Today we are answering the question, “How much spending money do I need for 8 days in Japan?”

Well, Japan can be as expensive or as cheap as you make it!

For our tours, we usually recommend $60 USD per person per day for spending money in Japan, and that’ll cover meals, entertainment, and light souvenir shopping. If you’re not on our tour, we recommend a little bit more per day to cover things like entrance fees.

Meals

We recommend budgeting about $50 per person per day for meals. This breaks down to about $10 for breakfast, $10 for lunch, and $30 for dinner, depending on the exchange rate.

Breakfast

Japan has amazing morning sets at cafés for about 500 to 700 yen, which usually include coffee, toast, and a salad.

Then, there’s always McDonald’s. McDonald’s is international, so it’s everywhere in the world, including Japan. You can get a breakfast set with coffee and a hash brown for roughly 500 yen.

Lunch

For lunch, you’ll need about 1000 yen or less. In this price range, you can get sushi, noodles, onigiri, curry rice, or a bento box.

A Teishoku set lunch is around 1200 to 1500 yen and includes rice, miso soup, a small salad, and a main dish.

Dinner

With a budget of 3000 yen per person for dinner, you can eat at an izakaya, a yakiniku restaurant, or a yakitori restaurant. For this price, you may even be able to order a drink or two. Draft beer is usually pretty reasonable at restaurants in Japan.

Entertainment

For entertainment, you’re going to need about $10 per day. This will cover things like karaoke and a movie. Karaoke is going to run you about 1000 yen per person for an hour without drinks. A movie costs 1900 yen.

Shopping

You’ll need to budget another $10 per day for shopping. Japan has great souvenirs, and you’ll want to take home some small mementos from your trip!

While in Japan, be sure to check out the 100 yen stores. You can find chopsticks, sake sets, and lots of Japanese goods at reasonable prices.

Entrance Fees

For entrance fees, we recommend about $10 per day. You may be surprised to find that a lot of the temples, shrines, and castles are free to enter. If you’re on a budget, you could just choose to visit the places that are free!

For the ones that do cost money, the entrance fee is usually around 500 yen. There are a few exceptions that cost more, such as Himeji Castle and Nikko Toshogu Shrine.

Museums generally run from about 1000 to 2000 yen.

Total Spending Money in Japan

So, for an 8-day trip, we recommend $640 dollars of spending money, which breaks down to about $80 dollars per person per day.

Keep in mind that this does not include your airfare, hotels, land transportation, travel insurance, luggage transfers, or pocket Wi-Fi. This is just pure spending money.

Update: We’ve recently started using the WISE card for transferring funds into foreign currency. It’s a convenient and safe way to exchange, withdraw, and spend money while traveling.

You can use your WISE card anywhere MasterCard is accepted, and you can withdraw money from ATMs with minimal fees. To learn more, check out the official WISE website.

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