For many years, the Seishun 18 Ticket has been one of Japan’s best rail travel bargains. Though seishun is the Japanese word for “youth,” there’s no age limit for the Seishun 18 Ticket, with the name being meant to evoke images of slower-paced, off-the-beaten-path travel with a touch of adventurousness.
In many ways, the Seishun 18 Ticket exists as a sort of an opposite-benefit counterpart to the more-famous-among-foreign tourists Japan Rail Pass. Whereas the Japan Rail Pass has a higher price that gives you unlimited access to some of the fastest trains in Japan to zip back and forth across the country, the Seishun 18 Ticket, which is also provided by Japan Railway Company, is lower-priced, costing only 12,050 yen for five days of unlimited rides on JR trains and BRT highway buses anywhere in Japan, and even some ferries too.
The tradeoff for the Seishun 18 Ticket’s lower price is that you can only use local and rapid trains, so the Shinkansen and other high-speed limited express trains are out. Truth be told, though, that limitation hasn’t been so hard to plan around, since the five unlimited travel days could be used at any time during the roughly five weeks the Seishun 18 Ticket is valid. You could use one day of your pass for the first leg of your trip to head to someplace you want to spend a few days exploring, then hold off on using your second day until you’re ready to move to your next far-off destination.
▼ A beautiful view from the Tohoku region taken during a Seishun 18 Ticket trip
In other words, the Seishun 18 Ticket is tailored for people who’ve got more time than money to spend traveling, making it a favorite of backpackers, college students, and young adults with a case of wanderlust. But Japan Railway Company has just announced the details for the upcoming winter Seishun 18 Ticket (the passes are offered three times a year), and very few of the changes are going to make people happy.
Let’s start with the good news, which is even though prices for just about everything are going up in Japan these days, the five-day Seishun 18 Ticket price remains the same, 12,050 yen. In addition, there’s a new three-day Seishun 18 Ticket priced at 10,000 yen, making the economic hurdle even easier to clear. Also, the new Seishun 18 Tickets can be used in automated ticket gates, unlike the old versions which required you to find a manned gate and show your ticket to the staff when entering or exiting a station.
▼ Until now, Seishun 18 Tickets (青春18きっぷ) had to be manually stamped with the date on the days they were being used.
Now for the bad news: the Seishun 18 Ticket must now be used on consecutive days, starting from when you activate it. No more using the pass to roll into one town, spend multiple days leisurely soaking up the local atmosphere and seeing nearby sights, and waiting to use your next day of free rides until you’re ready to move on to another spot to base yourself at for a while, stretching out your trip for a week-plus and making the time spent on slower trains feel like not such a big deal. Under the new Seishun 18 Ticket system, if you activate a five-day pass on Monday, its validity runs straight on through to Friday, and on Saturday it’s just a piece of paper. Same deal for the three-day pass: the days of validity are consecutive.
There’s one more bummer with the new format. Up until now, you’ve been able to share the Seishun 18 Ticket among multiple people, as long as you’re all entering/exiting the station together as a group. So while you could use all five days of the pass just for yourself, you and a friend or friends could divvy up the days between you. Five friends, for example, could use the whole ticket for all of them to have unlimited rides on the same day. This feature, though, is also ending with the new Seishun 18 Ticket format, as the unlimited ride privileges are now exclusively for the single purchaser of the pass, and not transferrable.
The winter Seishun 18 Tickets go on sale November 26 at major JR stations and travel offices, and can be used between December 10 and January 1.
With the SoraNews24 team of writers having taken some awesome trips with the Seishun 18 Ticket, even going all the way up through Japan’s northeastern Tohoku region and ending up in Hokkaido, it’s sad to see its awesomeness being scaled back. That said, 10,000/12,050 yen for three/five days of unlimited rail rides can still be a good deal, but having to use those days consecutively leaves you with less space in the schedule to enjoy the slow-life sites along the way, so the Seishun 18 Ticket’s characteristic sense of unhurried discovery might end up feeling like a wistful, bittersweet childhood memory.
Source: JR East via IT Media
Photos ©SoraNews24
Read more stories from SoraNews24.
-- From Tokyo to Tohoku for less than 25 bucks? Our epic Seishun 18 Ticket Japanese train voyage
-- Ads for JR’s “Seishun 18” rail pass celebrate the isolated beauty of Japan’s most far-flung stations
-- New JR Shinkansen-inclusive rail pass is a huge bargain, great way to help out a region in need
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8 Comments
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falseflagsteve
Well, I never thought of using this one. Lately we’ve been using the JR WEST 3 day Kansai pass for foreigners. Price increased from 10000 to 12500 though this year. Still good value, can get unlimited reserved seats on Shinkansen and Ltd Express.
virusrex
So it is a combination of both shrinkflation and enshittification, the price of the service remains the same to fool users into thinking they are buying the same product, but instead they get much less for the money and in a way that is less useful or convenient. For all the time Japan takes to absorb progressive ideas from overseas it surely adopts instantly the worst kind of things companies do to exploit their customers.
blimp
I used it quite extensively when I was younger. Benefitted both from the non-consecutivety and being able to split the ticket among friend, or anyone else for that matter. Now, I haven't used it for a number of years. Last time was probably close to 25 years ago, but to me this is a disappointing development indeed.
Still have the complete JR time table book/booklet somewhere. An old one of course.
Speed
Nothing seems to be getting BETTER with JR lately.
ifd66
I used to use them quite a lot. Seishun 18 kippu were great for travelling on a budget and a fun challenge to see how far you could travel in a day. But the new limitation pretty much makes them useless.
piskian
Well,I did get from Sodegaura in Chiba to Iwakuni and Hous ten Bosch for the price of a platform ticket back in the day,and from Wakkanai to Sapporo for nowt,so what goes around,comes around,I suppose.
JeffLee
Such a rip-off. It's the same stingy deal with the overpriced JR Rail passes. I am recommending foreign tourists to go for Jetstar of other LCCs for moderate to long distances and car rental once you're in the countryside.
Roten
Another of Japan's great values going down the drain. I remember when a colleague used four days of her five, and gifted me the last day to see how far I could travel. I left Kobe just after midnight and made it through all four prefectures in Shikoku, ending up at Dogo onsen in a day. What an adventure. I had to pay my own way back to Kobe, but I thought the seishun 18 was a great ticket and traveled on a few more that I bought on my own afterwards. 5 consecutive days defeats the purpose if it is for the JR system to help young Japanese to see more of their country during their school breaks.