Upside Down.
My guest poster wrote his own intro:
My friend, who lives in Japan, is waiting until he moves to Korea to travel around Japan. Strange, you say? Not when you look at the numbers.
Here is the rest of the post.
Travel Costs: By CW
It’s cheaper to fly to Korea than to visit a different city in Japan (and Kanazawa is fairly close to Tokyo, only a 50 minute flight)
- Kanazawa to Narita–about 32,000 yen by train round trip
- Kanazawa to Tokyo–about 26,000 yen round trip
- Narita to Seoul–about 20,000 yen (off season) by plane
Visit Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Fukuoka and Kanazawa by train as a resident of Japan. (All Prices in Yen.)
- Tokyo to Osaka–14,250
- Osaka to Kyoto–540
- Kyoto to Hiroshima–11,290
- Hiroshima to Fukuoka–9,100
- Fukuoka to Kanazawa–28,100
- Kanazawa to Tokyo–13,010
Total cost is: 76,290 yen. Additional cities? Add $$$$$. The same trip, Non-Resident flying in from Korea:
- Flight: 20,000 yen
- 14-day Japan Rail Pass: 45,100 yen
- 7-day Japan Rail Pass: 28,300 yen
Total: Between 48,300 and 65,100 yen. Additional cities? Same cost. It’s cheaper to travel around Japan if you live in Korea than it is if you live in Japan.
CW’s Research Tools:
And it’s more convenient to fly between both countries from Kimpo/Haneda. The flight per se might be a little more expensive, but the time and costs saving on the airportcity trips is well worth it. Haneda’s International Terminal is a shoebox of a building, but is accessible with the Monorail, and then a shuttle bus from Haneda 国内線 terminals 1&2. Kimpo is reachable by metro – line #5 – or even a cheapish cab ride.
It boggles my mind that in Japan they charge the citizens more to travel from city to city then it does for the foreign visitors. In the US, it seems that the opposite is true. Forginers pay more to travel then citizens simply because the citizens know and understand the local transportation.