Please advise/suggest regarding our itinerary from 25th Dec 2025 to 2nd Jan 2026. We are a couple aged 30.

6 comments

1. It doesn’t look like enough time for Hiroshima and Miyajima. I did Hiroshima the day I got there, stayed overnight, and did Miyajima the following day and still felt I could have used more time. You might want to scrap it and take your time in Kyoto or Osaka.

2. 27 sounds impossible. The bamboo forest and the shrine is on the opposite side of Kyoto.

   29. I don’t think you can day trip to Hiroshima and Miyajima and come back to Osaka. It’s impossible. You’re ignoring travel time.

3. A lot of places are closed on New Year’s Eve and January 1. Make sure you double check your plans

4. There is zero reason to do a tour for Nara/Todai-ji etc. It’s a quick little easy train from Osaka  or Kyoto, then you drop right into one big area and literally walk around feeding deer and looking around the temple. Unless your guide is adding something special, I would hate to be on rails there. 

   Also, I wouldn’t do both Kyoto and Nara as a single day trip in one day; Kyoto is a full on city with many sights that you’re already missing – and to add to that it’s winter, gets dark early and Kyoto closes stuff early. By doing a pre-booked tour of both, you lose the ability to either leave Nara when you’ve had enough, or stay if you’re having a blast.

   Your last day might not make a ton of sense depending on your flight time. Akihabara, Ginza and Shinjuku are different areas and you’ll waste some time on trains. Also imo Akihabara is pretty one-note and not worth going back to a second time for most. 

   Which brings me to my last point – generally speaking, I would try to do a little better in terms of breaking up my Tokyo time onto eastern and wesern tokyo to lessen the amount if commuting you have planned. These places can easily be 45-hr depending on your skill with local transit. I think sometimes people imagine themselves teleporting around Japan, but there is actual travel that will eat up your time.

   This sounded critical but it’s really not a bad itinerary, and you’re gonna have fun regardless!

5. 27th is too hectic if not impossible.

   If Osaka is your base better option would be to do 1 x Day trip to Nara and 1 x Day trip to Kyoto (personally I would spend more time in Kyoto as there’s many sights to see compared to Osaka). Also make sure to reserve the seats for Hiroshima on 29 and for Tokyo on 30. Many people travel home at that time, and Tōkaidō Shinkansen usually reach capacity for those dates.

6. A night of clubbing after all day at USJ sounds *exhausting*, especially since you’ll still be battling jet lag and the added cognitive load of a foreign language and culture you don’t know. At the same time, I think one or both of you will fortunately figure that out and call it an evening before you even make it to a nightclub, so the point is largely academic.

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