open at dawn and ends in Gion when the lanterns come on.

Walk up to the Yotsutsuji viewpoint at Fushimi Inari, about 30 to 45 minutes from the bottom, and turn around. The full summit loop is two to three hours and the view doesn’t improve. Nishiki’s shops keep their own hours and many close on Wednesday or Sunday, so make this a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday or Friday. Kiyomizu-dera shuts at 18:00 most of the year; in the second half of November it reopens for evening illuminations until 21:30, and in 2026 those run 21 to 30 Nov.

Your Nara day is the easy one. The JR Miyakoji rapid from Kyoto takes 45 minutes for ¥720, or Kintetsu gets you closer to the park for ¥760 in the same time. Todai-ji’s Great Buddha Hall is ¥800 and opens 08:00 to 17:00 from November to March, 07:30 to 17:30 the rest of the year. Deer crackers are about ¥200 and the deer know exactly what the paper looks like.

Is the Japan Rail Pass worth it for two weeks? Not on this route

The Japan Rail Pass rose again on 1 October 2026. A 14-day ordinary pass is now ¥80,000 (about $505) on the official site and ¥84,000 through agents; the 7-day pass is ¥50,000 or ¥53,000. Here is what this itinerary spends on trains if you simply buy tickets.

Leg	What you buy	About
Tokyo to Hakone and around it	Hakone Freepass, 2 days from Shinjuku	¥7,100
Hakone (Odawara) to Kyoto	Hikari shinkansen, reserved seat	¥12,100
Kyoto to Nara and back	JR Miyakoji rapid	¥1,440
Kyoto to Hiroshima	Shinkansen, reserved seat	¥11,100 to ¥11,740
Hiroshima to Shin-Osaka	Shinkansen, reserved seat	about ¥11,000
Total		about ¥43,000 ($275)

The pass does not cover the Hakone leg at all, because Odakyu is a private railway, and it does not cover the Nozomi, the fastest and most frequent train on every one of these shinkansen legs. Pass holders who want a Nozomi buy a separate ticket at a JR counter, ¥4,960 for Tokyo to Kyoto. Even if you squeezed every long leg into one 7-day window from Hakone to Osaka, you would pay ¥50,000 to cover about ¥35,000 of travel, on slower trains.

The pass starts to pay when you go a long way and come back. Tokyo to Hiroshima and back to Tokyo in a week, or adding Kanazawa or Hokkaido to the loop, changes the maths. A line south with a flight home from Osaka does not. The Kyoto guide (from 6 Nov) and the regional passes it mentions are a better fit for day trips.

Which trains to reserve, and the suitcase rule

Three bookings matter. Reserved seats go on sale at 10:00 Japan time one month before the travel date, online or at any JR ticket office.

Over the year-end holidays every Nozomi seat is reserved, no unreserved cars at all. Last winter JR Central set that period as 26 Dec to 4 Jan, and it does the same for Golden Week and Obon. If your two weeks straddle New Year, book the Kyoto to Hiroshima and Hiroshima to Osaka trains the day sales open.

Suica on your phone before you land

You do not need a physical transit card. On an iPhone 7 or later, open Wallet, tap the plus, choose Transit Card, then Suica, pick an amount and load it from a card already in Wallet. It works on trains, subways, buses and at convenience store tills in every city on this route, and it tops up from your phone in seconds.

JR East also publishes a tourist version, Welcome Suica Mobile, for iOS 17.2 and later. No registration, no deposit, no issue fee; you set a keyword, load it through Apple Pay, and the balance expires 180 days after you issue it, with no refund. It is a good fit for a two-week trip, less good if you’ll be back within the year. The app is iPhone and Apple Watch only, so Android travellers should plan on a physical IC card from a station machine on arrival.

What the fees and taxes add on top

Japan added or raised a stack of small charges this year, and they land on exactly this route. The full list with a worked example is in its own piece; here is what touches a two-week trip.

The departure tax tripled to ¥3,000 per person on 1 July 2026. You never see it at the airport; it sits in the taxes line of your flight ticket. Hotel taxes are per person per night and tiered. Kyoto’s bands from 1 March 2026 are ¥200 under ¥6,000 a night, ¥400 from ¥6,000 to ¥19,999, ¥1,000 from ¥20,000 to ¥49,999, then ¥4,000 and ¥10,000 at the top. Osaka charges ¥200, ¥400 or ¥500 depending on the room rate, with nothing under ¥5,000. Tokyo is ¥100 or ¥200 a night until April 2027, when it becomes 3% of the rate for rooms over ¥13,000 per person. Miyajima adds ¥100 per visitor into the ferry fare.

For two people in mid-range rooms on this itinerary, that is roughly ¥6,000 in departure tax, ¥3,200 in Kyoto, ¥1,600 in Osaka, ¥1,600 in Tokyo and ¥200 on Miyajima, about ¥12,600 ($80) you won’t see on a booking site total. Put it in the budget before you set it.

Japan in January: the winter version of this itinerary

The searches say “japan itinerary 2 weeks january” almost as often as the plain version, so here is what changes. Not the route. The route is better in January, because the Kyoto and Nara crowds thin out and the air is dry.

Tokyo’s January normals are a daily high of 9.8 °C and a low of 1.2 °C with about 60 mm of rain for the whole month. Kyoto is a high of 9.1 °C, a low of 1.5 °C and 53 mm. That means cold clear mornings, not grey ones. Fushimi Inari at 07:00 in January is near-empty and lit sideways. Hakone’s onsen is the point of the night, and the ropeway’s Fuji view is more reliable in winter air.

Two things to move. Kiyomizu-dera and Todai-ji keep winter hours (06:00 to 18:00 and 08:00 to 17:00), and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum closes at 18:00 from December to February, so start the afternoons earlier. And if your dates sit in the first week of January, remember the all-reserved Nozomi rule above and book those two trains first.

If you have been to Kyoto before and want snow, swap the Hakone night and one Osaka night for a flight to Sapporo. The Sapporo guide covers February and the snow festival, which is a different trip and a good one.

Before you book

US passport holders can enter Japan for tourism without a visa for a short stay of under 90 days, so two weeks is paperwork-free today. If you are weighing two weeks against ten days, how many days a first trip needs (from 4 Nov) walks through the trade-offs, and if your dates are in late April, read about Golden Week (from 6 Nov) first, because that week changes everything about trains and rooms. Flying over Thanksgiving to get here? These are the days to avoid (from 3 Nov) at the US end.