7 useful apps for travelling in Japan: transport, taxi, shopping and more

Travelling requires extra effort if you have little ones in tow. More so if you need access to nursing rooms and diaper-changing facilities in a foreign land at a moment’s notice. For this specific purpose, the free Mama Papa Map is a godsend, as it will help you locate such facilities easily across Japan. 

Crowd-sourced using location pins and reviews by parents all over Japan, the app offers an easy way to search for nursing rooms and diaper-changing stations around the country. The facilities that are available vary from location to location. More often than not, the suggested spots also come with useful information like how clean they are and the amenities they provide.

Shopping in Japan often comes with the struggle of trying to make sense of the information on the packaging, which are almost exclusively written in Japanese. While this country is one of the best places in the world for retail therapy, the language barrier remains a big hurdle. This is especially true for food and drinks as well as beauty, skincare and medicine. 

However, shopping can be easier, particularly for tourists and non-Japanese speakers, with the Payke app. All you have to do is scan the barcode of an item using the app and a translation of the product information will appear. Supported languages include English, Korean, traditional and simplified Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese.

You probably already have Uber on your smartphone – and that’s one less thing you have to worry about. While Uber doesn’t exactly work the same in Japan as it does in other countries, it’s one of the easiest ways to hail a taxi in big cities like Tokyo. 

Using the app saves you the hassle of having to explain your destination to the driver, as you can set that when requesting your ride. Plus, all transactions are cashless, so you don't have to worry about notes and coins, especially in the middle of the night.

Safety Tips by the Japan National Tourism Organization is a free app that allows you to check the weather as well as useful disaster information including early earthquake warnings, tsunami alerts and volcanic activity. You can even search for medical institutions and evacuation locations in the event of an emergency.

The app is available in a multitude of languages including English, Japanese, Korean, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, Thai, Indonesian, Tagalog, Nepali, Khmer, Burmese and Mongolian.

Not only does this app help you find routes to get around Tokyo and Japan, it also offers an offline search where you can still locate useful services near you without connecting to the internet. These include free wifi hotspots, ATMs, currency exchange amenities and train stations.

You can also make use of the app's travel guides for selected destinations within Japan. There’s even a planner which lets you create an itinerary complete with maps, timeline and estimated cost. The app also has a discovery function recommending nearby attractions according to your itinerary.

Switching between cities and hotels can sometimes leave you with an awkward transitionary period where you don’t know what to do with your luggage. Instead of lugging your belongings around with you all day, you can use Ecbo Cloak to find storage facilities to drop off your bags at reasonable prices.

While you can always make use of train station lockers, this app gives you other options like retail stores, restaurants and hotels offering storage services to non-guests. This is also beneficial, as station lockers are often too small to accommodate large suitcases. To make things easier, you can reserve and pay for storage all within the app, so there’s no need to stress about having cash on hand.

This is a no-brainer. One of the handiest and most obvious apps you can have for travelling in Japan is Google Maps. Not only is it great for finding information on and locations of attractions, restaurants, bars, shops and hotels, it’s also one of the best tools for navigating the extensive transportation networks in large cities like Tokyo.

When searching for routes, the map provides detailed navigation instructions for what trains you should take, and especially in Tokyo, even the most convenient train car to board for the quickest exit. You can also filter your route with options like ‘best route’, ‘fewest transfers’, ‘lowest cost’ and ‘least walking’. Additionally, it even allows you to pick your preferred modes of transport whether that be trains or buses or a mix of both.