00:00:03 John Daub: Hello everybody. Greetings. Welcome to Tokyo Station. I have some bad news for those of you that are going to be traveling to Japan in October 2023. I thought I would bring this information to you from the origin of where a lot of the Shinkansens depart from, Tokyo Station. How you doing everybody?

00:00:23 John Daub: So it came across just in the last 24 hours that Japan Rail, JR, is going to be raising the price of their unlimited passes about 40%, which is quite a significant price increase. As this train comes in, let me show you some of the prices. Just to illustrate right off the bat here. Boom. The JR price increase for seven days will go up from 29,650 yen to 50,000 yen. That's about a 40% increase. 14 day will go from 47,250 yen to 80,000 yen. And the 21 day, of course, to 100,000 yen right down there. Pretty significant, I would say.

00:01:31 John Daub: Here comes the Shinkansen right now. Let's gaze at what you would be riding if you were to pay those prices. But not to worry, if you are coming to Japan this summer and this fall until October, you do not have any price increases. So you are fine. There's the staff that is going to be cleaning it from JR East. Very exciting process. They do it in seven minutes or less. And it's a pretty amazing thing. One of the things that shocks people about Japan is how fast they clean it and so well they do it. Which they don't have to do too well because it is pretty clean anyways.

00:02:03 John Daub: Yeah, I'll show you that price list again in a second. But it's very easy to understand why they raise the prices. I mean, come on. It was 150 yen to the dollar just about six months ago. That's not fair. And also, we in Japan are paying huge prices compared to the discounted price that foreign tourists are paying. So, I mean, I think that that pass for a very long time has been undervalued. It's been seriously undervalued, the price of the JR rail pass. And I think it was about time that they raised it. I'm just a little bit shocked that they raised it so much so quickly. I guess it's pulled the band-aid off right away. That seems to be the best way to do things.

00:02:39 John Daub: Here's the price list one more time. Excuse me. So, the 21-day pass, which is three weeks, takes you from 60,450 yen to 100,000 yen. They just rounded the numbers to make it easier for everybody. And with the exchange rate sort of expected to stay above 130 yen to the dollar, I think that it's still pretty much a bargain. So, those of you that have been coming here when Japan opened the borders in November of 2022, you've been getting this amazing deal. So, everybody who asks me, is the JR rail pass worth it? The answer is, heck yeah, especially right now, if you know that the price is going to be increasing by a ridiculous amount of money in just a short amount of time.

00:03:45 John Daub: And for those of you that like luxury, there is a price difference for the green pass. I have that right here, too. So, the green car JR rail pass increase is about the same percentage, about 40%. It goes from 39,600 yen to 70,000 yen for seven days. That's 10,000 yen a day. And if you're riding the ticket on long hauls, which a lot of people do, that's a pretty good amount. That's still a pretty good savings. And we'll talk about that in this live stream. 14 days goes from 64,120 yen to 111,000 yen. And the 21-day pass is 83,390 yen to 140,000 yen.

00:04:17 John Daub: Risu FD writes in here, 68%, not 40%. I think some tickets are 40%. Some tickets are a little bit more. Those are the prices given by TokyoCheapo.com. I just looked at them. I didn't actually do the math on the percentage of it. But it's a pretty significant, bottom line, it's a significant price increase that you're going to feel. WRX Turbo is in the house. Nice to see you again. Long time no see. And Air to the Run is back. Just got back from the Cherry. Bless him. Bless him. Let's have a good time. Let's go.

00:04:45 John Daub: Awesome. So you got that spring feeling just like I do after that. You feel the spring, the energy behind it. All right, let me take you. Now, this is not so bad comparatively. Let me just take a look here. The biggest comparison I think we do with rail passes would be with the Eurail pass. And here we have the Eurail pass. 15 days is $887. So the JR Rail Pass for second class is still pretty competitive, if not better than what you would get from Europe. And if you've ever ridden European trains lately, except for maybe Germany, they're kind of rough. They're not as clean. And I think you get a way better experience in Japan.

00:05:41 John Daub: The train that I rode from Paris to Venice, overnight train, was the dirtiest train I've ridden in Europe. I thought it was the dirtiest train I've ever ridden in Europe, ever. And it's in Western Europe. So the Eastern trains were more beautiful and better maintained, I thought, which is weird. I guess it's because people don't ride them so much. But you can see that the prices for the Eurail passes are pretty high. And that doesn't include reservation charges. And Japanese trains, the reservation charge is free. So you got that. So it's good to put it in perspective a little bit here.

00:06:24 John Daub: When I always take the JR Rail Pass, I would take the 15 days within two months. I wish that JR had a pass like this, but they don't. The 15 days in two months is about $1,000. So that's a pretty significant price there. But if you're traveling for two months through Europe, and Europe's really big, that's not a bad deal. I found that it gave me a chance to pick the days that I wanted to travel on. Japan does not have that kind of a pass. However, Japan does have other rail passes. Let me show you.

00:07:18 John Daub: So this is the JR East website. I just took a screenshot of it. There are a lot of different rail passes that are besides the JR Rail Pass, which is the entire country. These are regional passes. And I think if you plan your trip correctly, you should take a look at these, and you're going to save some money by picking these passes. There's no reason to use a JR Rail Pass for the entire time if you're going to be doing a region by region. These work out better sometimes.

00:07:43 John Daub: And I talked with the ladies down at the window here, because I know a lot of you can't do that. You're not here in Japan. And they told me that this price increase was sort of expected, because the prices haven't gone up in a long time. There's just hasn't been a price increase on these JR Rail Passes. Like, I can't even remember when. But besides that, these regional passes that you see right here, they are actually not getting a price increase yet. There's not been decided yet. So these prices will remain the same until otherwise determined. But the price increases for Japan Rail will go in effect in October of 2023, which is, you know, six months away from now. So you've got plenty of time to plan around it. Or to plan how you want to approach it.

00:08:30 John Daub: The other big piece of information that I want to tell you before I move on to some more information is that Japan Rail let me know that the tickets you could buy this Japan Rail Pass in country. So if you arrive without a Japan Rail Pass, you can buy it here in Japan right now from the windows. There's certain places that sell these passes, in particular here at Tokyo Station. That will change. They haven't said exactly when, but that will change in some time in the next six months as well. You'll only be able to buy them online. So you can only get your JR Rail Passes online. I guess that you can get them from resellers or maybe even from JR directly. I'm not sure. Leave me a comment below. Let's use the comments for this video as a sort of a resource, a back and forth between each other about information on the Japan Rail site. Also on our Discord server, which we might start to add that in there because this information is quite significant for a lot of travelers.

00:09:37 John Daub: Because you're already paying a ridiculous amount of money for airfare to get here. This is just another price that's slapped on. And you're going to find that a lot of the hotel prices have really gone up over the last couple of years. Actually over the last six months when tourism returned because supply and demand. It's very simple economic policy here. This is like when this news hit me earlier. Irvin, thank you very much for bringing this to my attention. I'll keep this up here in the corner so you get an idea of the price increase. This is for second class rail for those that are trying to get this pass here.

00:10:19 John Daub: Cliffy D writes in here, can you still buy JR Passes at the ticket office? I'll be in Japan next week. Yes. From what they told me, the answer to that is yes. There was a line of people waiting in line to get the pass. What they told me at the window at the JR Rail Cafe, which is where I've done live streaming before here in Tokyo Station, is that you can get that rail pass here in Japan on arrival. But I would buy it in advance just to have peace of mind. Because they will 100% change the policy so you need to buy this online. So if you can buy it online, maybe that's a better idea.

00:11:30 John Daub: The line is Nozomi 35 bound for Tokyo. Check it out here. So getting a reserved and a non-reserved ticket, you can get non-reserved tickets. You can get non-reserved tickets with this pass. You don't need a reservation. But all the reservations are free. You can get reserved ticket seats for no additional cost if you pay nothing. The point is that it's all free. I've never been charged for a seat reservation. If you have, let me know in the comments below in Japan. If you're buying a seat reservation without a JR Rail Pass, you have to pay for that. That's different.

00:12:32 John Daub: Yeah. Let's go to the front of the train. It's a little sunny day here. All right. I'll take some of your questions as this train gets ready to pull out here in a nice sunny area. Put this up in the corner. I can't see the chat. Boom. This train is going to be pulling away in about five minutes here. How often do the prices change? Not very often. Subway ticket prices are going up by 10 yen. I don't think they have yet. But they're going to be going up.

00:13:34 John Daub: In Japan, inflation isn't really a thing. But over the last several months, we have seen prices in the supermarket go up as much as 50%, 70%, 80%. Things like eggs, chicken, meat, we've seen that go up as a result of just everything else is going up. So they have to raise the prices too. As a result of inflation, we've also seen some products in the supermarkets go out of business or be pulled because they just simply can't compete. And they're too embarrassed. This is maybe a Japanese way of thinking. They don't want to raise the prices on the consumer for the products that they have, so they just go under. Or maybe someone will buy the brand eventually. I'm not sure. One of the examples were these candies in a tin can. For some reason, I can't remember the name. They did not want to do the business. So it made a lot of sense for them to just close it down.

00:14:31 John Daub: Shinkansen tickets in general. A ticket from Tokyo to Kyoto. I believe it's about 12,000 yen, give or take. So that's about 80, about 90 dollars with the exchange rate, I think. So if you rode that and back, that's 26,000 yen. And the price of the ticket is about 10,000 yen a day. It's still a massive savings for the Shinkansen. The only caveat with the JR East passes are that you can't get a ticket. You can't take the Nozomi, which is what this train that's leaving on this side is. This is full of people who don't ride the pass, like me. I want my Nozomi. It's just a slightly faster difference than the Hikari. Hikari might stop at Shizuoka Station or at Atami or at maybe one other station, Gifu for example. But it's not a big difference in time. They're both all super fast. The only thing is that the Nozomi will depart a lot more frequently. And the Hikari maybe once or twice an hour. So you don't have as many trains that you could take. You cannot take Nozomi West either.

00:15:51 John Daub: If you have any questions, I'm looking at the question feed. I'll be here for the next five minutes just answering questions and looking at trains, which is what I love to do. There might be a lag here. I'm going to move to a new position. The Shinkansen is on the way out. The Shinkansen, see you later. See you later, excavator.

00:16:46 John Daub: That's great. It's possible that they do. But they've opened up the JR rail passes for... It's these passes here. They've opened up these rail passes for people living in Japan because there weren't a lot of tourists going up to, say, Tohoku. So they opened this up to people like me so I could ride the Shinkansen and go up there. As a YouTube creator, I would go up there to pick stories just because I could get up there a lot cheaper. The variety of passes are incredible. This is just JR East. You also have JR West. You have JR Shikoku. You have JR Kyushu. You have JR Hokkaido have their own passes. So it pays to look around. And perhaps these might be the option for you that fill in with a seven-day pass instead of getting a 14-day pass. You can save a little bit of cash. These passes can all be purchased in Japan at the window. I don't know if they're going to be going all online. But Japan is a country that has this window service, this face-to-face service. That doesn't go away.

00:18:06 John Daub: Everyone is asking the same question. Should I buy right before October? Yeah. If you can. That's a good question. I didn't ask the staff that one. But I'm pretty sure that if you buy it before this price change, that they're going to honor it. So I bet you that's going to be... But I think that that's something that you can consider for sure. If you want to, look at the comments. I'm going to go ask the lady before I leave this live stream. That's a great question. You know what? I could go and ask them live. But it takes about five minutes to get to the window. And I don't have a permit to film and ask them. So I'm just staying in general areas. All right. Here comes another Shinkansen.

00:19:23 John Daub: I bought the four-day Kansai area pass. I'm going to take my trip in May. And then I'm going to rely on the IC cards for the rest of my Tokyo trip. You can use those IC cards to buy passes as well. Just want to put that out there to you. If you wanted to buy a subway 24-hour pass, you could use an IC card at the ticket vending machine to buy a one-day pass. And then don't use the IC card. Or some of the IC cards might validate the pass within it. But I used my IC card to buy a platform. And people like me cannot get this ticket. So this ticket is not available. So these prices are only for tourists.

00:20:23 John Daub: I'm going to say that you can totally buy the tickets in advance. And they'll honor that. I think the price change is over time going to take effect. And you just can't buy it at that price anymore. I can't see how they would take it out. But just make sure you look at the validity. If you look at the validity of the pass before you buy it, that's the most important thing. But there might be some places that, you know, depending on the date that you buy the ticket, the price might change at the online register. I guess you would call that the cart. Based on the date you intend to use it. I don't know how they're going to be able to manage that. So my initial reaction is, yeah, if you buy it now or if you buy it the day before, you should be good.

00:21:12 John Daub: It's always been like that in Japan. Whenever they do a price change, you can buy and hoard stuff if you want to. But they don't charge you before the price change takes effect. The same with beer. When they announced last October that they were raising the price of beer, people were buying cases of it. They only save like a dollar or something. You have to pay for the storage of it. And then it goes stale. How can you drink all that beer? But, you know, they don't raise the price on it even though you're going to be drinking that later. So I can't see how that would be different with the JR Rail Pass, with that kind of thinking.

00:21:49 John Daub: Yeah. Risu FD writes in here, so if you were to buy the ticket now for October, it would be expired by the time you got here. So if you bought your ticket on September 30th, you would be okay until October 30th, right? As an example, just make sure you double check on this. And I don't know how they're going to be altering the online store. This is just an announcement to get you ready for it. But as they discover more information, I will do another live stream to bring that to you live. It's big news. One more time, this is the green car JR Rail price increases here. That 21-day is quite a significant increase. But this makes you think, yeah, you might as well buy the 21-day pass if you're getting it. It's just the 21-day green car pass is just 13,000 yen more than after the price hike for the regular. Do you see that? Strategically, if you're coming in October, that's kind of interesting to see that.

00:23:15 John Daub: Dreesu, thank you so much for the feedback on this. Usually it was three months in advance tops, but at some places, only let you get one month in advance. It just depends on where you buy it, the rules. Always check the fine print before you buy any kind of these passes. Make sure you can get a refund if your trip cancels. Buy with your credit card perhaps. Maybe make sure if you do buy with your credit card that it is refundable. If you did because the American Express didn't have a refund, Japan is different than American Express USA. I found that out the hard way. But eventually the insurance did kick in when my iPhone went stolen before I even received it. Apple would not send me another one. It's a whole story. I'm sure they'll let you know what happened in the chat. After a year, American Express finally reimbursed me for the amount after I filled in. Kanai and I filled in a bunch of paperwork. It was really hard.

00:24:09 John Daub: But the JR Rail pass here, that was the other piece of news. If you're buying it in Japan, you can still do that at the moment. But it's going to change to online only. So that's something that you should understand. And that's the normal pass right there. If you want to, for the next minute or so, leave me your thoughts, your comments. What do you guys think of the price increase? Is it awful? Is it too much? Is it justified, do you think?

00:25:05 John Daub: J. writes in here, I think when the rail pass is more affordable, tourists will more likely venture out across the country and support. But I think that they did their homework on this. I don't think that, I think the price was way, way too cheap. And those who wanted to buy the pass and thought it was, there were too many people, there were a lot of people who thought that the original price was too expensive too. There were people who thought that the seven day, there were people that would question me and ask, is it worth it? At that price that you see for the before. I'm still going to get the ticket.

00:25:39 Australian Tourists: Oh, how are you doing? Catching the shit, God said. J. Oh. I started to go, man, we watch you a lot. Can we just cross to Australia? J. Oh, right. We watch a lot of YouTube. J. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm just, come and say hello to everybody. Hello, everybody. J. How are you doing? Great channel. Subscribe. J. Where are you guys going next?

00:26:00 John Daub: Oh, we've got four days in Tokyo, then we're going to head off. Oh, yeah. So we're going to head off, we're going to look at Mount Fuji tomorrow, so we'll take the Shinkansen again to, was it Ottawa? J. To Odawara. Odawara, yeah. We're going to look around there for a day. J. Oh, cool. But we've been to Osaka, Kyoto. We've had a great holiday. It's been great fun. J. Awesome. Thanks, guys, for stopping by. That's all right. Great to meet you. J. Where in Australia are you from? Out of Sydney. J. Sydney? Okay, from Sydney. Awesome.

00:26:29 Australian Tourists: Any advice for everybody? Because I'm doing this because the price increases. J. Yeah, we saw that and I was showing my wife and she was quite surprised. It's a really good thing. It's a really big increase. So there's six of us traveling, so that would have been very painful. J. Significant difference. Yeah, for sure. J. Would that have changed your end result of buying this pass? I think we still would have bought it for the convenience, yeah, for sure. But it would have been less maybe spending money. J. Oh, right. I got some You Found Me cards, I think. I carry them now. My advice, buddy, is to do homework. You've got to do a lot of homework before you go. J. Do your homework beforehand. Yeah.

00:27:12 Australian Tourists: What time is your train? We're going tomorrow. We're going now. J. Oh, you're going tomorrow. Yeah, there's a free streaming job. J. Oh, seriously? Yeah, but you see... J. Wait, did you come in on the... Oh, here they are. Did you come in on the... I think it's my business card. Did you come in on the... I think it's my business card. Did you come in on the JR Rail Pass? Yes. J. Oh, you entered with the JR Rail Pass. No, we had it when we... Yeah, we had it already booked when it came in, yeah. Oh. J. So we booked it actually... Thank you. J. ...for the official site. Thanks, Simon. J. For the official site. You got six of you. Do you need more? Oh, yeah, I'll be right. Thanks a lot. Can I grab a few photos of you? J. Oh, yeah, sure, sure. Thanks so much, John. J. You're welcome. Oh, the photo was live. Yeah, that's all right. J. All right, yeah, here's my photo. Where are you guys? Here. All right, send me a screenshot. Will do. Nice to meet you. J. Nice to meet you. Have a good trip. Okay, luck with you. J. Oh, that's so cool.

00:28:19 John Daub: Let me go to the end of the line here. Nozomi, Chubu, Nagano. J. Oh, that's cool. The sun's starting to go away a little bit and cloud up. It's interesting. They would still have bought the passes, even the price. And that's, I think, where they did their homework. Despite the 40% plus price increase, people are still going to buy the passes. So JR lost a lot of money. They laid off a lot of workers. They're having to hire a lot of those workers back. So I think it makes a lot of sense.

00:28:56 John Daub: Over the last 10 years, and I'll leave you with this, over the last 10 years, tourism really started to blossom around the time that I started YouTubing, 2013. This is my 10-year anniversary, too. Around 2014, 2015, it really started to explode. In 2014, former Prime Minister Abe made the mark to get 10 million tourists to come to Japan, and he hit that mark. And I was in the newspaper about it, based on me making those tourism videos. And that got me on a lot of TV news shows here in Japan, TBS Hirobi, for example, because I was on the front page of the newspaper with that comment. And JR has done an amazing job of adding services in English for you. And it's not cheap to hire staff and make signs and do all this stuff for you, because, I mean, I've been there.

00:29:55 John Daub: I think tourism now makes up a bigger percentage of the riders now, by far, because Japan's population is shrinking. So that we do all these signs and improve the infrastructure even further, it makes a lot of sense, I mean, not to give you such a massive discount, because the old rail prices right here is so cheap. It's so, so cheap. It makes... When Japanese see the price that you used to pay... Yeah. You still pay, people are slightly upset. Like, how is that fair? All right, we want people to travel, but what about domestic tourism? Is it fair? No. But I think JR is doing a really good job of adding services in English, more ticket windows, training staff to speak English to people, to make people feel more comfortable. That costs money. I see that they have used this money to good use. It's still a cheap price, I think. I personally, I would get the... I think the 14-day pass is a bargain.

00:31:13 John Daub: Excuse me. I'm at the end of a cold. All right, thanks guys. I'm looking at the comments here. When I was in Japan a month ago, I noticed that all the ticketing stations have a dedicated JR Rail Pass service line. See? They've really added in a lot of services. JR Rail Pass plus APA hotels. That's a lot of services. Really? I would never... I'd say APA is like my last resort. And then my last, last resort would be like sleeping in a park. But the 14-day pass is a good deal. But you don't have to start it right away. Be strategic about it. Make the most of it. Use regional passes.

00:32:08 John Daub: Oh, here it is. Oh, yeah. I got some more stuff here. This is the old Tokyo-wide pass here. This was 10,000 yen. And you could travel on this. You could travel on the Shinkansen in this area, which is like Nagano, Niigata. I still use this pass quite a bit. This is this month's postcard, guys. If you'd like to support the channel... Let's see what we got here. The Shinkansen's taking off. If you'd like to support the channel, I really do appreciate it. This month's postcard is a 1,000-year-old cherry blossom tree in Fukushima that I went to go visit a couple of weeks ago. I'm editing this episode right now. Like, samurai would come and appreciate it. I think this tree, back in the Edo period, was in great inspiration so much. So this is this month's postcard. On the back of it, I have a picture of it from different angles and the manhole cover. Some information that helps support the channel.

00:33:12 John Daub: The hitchhiking Japan Blu-ray right there. Some of the signs that I used. A little story underneath there. There's a map. And that is available on the Only in Japan.tv store. Yeah. All right, everybody. Thanks for watching. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below. And hit me up on Discord. And I will try to check in. And I'm sure we have a lot of people here traveling Japan. We'll answer your questions. And I'll update and see the validity of buying the ticket on September 30th. And if it's good for 30 days or three months or what. I'll get that information. I'll pin to the top of this livestream and possibly do another livestream coming up just to reiterate some of the information as this changes because it absolutely could continue to change. I will be here to let you know all that. And thanks to everybody, especially the Patreon supporters for letting me know about the kind of content that they want. This is something that people wanted information on right away because it does impact your trip. All right, everybody. Have a good day. Have a good night. See you tomorrow. Bye.