How Japan works

ETC needs two things: the transponder built into the car, and a separate ETC payment card. Rental vehicles almost always have the transponder; you rent the card alongside it for a few hundred yen. Nobody rents the card on its own, so sort it out when you book the van. Enter ETC lanes at 20 km/h or slower.

A campervan registered as a camping car pays the ordinary-car rate however large it looks — the classification follows the registration, not the size. Keep the vehicle inspection certificate handy; toll staff sometimes ask to see it. A kei-based camper stays in the kei bracket, but one widened onto white plates moves up to ordinary.

The nationwide Japan Expressway Pass ended in 2023. What remains are four regional passes — Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kyushu, and San'in–Setouchi–Shikoku — available on a foreign passport plus a licence valid here, and only through the designated rental companies. Worth knowing separately: at 29 michi-no-eki you can leave the expressway, stop, and re-enter the same interchange within two hours without paying as though you had exited. It needs ETC 2.0, and it exists because some stretches run 25 km with nowhere to rest.

Most bathhouses still turn away tattooed guests. The reason is domestic, not personal: for decades visible ink here signalled organised crime, and the policy was written with that in mind rather than with visitors in mind. In 2016 the national tourism agency asked facilities not to refuse foreign travellers unreasonably and set out three ways to accommodate them — cover the tattoo with a sticker, come at a quieter hour, or use a private bath — but each place still decides for itself.

In practice: a tattoo small enough to hide under cover stickers is usually fine, and many facilities sell them at reception for a few hundred yen. A full sleeve or back piece will not be, and no amount of tape changes that. Town sento and resort areas used to international guests tend to be relaxed; large suburban super-sento are the strictest.

The reliable answer is a private family bath — no other bathers, no question asked. Failing that, tattoo-friendly.jp lists places that have confirmed their policy by phone, in English and Japanese.

Just over four in ten payments here are now cashless, which means a lot of them still are not. Cities and chains take cards; the places a road trip actually stops at often do not — small-town shops, shrine entry fees, coin laundries, self-service fuel pumps, dump stations, unattended car parks, and festival stalls. Carry notes and keep coins.

Not every ATM accepts a foreign card. The two that reliably do are Seven Bank, inside Seven-Eleven and at stations and airports, open around the clock and in English, and Japan Post Bank, which is easier to find once you are rural. Seven Bank allows ¥100,000 per withdrawal; Japan Post charges ¥220 on some foreign cards.

With children, the cash-only moments are the ones they care about: the sweet shop, the coin-operated ride, the stall at the summer festival. Running out is a small disappointment that is easy to avoid.

Michi-no-eki are roadside rest stops built for driver safety, not campgrounds. Sleeping in your vehicle is accepted as a nap between drives; arriving with the intention of staying the night is not, and the difference is visible from outside. Stay in the van, keep the engine off, and leave in the morning.

What crosses the line is everything that turns a parking space into a campsite: chairs and tables, awnings, cooking of any kind, and open flame — all prohibited. Household rubbish stays with you. So does your charging: the outlets belong to the facility, and using them is treated as theft, not as a favour.

If you want to legitimately camp, look for an RV Park — a growing number of michi-no-eki now run one alongside the free lot, with power and a fee of around ¥2,000–3,000. Paying for it buys you the freedom to actually set up.

Use the ordinary-car bays, not the large-vehicle ones. Those are sized for trucks and coaches that physically cannot fit elsewhere, and at night they are how long-haul drivers get their legally required rest — a campervan taking one is taking a bed. A camping-car registration puts you in the ordinary bracket anyway. Park inside one set of lines, and leave the accessible bays alone; those come with a permit scheme now running in 45 prefectures, though not in Hokkaido or Tokyo.

Height is the constraint that catches people out. Multi-storey and mechanical car parks generally cap around 2.1 m, which rules out most campers, so plan for surface lots. A standard bay is about 2.5 m by 5 m, so anything over five metres long will overhang.

On sleeping, the national line is narrower than most people assume: a nap to recover from driving is fine, staying the night as accommodation is not. Individual michi-no-eki set their own rules on top of that. If the plan is genuinely to sleep, an RV Park — 644 of them nationwide, around ¥2,000–3,000 a night with power — lets you stop pretending it is a nap.

Night here is treated as roughly ten in the evening to six in the morning, and the expectation in a car park is that you become invisible during it. That means no idling, no generator, no talking outside the van, and closing doors rather than letting them slam. Running the engine to keep the aircon going overnight is the one visitors do most often and the one that carries actual weight: many prefectures and cities have anti-idling ordinances, and while they usually end at a warning rather than a fine, the rules differ by municipality — even between cities in the same prefecture.

The other line is the one between resting and camping. Chairs outside, a table, cooking, eating in the open air: at a michi-no-eki or service area these read as setting up for the night, whatever time it is.

With four children this takes deliberate effort. Once it is late, keep them inside — voices carry further across a quiet car park than anyone expects. And if you can choose, do not park beside the trucks: their engines and refrigeration units run all night, and yours will be just as audible to them.

Everyone shares the same water, and none of it is drained between guests — so the washing happens outside the bath, not in it. Sit at a shower station, wash and rinse completely, then get in. Long hair goes up. The small towel you are given never touches the water; fold it on your head or leave it at the edge. Nobody wears a swimsuit: bathing is done naked, with the small towel held in front of you as you walk.

Inside, it is quiet. No swimming, no running on wet stone, no phones or cameras anywhere past the changing room door. Dry off before you step back onto the changing-room floor.

With children, one rule is written into local law rather than custom: mixed bathing is barred from around age seven, but the exact age is set by each prefecture — several use eight, and some leave it to guidance instead. Check locally rather than assuming. Children still in nappies are generally not allowed in the shared bath at all. A private family bath (kashikiri-buro) sidesteps all of it, and most places that have one will book it by the 45 minutes.

There are almost no public bins, so plan to carry everything with you. The convenience-store bin outside is for what you just bought and consumed there — not for a week of van rubbish. Staff treat anything carried in from a vehicle as household waste, and dumping it is illegal disposal, not a grey area. Many chains have moved their bins inside next to the till for exactly this reason.

Bottles, cans and PET go to the recycling boxes at supermarket entrances or beside vending machines, which are for containers only. Everything else waits. Sorting rules are set by each municipality, not nationally, so the categories change as you drive — most places run eleven to fifteen streams, and around eight in ten require the town's own designated bags.

For a van, the practical answer is a lidded, odour-proof bag kept sorted as you go, emptied where disposal is actually provided: an RV Park (waste handling is part of the certification, sometimes for a fee) or a campsite. Michi-no-eki and convenience stores are not that place.

Cruise in the left lane and treat the right one as a place you visit, not a place you sit. Overtaking is done on the right — coming past on the left is an offence — and staying out there after you have finished is one too. That is not a technicality: sitting in the overtaking lane was the second most common enforcement category on expressways in 2023, behind speeding. The minimum speed is 50 km/h, and there is no distance or time limit that makes lane-hogging legal, whatever you read.

If you break down, the order matters and it is not the one most visitors expect. Hazard lights, then flare and warning triangle, then get everyone out of the vehicle and behind the guardrail, back from the car, and only then call for help. The expressway operators are blunt about it: the inside of the car is not a safe place, and people have been killed sitting in one waiting. That includes the children — there is no version of this where anyone stays inside. Walk behind the barrier, never along the lane, and do not attempt repairs.

A camping-car registration keeps you at the ordinary 100 km/h limit (120 on a few stretches) rather than the 80 that trucks get. Whether you should use it is a different question, given the weight and the height. And if you miss your exit, carry on to the next one — reversing or turning around on an expressway is in a category of its own.

Yielding to a siren here is a legal duty, not a courtesy. Because traffic drives on the left, you pull to the left — the opposite reflex to anyone who learned to drive on the right, and the mistake visitors make most. At or near a junction you must clear the junction itself and come to a stop at the left edge; elsewhere, moving left and giving way is enough without stopping. On a one-way street where moving left would block them, go right instead.

On the expressway the same rule reads differently in practice: move out of the right-hand lane and back to the left, because that is the side they will come past on. Japan does not use the German-style corridor between lanes — there is nothing to form, just a right lane to vacate. You do not need to fling yourself onto the hard shoulder either; easing left within your lane is often enough, and a sudden swerve in a tall vehicle is its own hazard. Once they have passed, do not tuck in behind them.

The practical problem in a van full of children is hearing the siren at all. With the windows up and everyone talking, the first warning is often in the mirror rather than the ear. And when you stop to give way, everyone stays in the car — that is the opposite of what a breakdown calls for, and the two situations are easy to confuse.