Getting Around Tokyo

Read the row for the distance you are travelling, not the number of stops. Six stops on the Ginza Line through the middle of town can be shorter than three on the Oedo Line, which loops.

Two things fall out of that grid. The first is that Toei is the more expensive network the moment a ride passes about five kilometres, which is why an Oedo Line hop across town costs noticeably more than the same distance on the Marunouchi Line. The second is that the IC discount is small, a handful of yen, and is not the reason to carry a card. The reason is that the card ends the arithmetic: you tap in, you tap out, the gate works out the band.

Two special fares sit outside the ladder. On the Chiyoda Line, the single stop between Ayase and Kita-senju is a flat ¥160 for an adult. On the Toei Mita Line, journeys between Meguro, Shirokane-dai and Shirokane-takanawa are a flat ¥180 for an adult, ¥178 by IC. Both exist because those sections are shared with another company's tracks.

The ticket price on both networks now includes a ten-yen barrier-free surcharge on the adult fare, which the operators state on the same page as the bands. If you lose a paper ticket before the exit gate, Tokyo Metro charges a handling fee of ¥170 on its own lines and ¥220 when the journey involved another company, which is a small argument for the card and a large one against paper for anyone travelling with children.

The single most confusing thing about the Tokyo subway for a first-time visitor is that there are two subways. A journey from Ginza to Asakusa can be one company's line the whole way, or it can start on the Metro and finish on Toei, and if it does, you pass through an orange transfer gate in the middle where a paper ticket will not take you.

Toei publishes the rule plainly: on a single ride crossing between the two subways, the adult fare is the sum of the two operators' fares minus ¥70, with fractions rounded up to the nearest ten yen, and the child fare is half that discounted total. So a ride that would be ¥180 on the Metro and ¥180 on Toei is not ¥360 but ¥290, about $1.88. Some sections are excluded, and the discount applies automatically at the interchange when you use an IC card.

With a paper ticket you have to buy the through fare at the machine before you start, using the fare board above it. Get it wrong and you settle up at a fare adjustment machine at the far end, which is a queue you did not need. This is the practical case for the card that has nothing to do with the few yen it saves: it makes the two-company problem invisible.

Commuter passes get a different treatment, layered rather than flat: each operator's monthly pass is discounted fifteen per cent and then summed, a three-month pass takes a further five per cent off the combined total and a six-month pass a further ten. Almost no visitor needs one, but it explains why the pass prices quoted at a station window do not divide neatly by the single fares in the ladder above.

Suica is JR East's card and PASMO is the card of the subway and private-railway operators. They do the same job, they work on each other's networks, and eight regional cards from other Japanese cities work here too. Either one covers Tokyo Metro, Toei, JR, the monorail, the private lines and city buses, and doubles as a payment card in convenience stores and vending machines.

Sales of unregistered Suica cards were suspended in June 2023 during the global semiconductor shortage and resumed on 1 March 2025. JR East sells the card in fixed face values of ¥1,000, ¥2,000, ¥3,000, ¥4,000, ¥5,000 and ¥10,000, each including a ¥500 refundable deposit, so a ¥2,000 card carries $9.72 (¥1,500) of travel value. Top-ups are cash only at station machines, in units from ¥500 upward, and the balance caps at ¥20,000. Credit cards cannot top up a physical Suica.

The visitor versions, and what they cost you to return

Welcome Suica is the version for overseas visitors: no deposit, and it stops working 28 days after issue. PASMO's equivalent is TOURIST PASMO, also 28 days, and its unused value is not refunded, which is the trade for paying no deposit. Both are aimed squarely at a trip rather than a life.

A standard Suica can be refunded, and the arithmetic is worth knowing before you decide which to buy. JR East charges a ¥220 handling fee against the remaining balance and returns the ¥500 deposit in full, so a card handed back with ¥1,000 on it returns $8.29 (¥1,280). A card issued by JR East has to be refunded at a JR East station; a Suica issued by another company, the Tokyo Monorail among them, goes back to that issuer. A card left in a drawer expires after ten years of non-use.

Mobile Suica in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet is the version most travellers now want, and here we hit a limit: we could not reach an official JR East page stating the current scope of support for foreign-issued credit cards, so this page does not claim it works with your card. Check it in the wallet app before you land rather than at the gate.

The pass covers all nine Tokyo Metro lines and all four Toei lines, unlimited, and it runs in clock hours from the first tap rather than to midnight. It is sold to overseas visitors and to Japanese residents from outside the greater Kanto area, in a paper form and a QR form that can be sent to a phone if you buy several.

The honest reading of that table is that the 24-hour ticket is the hardest of the three to justify. A sightseeing day that starts in Asakusa, spends the afternoon at Senso-ji and the evening in Shinjuku is three or four subway rides, not six, and walking between neighbourhood sights is how most people actually spend the day. The 48-hour version halves the daily cost and needs only about four rides a day to pay, which a real itinerary does reach.

The second thing the table cannot show is what the pass does not cover. There is no JR in it at all. The Yamanote loop, which is the line that connects Tokyo Station, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Harajuku and Ueno in one ring, is a separate fare every time you use it, and it is the line a first-time visitor uses most. A pass-holder who forgets this pays twice for a day.

Buy it before you need it. It is sold at the airports, at Tokyo Metro pass offices, at tourist information counters and online in the QR form; it is not sold at an ordinary ticket machine on the platform when you are already late.

Ranked by how often they are the right answer rather than by price.

Two more sit on JR East's pages and are worth naming so you can rule them out. The JR Tokyo Wide Pass at $103.70 (¥16,000) for three days covers a much larger area than the city, out as far as Nikko and the Fuji lakes, and is a day-trip instrument rather than a city one. The NONBIRI Holiday Suica Pass at $18.47 (¥2,850) is a weekend and holiday product over a wider Tokyo area.

The two that are usually wrong are the Toei Bus One-Day Pass, because the network a visitor needs is underground, and the 24-hour subway ticket bought for a day that was always going to be a walking day. Buy neither on arrival; buy the 48-hour pass on the morning you can see it will pay.

What none of these cover is entry to anything. Attraction tickets are a separate purchase and are compared on the tickets hub.

Above every ticket machine hangs a map of the network with a number printed beside each station. That number is the fare from where you are standing to that station, and buying a paper ticket means finding your destination on the board, pressing that amount on the machine and taking the ticket. The English button is on the screen; the board itself is usually bilingual in central Tokyo, and the station numbering system, a letter for the line and a number for the station, does the rest.

With an IC card you skip all of it. Tap the card flat on the pad as you walk through, tap again on the way out, and the gate deducts the fare it calculated. If the balance is short the gate closes, which is a small embarrassment and no more: the fare adjustment machine beside the gates takes cash, adds value and releases you.

Three gate rules save time. An orange gate between two subway companies is a transfer gate, not an exit, and a paper through-ticket goes in and comes back out of it. A gate marked with a wheelchair symbol is the wide one, and it is the one to use with a suitcase. And the exit numbers matter more here than the station name: a large station has a dozen exits spread over half a kilometre, so the useful thing to know before you get off is not the station but the exit letter, which is why every attraction page on this site names one.

When something goes wrong, the staffed window beside the gates is the answer rather than the machine. Tokyo Metro station staff handle lost tickets, fare disputes and lost property at the gate line, and the operator runs its own lost-and-found service, which recovers more than you would expect in a city where 4.8 million items were handed in to police in 2025.

Tokyo's trains stop. There is no all-night subway, the last services run somewhere around midnight to one in the morning depending on the line and the direction, and the operators publish those times per station rather than as a single figure, which is why this page does not print one. Check the last train for your own station on the operator's timetable before a night out, not after it.

What happens when you miss it is the expensive part. Taxis are plentiful and metered and the fare across central Tokyo at two in the morning carries a late-night surcharge that applies between 22:00 and 05:00, on the Tokyo Hire-Taxi Association's own rules. The alternative that Tokyo actually uses is to stay out: karaoke rooms, all-night cafes and the city's capsule and business hotels all trade on the last-train hour, and the neighbourhood pages for Shinjuku and Shibuya cover where that works.

The first trains start around five in the morning, which matters in the other direction: an early flight out of Haneda is usually reachable by train, an early flight out of Narita often is not. If your departure is before about eight in the morning, work backwards from the airport rather than forwards from the hotel, and consider the private transfer that runs at any hour rather than the train that does not.

One detail that catches people on the way home: the last train to a suburb often leaves well before the last train on the same line into the centre. A hotel near a Yamanote station keeps you in the part of the network that runs latest.

Tokyo taxis are metered, clean and easy to hail, and the Tokyo Hire-Taxi Association is the body that publishes the rates. Its English site confirms the structure, a fixed-fare system to and from both airports covering the 23 wards plus Musashino and Mitaka, tolls charged on top, and a late-night surcharge between 22:00 and 05:00. What it does not publish as text is the numbers: the fare charts, including the base fare and the airport fixed fares, render as images that we could not read as figures, so this page prints no taxi price at all rather than repeat a blog's. Dispatch apps are the practical way to get one and to see the fare before you ride.

Coin lockers are the same story. There is no station-operator page with a printed size and price table that we could reach; JR East's own English locker leaflet now returns a not-found page. Lockers exist in quantity at every large station, they take IC cards as well as coins, and the ones at Tokyo, Shinjuku and Ueno fill by mid-morning on a weekend. Budget for the search, not for a price we cannot source.

Sending the suitcases ahead instead

The alternative Tokyo residents actually use is to send the bag. Yamato Transport's Airport TA-Q-BIN moves a suitcase between the Kanto region and the airports on an eight-tier rate ladder by size, from $10.37 (¥1,600) for the smallest to $33.20 (¥5,130) for the largest, with cashless payment a few yen cheaper per tier and insurance up to ¥300,000 a parcel. Since June 2025 at Narita and July 2025 at Haneda, dropping a bag off at the airport counter adds a further ¥660 on top of that rate.

Hotel-to-hotel forwarding on the same network is what makes a multi-city trip through Japan practical with a large case, and it is worth pricing against a day of dragging luggage through subway stairs. The subway is not built for it: stations have lifts, but the route to them is signposted for people who know the station, and the Oedo Line in particular runs deep.

If none of that appeals, the door-to-door option is a car. A private airport transfer carries the bags for you and costs less than most people expect for two or more travellers, and the case for and against it is priced out on the two airport pages.

The famous images of white-gloved staff pushing passengers into carriages are real and they are also a commuter phenomenon with a narrow window. Neither Tokyo Metro nor Toei publishes a tourist-facing peak window as a printed figure on the English pages we could reach in Q3 2026, so rather than invent one: the crush is on weekday mornings into the centre and on weekday evenings out of it, it is worst on the lines that feed the business districts, and it is barely noticeable on a Sunday.

The practical response is scheduling, not avoidance. Museums open in the morning and a visitor travelling towards the centre in the morning is travelling with the commuters; a visitor going out to Ueno Park or a suburban temple is going against them. Women-only carriages operate on several lines during the morning peak and are marked in pink on the platform.

With a suitcase, the rush hour is not a discomfort but a genuine obstacle, and this is where the airport transfer earns its price on an arrival that lands at the wrong time. With small children, the same, and there is one more reason to avoid it: the carriages are silent, phone calls are not made on trains, and a tired toddler in a packed carriage is a hard hour for everyone including you. The Tokyo with kids page plans days that dodge it.

On the other side of the ledger, the trains run to the minute, they run all day at high frequency, and outside the peak the subway is one of the most comfortable ways to cross any large city on earth. The only thing that stops it working is the clock, at both ends of the day.