Sweet! I am planning to visit Japan in the future, if this darn virus won't stand in my way anymore that is. Would really love to make a trip across as much of the country as possible and visit as many cities as I could. That is of course after I save up enough money as well.
It's not nearly as expensive to travel as Europe, but if you indulge, it can be VERY expensive.
When I went in 2016, we did:
- Tokyo for 8 1/2 days
- Kyoto for 4 days
- Osaka for 3 days
- Okinawa for 3 days
- Tokyo for the final 2 1/2 days.
In that span, we traveled as such:
- Drove to Yokohama and into Chiba, on the Wangan (what a dream come true!)
- Nagoya day trip (to see Sumo Tourney)
- Yokosuka 1/2 day trip (for obvious reasons :))
- Yokohama 1/2 day trip (for baseball and to see Chinatown)
- Kobe Day trip (for Kobe Beef and to see Sorakuen Garden)
- Uji 1/2 day trip
- Himeji day trip (well, more of a 1/2 day trip, to see the castle)
- Naha 1/2 day trip (we stayed in Sesoko, on the north end of Okinawa)
We also did something big every day (unless it was a travel day), save for the first day there (I was getting tattooed for 5 hours and I proposed to my wife).
For food, we ate at Yoshinoya or Matsuya once a day and ate at/from a restaurant once a day as well, to keep costs low.
So, excluding the flight (which I paid for almost a year {10 months} in advance, $1,900.00 for both), the train/plane travel within the country (all paid for well in advance; it was only around $500.00 Canadian) and the tattoo costs (I saved up for that separately), my wife and landed in Japan with about 500,000 yen (approx. $5,000.00 American dollars) to spend and between the food, accommodations, taxis, baseball games, Joypolis, souvenir shopping, aquariums, arcades, etc., etc., we arrived back in Canada with 6,000 yen (approx. $600.00 in American dollars) in hand.
If we did everything we did in Europe for only 2 weeks, it probably would've been 1 1/2 to double the cost.
Set your savings goals on the trip and you will see the account grow, until you are ready to go!
BTW, I too can confirm that they got Yokohama's Chinatown, pretty much bang on in Yakuza 7. Had an excellent Szechuan dish that was sooo spicy (we took it back to our hotel in Ikebukuro, after the Baystars' game). Great stuff!