Phil comments

My recommendation is do your research. Do not assume the JR pass will save you money. My wife and I will traveling again to Japan for 22 days in November and the JR pass will not work for us. I’ve done hours of research on travel costs and timings for our itinerary and I cannot make any combination of the 7, 14 or 21 day pass work, and, albeit our preference is green class, I cannot justify ordinary class either. We are actually flying from Tokyo to Osaka cheaper than the bullet train, but we are travelling back to Tokyo via various stops on trains, but buying individual tickets as it works out cheaper than purchasing the JR pass. We also have suica cards which I highly recommend for local trains.

I will add, we purchased the 14 day JR green pass for our 11 night trip 2 years ago, and it did pay off, as we travelled all the way from Tokyo to Hiroshima.

Effectively, the cost of this pass covered all our long distance travel so any local travel was effectively costing us nothing, except when the use of a private railway line was necessary. So for this example the JR pass worked brilliantly.

Do your research to see if the JR pass works for you!