14 or 17 days in Japan? How to choose your trip's length
Japan has enough to fill far more than two weeks, but not everyone has 17 free days. Here's how we decided what to cut and what not to, and how we built two complete routes from the same base.
It's the first question almost everyone asks when they start planning a trip to Japan: how many days do I really need? The honest answer is "as many as you have," because the country genuinely never runs out of things to show you. But if you have to put a specific number on it, the real difference is between a two-week trip and a longer one, and that's where our two itineraries come in: 14 and 17 days.
The base is the same
Tokyo, Mount Fuji, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Hiroshima and Miyajima appear on both routes, without exception. It's the skeleton we consider essential on a first trip: city, nature, temples, history and food, all well balanced.
What changes in the 17-day version
The longer version adds an area that many second- or third-time travelers specifically ask for as soon as they discover it: Kanazawa, Shirakawa-go and Takayama, Japan's most rural and traditional side, with thatched-roof houses and ryokans you find hard to leave in the morning.
If you have 17 days or more, take them without thinking twice. The Takayama area is, by far, one of the parts people remember most afterward.
When the 14-day version makes more sense
If it's your first time and you can't or don't want to take more than two weeks, the 14-day itinerary isn't a half-trimmed version of anything: it's designed from scratch so nothing important is missing, with no sense of seeing a scaled-down version.
Our real recommendation
In both cases, we're talking about a budget excluding flights of between €2,000 and €4,500 depending on the travel style you choose.
Our favorite activities in Japan
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