Time keeps marching forward, and before realizing it, this month marks 10 years since I moved to Japan! If we put it on the same timeframe, it's an equal timeframe as 6 years of high school + 4 years of university combined, which is almost unthinkable. People do say time moves faster as you get older, and it's hitting close to home now. Instead of writing a long philosophical post, I want to write random small tips or tricks that are quite helpful for me personally, and perhaps, this information can also be useful to the readers. At least, some of this information was something that I wished I had known from Day 0. I might update this post again in the future, especially if I recall some useful tips that I might forget to write this time.

Track Your Adventure

After moving to Japan, one of the goals on my bucket list is to visit all of the 47 prefectures. Compared to Indonesia, with 2 seasons (hot or hot with rain), Japan has 4 seasons, which actually makes each travel destination more attractive and worth visiting multiple times!

So far, I have visited 43 out of 47 prefectures. You can also make your own map version in the following website.

Japan is very vast, and even after visiting several prefectures multiple times, there are still a lot of places to explore! Google Maps also provides Timeline information, where you can visualize places that you have visited in the past. There's a caveat: from roughly last year, Google tried to improve its privacy and data retention policy, so you need to explicitly enable the settings to use this feature.

Discounted Train Tickets

Trains are definitely one of the biggest and most convenient ways to travel in Japan. Unfortunately, the cost of the bullet train (shinkansen) can be much higher compared to a bus or even an airplane. One of the local ways is to make reservations online via eki-net, up to a month in advance. The website itself is only available in Japanese, so Google Translate is your friend here.

For foreign visitors, there are a lot of alternative options, such as the famous JR Pass. For foreign residents in Japan, there are many fewer pass options, but not zero, such as JR Tokyo Wide Pass or Seishun 18 Kippu. You can see the more complete list in the following page.

It is also recommended to keep track of seasonal promotions via some accounts in Twitter / X like this one.

Tips on Hotels Reservation

While Google Search is quite useful to narrow down the list of hotels, the list might be incomplete or may not properly index prices from domestic websites. To give a better picture, let's say, we're looking for an accommodation in Hakone for November 23-24 (1 night). I'm going to use both the Japanese version of Rakuten Travel and the English version of Rakuten Travel. The Japanese version returned "80 results" while the English version only returned "33 properties". Assuming you understand Japanese or at least how to translate Japanese into English, this discrepancy has limited your choices even further.

English version

Japanese version

Now, here is the fun part. A lot of additional discounts are only available on the Japanese website. In the screenshot above, for cashless payment, you can get an additional 220 yen discount. There's also a highlighted red box with "30% coupon" written in it, which is basically a way to get tax reduction via Japan's hometown tax program named furusato nozei (ふるさと納税).

Furusato Nozei: Japan's Hometown Tax Program

This probably deserves its own post, but there are already a lot of online articles available, so I will simply link them here. To put it short, the program is aimed to distribute tax revenue into rural areas, by allowing taxpayers to re-allocate a percentage of their tax payment into other prefectures.

This is a very rough calculation, but let's say you are not yet married and have an annual income of 7,000,000 JPY. Based on japantaxcalculator.com, you need to pay roughly 700,000 JPY in tax. By using furusato nozei calculator, you can roughly utilize 100,000 JPY out of your tax payment above for donation to other prefectures. This usually provides 30% of the donation value back, so in the Rakuten Travel case above, you can get up to 30,000 JPY coupon via this scheme.

Of course, this scheme is not limited to receiving hotel coupons. There are a lot of available options, ranging from daily necessities (e.g., food, clothing) to other travel coupons.

References:

• What Is Furusato Nozei? A Guide for Company Employees
• Hometown Tax for International Residents in Japan
• Rakuten Travel Furusato Nozei
• furusato-tax.jp

Health Insurance Benefits

In Japan, if you're an employed worker, you will be automatically enrolled in the insurance company based on your employer's choice. The premium fee itself is usually based on your salary, up to a certain level where it will be capped. The insurance usually covers annual health checkup and ~70% of standard medical bills, including the doctor's fee & medicines.

While the benefits are great, you can easily pay over 200,000 JPY in a year for the health insurance premium fee. For younger people, your actual medical fee is probably much lower than the amount you pay in a year. As a way to subsidize these differences, IT Software Health Insurance provides a lot of additional benefits / discounts, such as recreation facilities (hotels), travel assistance, sports club, restaurants, and so on. Please note that these benefits are totally dependent on the insurance companies, so please check your own insurance company's website.

4 years ago, I wrote a separate post of reviewing these health insurance facilities, so please take a look if you're interested: ITS Kenpo Recreation Facilities Review.

Japanese Supermarket Discount Stickers

In Japan, there's a unique tradition where supermarkets and food halls (usually located on the basement floor of the train station/shopping center) provide discount stickers in the evening. This is usually done as a last-minute effort to sell food at a lower price rather than making it a waste. There are multiple discount levels, let's say, if the food hall will close at 9 PM, they might put a 20-percent off sticker at 7 PM, and then a 50-percent off sticker at 8:30 PM. I used to do it a lot in the early years since there was a supermarket near my previous apartment, but nowadays, I mainly utilize these hacks to purchase fruits (e.g., strawberries) since fruits in Japan are quite expensive...

In the following Japan Today article ("The good, the bad, and the ugly of half-price stickers at Japanese supermarkets"), they actually highlighted that there is a group of people who are waiting for hours or doing bad practices such as asking for discount stickers, so please try to be considerate and utilize these hacks in moderation.

Credit & Points Card

Credit & points card benefits are not necessarily limited to Japan, as they probably apply anywhere else in the world, but it's still worth pointing out. It is usually recommended to utilize an ecosystem that you are using the most. Let's say, if you're using a Rakuten card, you might also want to consider their other services (banks, mobile services, etc). Or if you often travel abroad, it might be better to issue a credit card provided by ANA or JAL for better mileage conversion.

Since Japan is located in disaster-prone zones, I recommend that you get one of these emergency kit bags. Of course, these emergency kits are also readily available for purchase in the online shops, but there's also an alternative way to get them for "free" by using points. For example, by linking my credit card with the V-Point card, I usually receive 1000-2000 points every month.

Offerings from V-Point

References:

• How to Use Points Cards in Japan: The Ultimate Guide
• Point Cards in Japan, Demystified
• Japanese Point Cards Explained: A Savvy Guide

ATM and Money Transfer

Rather than tips, this is more of a precaution that ATM in Japan has a very complicated fee depending on the day & time. The fee is usually 0 - 440 JPY, depending on the providers. Of course, cashless is recommended, but there are still some restaurants that only accept cash in Japan. Even though I never experienced it by myself, I heard some ATMs are even inoperative during the New Year holiday!

The complexity of ATM fees in Japan

Since October 2022, there's a remittance service between 20+ banks in Japan named Cotora / ことら送金. For small amounts of money transfers (less than 100,000 JPY), this service provides a 0 JPY transfer fee.

Cotora in SMBC Mobile App

Tabelog: Japanese Restaurants Rating Website

For restaurant reviews in Japan, Tabelog tops Google reviews in a lot of aspects. To start with, Tabelog is using some kind of weighted scoring to ensure that only 3% of the restaurants will receive a score of 3.50 or higher. If you're a food enthusiast and have extra budget & time in your hand, you can also aim for restaurants with a score of 4.00 or higher (Top 0.07%!). In 2025, Tabelog handed out Gold/Silver/Bronze awards to 653 restaurants (35/151/467 respectively): Tabelog Award Website.

Since there can be only ~3% of restaurants with a score of 3.50 or higher, it does not mean lower-rated restaurants are bad, especially if the restaurant is relatively new or unknown to the public. On the other hand, if the score is high, there's a very small chance it will go wrong.

Event Ticket Lottery & General Sales

If you like going to music concerts or VTuber events, this section might be useful for you.

• Tickets are usually sold in pre-lottery (membership only), general lottery, and general sales period. For the pre-lottery period, you're required to be either part of the group's membership or the lottery system's membership (e.g., LEncore for Lawson Ticket).
• The lottery application itself is usually tied to a phone number. There are cases where the application website itself is not available abroad, Japan's IP addresses only.
• For events that also target an overseas fanbase, there might be a dedicated application that requires foreign identity proof (e.g., passport). Theoretically, it might increase your chances a bit if you're a foreign resident living in Japan, since you can apply through both methods.
• If you use a credit card payment, your card provider might actually deduct the payment fee in case of successful lottery hours before the official announcement. If you don't receive any notification hours beforehand, unfortunately speaking, it means your lottery application has failed.
• For the general sales period, it is recommended to log in a few minutes before the ticket war starts. Moreover, it's recommended to connect your credit card to the system first, so you can check out the payment in a minute.

General Sales started at 12 PM and finished the checkout a minute afterwards. Each second counts!

Closing

As this post is mainly dedicated to small tips or tricks, I tried to exclude ones that require a larger commitment, such as NISA / iDeCo / Tax Exemption for Dependents / Housing Loan Tax Deduction / and so on. There are a lot of other ways to save your money and optimize your expenses, so don't limit your options only to the ones written here.

Thanks for reading this far!