So, with a few weeks under my belt, I think I can make a much better budget estimate for daily spending for one person. Granted, you can do things much cheaper or more expensive, but I think this is a good starting estimate for your budget vacationer.

Lodging: 4500 (daily rate), 2500 (weekly rate), or 1200 (monthly rate)
Food: 1500 - 3500 yen per day
Transportation: 1200 yen per day
Entertainment: 1000 - 5000 (temple entrance fees, museums, shows, rides, movies, etc.)
And if you’re here in the summer: 500 yen per day for bottled water or other drinks
Total: 4900 – 14700 yen per person per day, plus airline tickets.

Of course, your own circumstances would affect things, which is why I’ve broken it down a little. If you’re still planning for your trip, I suggest buying a nice guidebook (I’ve been using Fodor’s) and looking up the places you wantto visit to see how much entrance fees are, you’ll get a better estimate that way. I also suggest that if you’re planning on booking hotels after you get here, you should find as many discount hotel websites as you can before you leave and keep a list of bookmarks on some kind of portable storage drive with you, because you’ll be glad you did.

Souvenirs, well, you’ll just have to figure out how much you want to spend and try to stick to it. My only suggestion there is that you leave most of the souvenir shopping for the end of the trip, because you’ll have a little more perspective on how much things really should cost. The only exception is if you want to buy charms at a temple and you find one with labels in english. Those are kind of scarce.

I have a few other tips I’ve learned, but this post is getting kind of long, so I’ll put those up later.

Like I thought, the japan-hopping ate up a good chunk of the budget. We’d been paying about 1400 yen per person per night at our monthly apartment, but the hotels ended up costing an average of 5000 yen per person per night. We made the mistake of thinking one place was charging per room because the cost for the 2 person room was higher than the one person room, but it was just because it was bigger. So we paid double what we thought we were going to for a few nights.

Also, even though groceries are more expensive here, eating out every meal still costs more. So the two areas I thought we might be able to cut back on to make up for my underestimating travel expenses have a lot less wiggle room now.

True, some of that was purposeful - we wanted individual rooms, while we could have saved some money by staying at youth hostels, and we were kind of lazy by buying bentos instead of getting easy fix stuff from a store. But man those bentos were good.

Our current MO is to try to take what we’ve learned and keep our spending super-low for the rest of the trip to compensate - we’re in Kyoto now, and we have a new monthly paid for already (around 1000 yen per person per night). There are plenty of free and cheap temples and free and cheap museums around to keep us occupied, and lots of cup noodle and cereal to eat.

If we were doing it again, I think we would have been more descriminating in hotels, say, by booking online or by trying to stay mostly at an inexpensive chain store, like Super Hotel, which we liked better than the expensive ones(we stayed at the one in Sendai, it had a hot spring and was about 3000 yen per person per night). Also, love motels charge for the room, not per person, so if you can figure out how to work the machine or aren’t too embarrassed to ask the person at the front desk to check you in, it’s fairly inexpensive overnight(9:00 or 10:00 pm to 10:00 or 11:00 am was about 6000 yen). No windows, though, so they can be pretty smoky, since pretty much every hotel allows smoking in the rooms.

Other than that, I’m not sure what we could have done differently. Any ideas?

There’s good and bad news on the food front: first, eating out in Japan is much cheaper than we’re used to. Second, eating in is much more expensive.

Groceries are surprisingly high cost. A pair of apples can set you back 300 yen. A half-pound of cherries is 400. Cereal, 300 for 2 bowls worth of Kellogg’s, 200 for a local brand. More on that here, although I don’t know how up-to-date it is. Based on my rough observations, everything costs about 30%-40% more here. Of course, I’m used to shopping at Wal-Mart, which exists in its own little discount universe, so maybe it’s not so bad as that.

On the flip side, taxes are cheap and usually included in the price, so what you see on signs is pretty much what you pay, which is partly why eating out is so cheap. The other is that you don’t tip here. So even though prices can look reasonable to high, you don’t have to add 6-10% taxes and 10-20% tip, and a 650 yen meal stays a 650 yen meal.

So, these two have so far evened each other out. We spend about 300 yen each on a meal at home, then spend about 700 yen each on a meal out each day on average. Okay, we eat three meals, but somehow breakfast and snacks always seem to be about 300 yen per person no matter where we’re eating. If we keep this up, we’ll be well within the budget for food/misc. I imagine that the couple of weeks we’re planning to travel extensively will inflate this, but it looks likely to stay below $1000.

A new important travel tip: if you’re planning on changing your spending habits drastically, such as going on vacation, or if you’re spending an extended period of time outside of your ‘normal spending zone’ (we think that means your country), call and tell your bank. If the person who answers the phone doesn’t know what you’re talking about, ask to be transferred to the fraud department or an account specialist. Visa is trying to crack down on the amount of money lost through credit card fraud, so any unusual activity can cause a lock on your account. It’s a relatively new phenomenon, I assume, because my card was just fine for the semester I spent in Germany 3 years ago even though I was withdrawing large amounts of money fairly frequently.

It’s also a good idea to find out what your daily/weekly/monthly withdrawal limits are if you don’t know them already, since trying to withdraw ever-smaller amounts of money is what caused Visa to flat-out cancel my husband’s and my cards and left us kind of stranded this weekend while we wait for a new card to arrive.

Most things you can take care of when you arrive in Japan, but buying a plane ticket isn’t one of them. Sure, you can get here by boat, but planes are so much faster. We used Orbitz to get our tickets, but if you look at the websites for the Japanese airlines (ANA, JAL) sometimes you can find amazing last-minute deals – sometimes as low as half the cost of a regular ticket. If you have flexible travel dates, I would highly recommend this. I also recommend ANA should you have the choice – they served us 2 good meals and every seat had its own personal television screen with on-demand programming. It was the best of the five intercontinental flights I’ve ever been on (Delta was also nice, 11 years ago, but the KLM flights were uncomfortable and crowded).

Other things you should look into before you come: JR passes. You can’t buy them in Japan, you have to buy them before you leave, and if you’re planning to travel all over the country they are probably worth it.

Japan is one of the most expensive tourist locations in the world. Tokyo and Osaka, two of the largest cities and the two most easily accessible tourist spots, are #1 and 2 on the most recent list of the most expensive cities in the world.

However, there are options for people who want to see Japan without spending a lot of money, and even if none of these are for you, I strongly suggest contacting the nearest Japanese consulate when you decide you want to travel to Japan. They should have tons of useful information or at least be able to point you to the nearest place that does.

Of work exchange programs, the JET Program, NOVA, and the plethora of other English language teacher exchange programs are the most well-known. A few words of warning, though: some of these programs have age limits, they tend to prefer native speakers with American accents, no actual teaching experience necessary although they do favor college degree holders of any major, and there have been some reports that the Japanese schools are rather racist and only interested in white teachers.

There are other work-exchange programs like WWOOF that are all around more flexible, but once again it’s a work arraignment. If you want to go to Japan without working, and you’re willing to rough it or stay in unorthodox places, you might be interested in some of the (scarce) campgrounds or parks. There tend to be people sleeping on benches or on the ground in several of the major parks I’ve seen, and the airports and other public places are reportedly willing to let people stay in them occasionally(Narita airport even has pay showers). It’s not the most luxurious vacation, but if you want to backpack it or spend a lot of time in Japan for little more than the cost of plane tickets, food, and necessities(and hopefully baths and laundry), it may be more than possible.

But the people outside of these categories, who simply want to vacation in Japan without spending their life’s savings, this column is for you: my husband and I are newly married twentysomethings taking up the challenge of a summer in Japan on a budget. We’re trying to spend two months here with $6000 to cover everything – plane tickets, hotels, etc., and we’re investigating the feasibility of taking such a long trip without costs spiraling out of control. We’ve discovered some pitfalls and hidden expenses (and savings) that I wanted to share with other people who are also of limited income trying to go on a large trip. We’ve saved for years to make this happen, and we want to squeeze everything we can out of each and every yen.