Our Experience Doing 6 Weeks in Japan with a Baby
For the last decade, we assumed that traveling to Japan with small kids would be a nightmare. In fact, we made a concerted effort to visit as much as possible before having a baby–including multi-month “bucket list” type trips–because we feared that would be impossible with an infant or toddler.
After spending well over a month in Japan with an under one year old, we learned that–thankfully–all of that was wrong. Traveling to and around Japan with a baby was far easier than we anticipated. Not as easy as when it was just the two of us, but that kind of comes with the territory. Easy enough that we already have a return trip to Japan planned!
Getting to that point was difficult. Part of our problem was that there’s voluminous information online about traveling to Japan with an infant. And like parenting advice itself, many of the recommendations are completely at odds with one another. So naturally, we’re going to add to that chorus of conflicting info, with more tips & tricks bound to confuse you even further.
Kidding…hopefully. Our goal here is to allay your fears, with what worked and what didn’t for us, and other things we learned along the way. Rather than pretending this is a definitive guide for traveling with babies to Japan, we’re going to give you a rundown of what we did, a rough idea of what our fears were and how reality differed from those.
Ideally, this information will help put some of your concerns to rest even if you don’t do things exactly like we did. Because, again, there’s no right answer to any of this. What worked for us may not be what works for you, but at least you’re armed with more information.
Flight Fears – We were terrified for this. I lost count of how many articles I read about flying internationally with a baby. The success stories. The horror stories. I became preoccupied about this to the point that I had literal nightmares about it.
We talked to friends about flying internationally with a baby, and almost all of them have offered reassurances. Many enthusiastically recommended traveling as close to the 6-month mark as possible. They described this as the “sweet spot” before the baby is really mobile and active, but after they start sleeping more and are less fussy.
That was our plan all along (well, we ended up missing the 6-month mark by a bit, but were still well within that window). But while planning this trip, we were in the eye of the storm, so to speak, and it was hard to envision a time when the dreaded witching hour wasn’t a thing.
We also are native Midwesterners who are cognizant and apprehensive of being “those people” who are a burden, in the way, annoying, etc. We are afflicted with personalities that are overly apologetic. Rationally, we knew that everyone was a baby and people need to get places regardless of age. It’s just a fact of life. And we ourselves have never been annoyed by crying babies on planes, so there’s no hypocrisy guilt…but there was still a very big mental barrier.
For those who are reading this in a similar position, I’m here to offer the same assurances that our friends offered us: it does get better. Well, probably. It did for us. Living near Los Angeles, we had nonstop flights from LAX to Haneda, and they were literally smoother sailing (er, flying) than our flights back “home” to family in Indianapolis. Of course, as with anything, your mileage may vary.
Plane Seats – Flights were such an overwhelming fear that this is a two-parter! In order to minimize all of the above, we deliberated long and hard about which seats to book. As basic background, we always fly economy. Even as novice travel hackers who are reasonably adept at acquiring miles (we don’t put nearly the effort into it as some bloggers), our position on travel is typically more as opposed to better.
In any case, we knew we were going to fly Delta or United. From there, we debated our options: two seats in premium vs. three seats in economy vs. two seats in economy bulkhead. That sounds simple when written out, but there were seemingly endless permutations when we booked…and rebooked…and re-rebooked our flights.
I can’t give you a definitive answer as to which of these is best. No one can. What we ended up with was three seats in economy bulkhead, meaning both a car seat and a bassinet. We figured this was our best hedge, because it gave us two different seating options for Baby Bricker.
This was the correct decision for us. We wanted the bulkhead/bassinet option because, unlike seemingly every other baby on the planet, ours hadn’t been a fan of her car seat. Putting her in that and going for a drive around the block didn’t calm her down, it melted her down. But she (kinda) liked the crib, so at least we’d have that?
We were nevertheless worried, because baby’s favorite spot to sleep was on the comfy, heated pillows of mom’s chest. This is what led us to consider the premium seats in the first place. Three seats in economy wouldn’t do us much good if two of us were always going to be in one of them, so maybe two seats with more space would be the better option?
It was a gamble, but one that paid off. About two weeks before we left for Japan, Baby Bricker finally got the memo that her people are supposed to love their car seat, find it calming, etc. And so she did. I kid you not, that was how things played out, and it was sheer dumb luck that she went from hating her car seat to loving it, and having a great flight in the process.
This anecdote alone should underscore how children change on a whim, and maybe that whatever I or anyone else has to say may not apply to you. Heck, even what you discover about your own kid may not still apply between the time you book the trip and the time you take it. Regardless, I felt like the 3 seats in economy bulkhead best positioned us for success–and an opportunity to pivot–in the fickle realm of parenting.
Jet Lag – This shockingly was not much of an issue going from Los Angeles to Japan. Actually, it was less of an issue than going from LAX to Indianapolis or to Orlando, the two trips we had done prior to this.
Our secret to success, I guess, was trying to get the baby (and ourselves) on Japan time during the flight. Meaning that we all went to sleep at night and woke up in the morning…more or less. Upon landing in Japan, we stayed up until when we’d normally go to bed.
This is what we always do, and it works for us. Again…more or less. We still find ourselves waking up at about 4 am each of the first few mornings, but that serves strategic advantage in getting out and about, watching cities or temples wake up for the day, etc.
We were worried that Baby Bricker wouldn’t comprehend why we were suddenly sleeping during the day and playing all night, but that wasn’t the case. She slept on the plane when we did (I suspect the white noise and soothing motion of the aircraft did the heavy lifting), stayed up until nightfall when we landed, and woke up at 4 am each of the first few days. Bedtimes weren’t bad, or at least, weren’t any worse than at home.
Going from Japan back to the United States, on the other hand, was a totally different story. That jet lag the first week back was, and I’m not exaggerating, hell on earth. But it’s always worse for us flying that direction, and this is a post about Japan, not returning to the US. At least we were already home when dealing with the fallout?
Packing Light – We normally pack light. We did not pack light for this trip. As background, we’ve done multi-month trips to Japan in the past with only a carry-on suitcase and backpack each.
As it turns out, adding one baby that’s less than 10% of the size of an adult human does not increase what you need to pack by 10%. Standard logic would dictate, since baby clothes are quite small, that would roughly be the case. It is very much not the case. Baby Bricker is not a light packer, and this one (1) baby doesn’t just need as much stuff as one (1) adult, but in fact, more than both of us combined.
Part of this was because brought the car seat, which meant taking the stroller so that we didn’t have to carry the car seat around by itself. Those two things added considerably to what we packed, but we also brought diapers, baby food, developmental toys, books–the whole kitchen sink.
To some extent, having more luggage as a result of the baby is unavoidable. But we also agreed that we overpacked. In our past life as a light-packing couple, one of our mantras was “cities have stores.” Which is to say that it’s better to underpack and buy your way out of a problem than overpack for every possible contingency.
We should’ve taken our own advice. While it was nice to have our preferred brand of diaper, baby food and other stuff, we ended up making multiple trips to Babies ‘R’ Us and supermarkets while in Japan. We could’ve reduced what we packed by 25%, easily.
I also regret not shipping our luggage from Tokyo to Kyoto. It’s such a simple, safe, and cost-effective thing–not doing so was an unforced error.
Strollers vs. Babywearing – We are babywearing enthusiasts, but not the weird cultish ones who only use carriers and look down on parents who use strollers. We own the Stokke YOYO3 Stroller and love it! In fact, we think this is an amazing–arguably the best–traveler stroller on the market.
We just prefer to babywear whenever and wherever possible for a few reasons. The first is that it’s much more convenient than using a stroller. Unlike a stroller, a baby carrier can go anywhere you can go. This alone makes it more versatile than a stroller. Until you’re using a stroller while traveling, you may not realize just how much of the world is inconvenient on wheels. For many Americans, stroller life is an outgrowth of suburb life. Drive, park, get out the stroller, navigate on flat land, rinse and repeat.
This is not how stroller life goes elsewhere. We already had an idea of this before having a kid, as we spend a lot of time at the beach, hiking, and in urban environments. We also visited Europe and Asia with friends who are not light packers, and saw them struggle with their suitcases at train stations, airports, and throughout cities that were designed hundreds of years ago. It was pretty easy to extrapolate from that what using a stroller would be like.
Using a stroller means fundamentally rethinking and reframing how you navigate public spaces. By contrast, a baby carrier changes nothing. You still walk around with your feet, same as always. Navigation remains a known quantity. For us, with so many other things changing, retaining a bit of the status quo was really important.
Although we had both the stroller and the baby carriers (plural), we seldom used the stroller. In fact, we stored it at the hotel we stayed at in Tokyo on the front and back end of the trip, so we didn’t even have it in Kyoto and beyond. For those wondering, Sarah prefers the BabyBjörn Baby Carrier One Air with 3D Mesh and I favor the Ergobaby Omni Breeze. (We did a lot of research and testing to land on these two options. Although it’s impossible to say which carriers are the “best” since that’s personal…I think one of these two will work well for the vast majority of people.)
Again, these are our experiences as opposed to advice. But if this were advice, I’d append “do not try this at home while traveling” cold turkey. We babywear extensively at home, and had built up strength, endurance, or whatever as a result of that. I cannot imagine going from zero to 100% babywearing while traveling. It would be terrible advice to offer.
To that end, the real advice here is to try babywearing at home in the first couple of months and see if it’s for you. If not, no worries–it isn’t for a lot of people. But either way, you’ll have your own answer to this “debate” and won’t even need advice on this point from anyone else. As indecisive and uncertain as we were about almost everything, this was not one of those things.
Diapers – At home, we use a mixture of Huggies and Coterie diapers. It works well for us for daytime vs. nighttime, but to each their own.
As noted, we brought diapers with us, but not nearly enough for the entire trip. Our intent all along was to buy more, and that we did. We ended up ‘testing’ multiple Japanese brands–Moony, Goon, Mamy Poko, Merries, and this exotic brand called “Pampers.”
Diapers are available all over Japan because babies also exist there and operate in a similar fashion. We found diapers at the aforementioned Babies ‘R’ Us, as well as Don Quixote, and pretty much every supermarket. Even some of the 100 yen stores had them. It wasn’t even remotely difficult to find them.
The one useful tip here is to bring something to put dirty diapers into for disposal. If you’ve been to Japan before, you’re likely already aware that public trash cans are few and far between. Same applies here. Be prepared to carry dirty diapers around with you all day. (Daiso sells disposable bags–but you can also just bring pet feces bags with you.)
Changing & Feeding Stations – Don’t even worry about this. We spent a good amount of time at Tokyo Disney Resort, which was fantastic–as expected. More surprisingly, so was just about everywhere else in Japan that was non-rural.
There are multipurpose restrooms, nursing rooms, and larger toilets with changing tables all over the place. Almost every single train station, department store, and even lots of convenience stores. Kyoto was especially, shockingly, good–there were a number of places with private nursing rooms that were incredibly nice. As with all of Japan, these are clean and convenient.
We’d recommend downloading the mamamap app or using the mamamap website if you’re off the beaten path, but even then, we had no issues whatsoever. Japan is incredibly baby friendly. More so than the United States, in my opinion, by virtue of so many public spaces offering nice accommodations.
One thing to keep in mind is that Japan is generally more modest than the United States or Europe. Do with that information what you will.
Transportation – We always use public transportation in Japan. We’ve never rented a car and we’ve used a taxi like once, ever. And that was not this trip. Although we’ve purchased it in the past, we did not buy the Japan Rail Pass this time due to the last price increase not making the math work.
We still used the Shinkansen, trains, and subway as much as ever. To a lesser extent, we also used buses. The Shinkansen was a breeze, as always. Even when we had a near meltdown, there was room to stretch our feet and avert disaster. Or at least, not subject others to it.
On this front, my only meaningful piece of advice would be to plan your itinerary to avoid rush hour. You don’t want to be on those trains that are packing people in like sardines for reasons that should be obvious. You’ll be especially out of place if you do opt for a stroller in these scenarios, and even babywearing will be uncomfortable.
Restaurants – We are Americans, so eating is a pastime for us. Food is part of what keeps us coming back to Japan. In the past, we’ve eschewed the train station and department store restaurants in favor of everything from hole in the walls to fancy kaiseki dinners.
This time, we did a lot more approachable restaurants. We also did lunch as opposed to dinner–or ate before 6 pm. Everywhere we went was incredibly baby-friendly. The staff was always accommodating, bringing over high chairs and bowls of rice, and just generally being very helpful and friendly. All of our dining experiences were fantastic.
With that said, we knew where to go and, more importantly, where not to go. We aren’t ones to try to swim upstream, so to speak, and although we love food and try to find great (non-touristy) restaurants, we knew better than to do that with a baby. Some of these places barely want foreign patrons in the first place, so we just didn’t bother with anywhere that appeared borderline.
We did do a couple of our favorite ramen spots in Kyoto, but not the bar-style ramen shops that are more rigid and no-nonsense. For a couple of those, the two of us actually alternated–eating individually while the other waited outside (or back at our Airbnb).
This is another topic where there’s no such thing as one-size fits-all advice. It’s quite possible that we erred on the side of caution too much, and avoided places we might’ve been welcome. But we placed an emphasis on comfort–ours, other patrons, and the restaurant staff. Our view is that even eliminating ~20% of the restaurants in Japan, there are still amazing options on just about every block. Your mileage may vary.
Grocery & Convenience Stores – This restaurant approach worked well for us because we’ve always done a 50/50 split in restaurants vs. supermarket/convenience store meals. In fact, one of our requirements for extended stay accommodations in Japan is being within walking distance of a good grocery store.
Accordingly, we opted for an Airbnb in Kyoto that was a 5 minute walk from both the Keihan Line and one of the larger Life supermarkets. Our daily ritual was heading to Life between 6pm and 7pm, grabbing whatever clearance finds caught our eye, and then going home and eating.
This was also great for buying foods that we were comfortable feeding Baby Bricker. While we make a variety of dubious dining decisions, we’re pretty particular about what we feed her. Having access to fresh and healthy food for her (and also ourselves, I suppose) was great.
Cribs vs. Co-sleeping – We had it beaten into our heads by parenting books and so forth that co-sleeping is terrible, borderline neglect, a potential death sentence, etc. Naturally, this scared us into not doing it for the first 6+ months of Baby Bricker’s life.
Then I did the research for myself. (Uh oh, famous last words before a blogger goes off the rails and down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole!) In analyzing actual data, the risk drops significantly after a certain age. It went down even further if you controlled for certain variables that did not apply to us. (We do not smoke, drink, we’re both skinny, etc.)
Not to go too far down that particular rabbit hole, but this made us comfortable co-sleeping with Baby Bricker between us on the floor at our Airbnb. This is common in Japan–so much so that you’ll have a difficult time finding an Airbnb with a crib or pack and play (and there’s even a term for this type of co-sleeping: kawa-no-ji).
Our hotel in Tokyo provided a crib and we used that. Honestly, though, the co-sleeping was so much easier.
Looser Plans – We are go-go-go people. Or rather, we were go-go-go people. Our days used to start early and end late, with little downtime.
Now, we’re on baby time. We tried to get out the door as soon as she was ready, but that was often easier said than done. On the plus side, she napped easily while babywearing, so that was never an issue. She just slept while we went about our day.
One tough part of this was not staying out late. We were routinely back in our Airbnb or hotel by 7:30 pm for the bedtime ritual, and only narrowly averted public evening meltdowns on a couple of occasions. There were a couple of times when we got her to fall asleep in the baby carrier and actually went back out like that (without issue), but we never strayed far from home when doing this.
This also meant no lengthy day trips, save for Nara (an easy one from where we were staying). We usually use Kyoto as a home base for bouncing around the Kansai region, but this time, we stuck closer.
Friendly Faces – We’ve been going to Japan since before its big tourism boom a decade ago, to the point that we were novelties in some places. More accurately, Sarah was a novelty–beautiful, friendly, long hair, told on more than one occasion that she looks ‘like Anne Hathaway’ (a comment she’s never heard in the states).
By and large, that stopped happening a while ago. Even when it did happen, it was almost exclusively younger people, women especially, who would ask for photos with or of her from time to time. Older Japanese people would mostly ignore us, as expected. In some rare instances they’d move away from us on a train.
So it came as quite a surprise that we were suddenly popular with older Japanese people. More accurately, that Baby Bricker was popular with them. We don’t share her face online for privacy reasons, so I’ll paint a picture–she has blonde hair and bright blue eyes, is incredibly fluent in baby babble, just learned to wave…and loves to show off that newfound skill.
Whenever we were on the train or in any public place, Baby Bricker was looking around and seemingly trying to find someone making eye contact. Once they did, she started hamming it up, waving and being adorable. This created a not-so-vicious cycle of strangers noticing her and waving back. She broke down the language barrier and interacted with dozens of Japanese people every single day.
I know that it can be grating for parents to boast about their kids and that “have a cute baby that’s outgoing” is not really actionable advice, so I’ll cut this short. But as mentioned, this is about our experience in Japan, and this was an outsized element of our experience.
Lifelong Memories – A lot of the above revolves around the compromises that you’ll make in traveling to Japan with a baby. And it’s a near certainty that your travel will have to adapt to the new, fussier style. At the same time, it is incredibly enriching and satisfying. That last point about Baby Bricker’s interactions really cuts to the core of what made this trip so special.
Obviously, an ~8 month old is not going to remember this trip…or the next one. But we will! It’s fair to say that it was too early to see Japan through our daughter’s eyes, but we did see Japan as reflected in her eyes. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?
What I think it means is that the trip was mostly for us, but everything was from our new prospective as parents and through that lens. We weren’t so much looking at the torii of Fushimi Inari–we were looking at our daughter look at them. We weren’t locking eyes with the deer in Nara–we were looking at her look at them. Same goes for those interactions on the train with random strangers. We were active participants, not just passive parts of those, but we were not the protagonists.
Those memorable moments would not have happened but for our daughter, even if we were the ones who had our hearts filled and made lifelong memories along the way. I’m probably doing a pretty lousy job of articulating all of this, but I suspect that if you’re in a position to be reading this post, you already know what I mean without me putting it into words.
The bottom line is that we’ve been fortunate to have some amazing trips to Japan over the last decade-plus, but this was our best yet. On paper, it sounds like a story of making compromises and overcoming difficulties or adapting to a new family travel dynamic. That certainly was part of it, but a small part.
What’s impossible to explain is the immense satisfaction of the little moments, seeing our daughter react to something or to Japan react to her. Experiencing something familiar in a fresh way and appreciating it anew. Cliche as it might sound, it was seeing Japan in a new light, with our new favorite person. I’m sure this is only going to get better and richer as she gets older, and we cannot wait. It’s why we keep going and why, if you’re reading this as a new parent on the fence about visiting Japan with a baby, so should you.
If you’re planning a trip to Japan, we start by consulting our Ultimate Guide to Kyoto and Ultimate Tokyo City Guide to plan all aspects of your visit to Japan’s top two cities. You should also check out our other posts about Japan for ideas on other places to visit!
Your Thoughts
If you’ve been to Japan with a baby, what was your experience? Any additional tips you’d offer for parents traveling to Japan with kids for the first-time? Agree or disagree with any of our advice–or different perspectives? If you have first-hand experiences, please share in the comments–more viewpoints will help other readers! If you don’t have experience, feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments!
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