What is the best route?

Hi there,

It would depend on where you would travel too. There are winter sports resorts all over Japan.

www.snowjapan.com is a good resource for finding them.

As for the JR Pass, I would recommend deciding on your travel first, then find the best JR Pass to match your plans.

Hope this helps,
Daniel

Thanks Daniel!

I was thinking of visiting:
Toyko
Nikko (as a day trip)
Hakone (or is this better as a day trip?)
Kanazawa
Shirakawa
Takayama
Kyoto
Osaka
Hiroshima
And then a ski resort somewhere along the way

Unless you would suggest something else?

Hi gain!

This looks like a great plan and a lot of travel already. Two weeks is likely the very minimum you'd want to explore this trip and get a feeling of each city.

The best approach I would recommend here for a JR Pass is to buy normal tickets for your arrival and around Tokyo then start using a 14 day JR Pass when you start traveling using the bullet trains, to Nikko or Kanazawa.

For Skiing, you could look at Hakuba, it would not be too hard to add it in on the route to Kanazawa and is one of the post popular resorts in Japan.

Great - thanks so much!

I think we will be there for around 16 days now so hopefully will be enough time.