Renting a car in Japan: the permit rules, tolls and when it's worth it

Every so often a friend visiting Japan asks whether they should rent a car, and the honest answer is usually no — followed by a much more interesting unless. The train network is so good in the corridor between Tokyo and Fukuoka that a car there is mostly a way to pay for parking. Step off that corridor, though, and the calculation flips fast. A coastal road in Hokkaido, a valley in Tohoku, the ring road on Yakushima: those are places where the timetable says four buses a day, and a car buys you the whole day back.

I live in Tokyo and drive on a Japanese licence, so I can tell you about the roads, the toll gates, the petrol stations and the parking. What I cannot tell you from experience is what it feels like to hand an International Driving Permit across a rental counter, or to buy one of the expressway passes sold only to overseas visitors — residents are not eligible for those. For that part I am working from what JAF and JNTO publish, and I have linked their pages so you can check them yourself.

Everything below was checked on 2026-08-04. Toll prices and pass conditions change, and JNTO's expressway pass page carries its own "subject to change" note, so treat the numbers as a starting point rather than a quote.

Some links on this page are affiliate links, and this site earns a commission if you book through them. It does not change what you pay, and the official pages I link to earn me nothing.

The paperwork, and why it has to be done before you fly

This is the part that ruins trips, so it goes first.

Japan recognises the International Driving Permit issued under the 1949 Geneva Convention. That is a specific document — a grey-covered booklet issued by an authorised body in the country that issued your licence, such as an automobile association or a post office, depending on where you live. You apply for it at home. Nobody in Japan can issue one to you against a foreign licence, so if you land without it, there is no counter you can visit to fix the problem.

At the rental desk you present three things together:

1. Your International Driving Permit
2. Your original home driving licence — the IDP is a translation, not a licence in itself
3. Your passport

Leave any of the three at the hotel and you do not get the car. The passport matters because your entry date determines how long you are permitted to drive on the permit.

If your licence is Swiss, German, French, Belgian, Monégasque or Taiwanese

There is a second route, and it applies to a specific list. JAF — the Japan Automobile Federation, which is the body that issues these translations — names Switzerland, Germany, France, Belgium, Monaco and Taiwan on its fee page for people who "only want to drive vehicles in Japan temporarily" (checked 2026-08-04). Those licences use an official Japanese translation of the licence rather than an IDP. You carry the original licence plus that translation.

JAF's page states that an application for a Japanese translation can only be made in Japan, and separately links a route for people who are currently outside Japan. If you hold one of those six licences, read JAF's own page rather than a summary — including mine — because it is the page that changes when the rules do.

Two more constraints worth knowing. The permission to drive on a foreign permit or translation is time-limited — it is a visitor arrangement, not an indefinite one — and if you later become a resident you are expected to convert to a Japanese licence through the process JAF calls gaimen kirikae. And the permit does not upgrade you: if your home licence is automatic-only, that restriction follows you here. Most Japanese rental fleets are automatic anyway, which works in your favour.

What a rental actually costs, and what is not in the price

Japanese rental quotes are usually cleaner than the equivalent in Europe or the US — the big damage waiver tends to be bundled rather than sold to you at the desk. But "bundled" is not "everything", and the gaps are consistent across companies.

Tabirai's English site states that its prices include the car rental, collision damage waiver, GPS and tax, and lists the ETC card rental fee, fuel and expressway tolls as charged separately, along with the optional insurance that waives the non-operation charge (checked 2026-08-04).

That last item deserves a translation. The non-operation charge, usually written NOC, is a fee the rental company charges if the car needs to come off the road after an incident — it is compensation for their lost rental days, and it sits outside the collision damage waiver. It is typically a fixed amount rather than a percentage, and it is the thing the optional top-up insurance exists to cancel. Whether to buy it is a judgement call, but you should at least make the call deliberately rather than discover the term afterwards.

Two more line items that surprise people:

• Fuel policy. Full-to-full is standard, and you are expected to return the car full with the receipt to prove it. Petrol stations come in full service and self service varieties; at a self-service pump the touchscreen is usually Japanese-first, and the useful word is レギュラー (regular unleaded).
• One-way drop-off. Picking up in one city and dropping in another is possible but frequently carries a fee that scales with distance. Returning to the same branch is often meaningfully cheaper.

Tolls, ETC cards and the regional expressway passes

Japanese expressways are tolled, and the tolls are real money. A long drive can add a five-figure yen sum to a trip that looked cheap on the rental quote.

Payment happens through ETC — an in-car transponder that reads a card as you roll through a purple-signed lane at reduced speed. Rental companies rent you the card; the transponder is already in the car. Without one you queue at the general lane and pay by cash or card. Renting the ETC card is almost always worth the small fee, and on some routes ETC users get discounted rates that cash users do not.

The more interesting option is a regional expressway pass. These are sold specifically to overseas visitors — JNTO's page states they require a non-Japanese passport, or Japanese citizenship with permanent residency abroad, plus a valid licence and an International Driving Permit, all checked at the point of purchase. They give unlimited expressway travel inside one region for a set number of days.

Pass	Region	7-day price
Hokkaido Expressway Pass (HEP)	Hokkaido	¥13,500
Tohoku Expressway Pass (TEP)	Tohoku	¥14,900
San'in-Setouchi-Shikoku Pass (SEP)	San'in, Setouchi, Shikoku	¥14,700
Kyushu Expressway Pass (KEP)	Kyushu	¥17,200

Prices from JNTO's expressway passes page, checked 2026-08-04; that page carries its own last-updated date of 28 March 2025 and notes details can change. Shorter and longer durations exist — the Kyushu pass starts at ¥6,200 for 2 days, the San'in-Setouchi-Shikoku pass at ¥10,700 for 3 — so the per-day rate is not flat and the short versions are not simply pro rata.

There is no nationwide version of this in the list JNTO publishes. If your plan involves driving from Tohoku down through Kansai to Kyushu, no single pass covers it — and honestly, that itinerary is one the Japan Rail Pass or a set of regional rail passes handles better than a car.

Where a car actually wins

The pattern is consistent. Trains in Japan are excellent between places and poor within sparsely populated areas. So a car wins where the trip is inside a region rather than between regions.

Trip type	Better by	Why
Tokyo → Kyoto → Osaka	Train	Shinkansen is faster door-to-door, and city parking is expensive
Sightseeing inside Tokyo or Kyoto	Train and subway	Traffic, one-way streets, and paid parking at almost every destination
Hokkaido outside Sapporo	Car	Long distances, thin bus timetables, national parks with no station
Tohoku coast and mountains	Car	Same reason, plus onsen towns that are a taxi ride from the nearest station
Kyushu volcano and onsen loop	Car	Dense cluster of destinations that trains connect awkwardly
Shikoku, Noto, Izu, Yakushima	Car	Coastal roads where the road is the attraction
Airport → city on arrival day	Train or transfer	Jet-lagged driving on the left, in the dark, is a bad first move

A useful shape for a two-week trip: do the cities by train, then pick up a car at a regional airport or the first rural station for a three-to-five day leg, and hand it back before you return to the cities. You avoid paying for parking on days you never touch the car. If you are heading for Kansai first, the airport routes into Kyoto and Osaka are all rail-based and there is no good reason to start with a car.

Driving here: the things that are genuinely different

Traffic keeps left. If you have only driven on the right, the two moments to watch are pulling out of a car park and turning at a quiet junction with no other traffic to copy. The wipers-instead-of-indicator mistake is universal and harmless.

Speeds are lower than you expect. Ordinary roads are signed well below motorway speeds, and expressway limits are posted — some sections have been raised above the traditional 100 km/h, so read the signs rather than assuming a national number. Average speed on a rural road will be lower than the map's estimate because of towns, lights and single-lane sections.

Kei cars are the small yellow-plated ones. Engine capacity is capped, they are cheap to rent and thrifty on fuel, and they are genuinely the right tool for narrow mountain and village roads. They are less comfortable at expressway speed with four adults and luggage. Choose by the roads you will spend most time on.

Navigation by address is painful; navigation by number is not. Japanese addresses are block-based and do not run along the street, so typing one into a car GPS is slow. Two shortcuts: most built-in units let you search by a destination's telephone number, and many tourist sites publish a mapcode, a numeric code the Japanese navigation systems accept directly. Both are faster and less error-prone than an address.

Parking is a paid, structured thing. City car parks are metered, often with a plate that rises under the car until you pay, or a gate barrier. Convenience stores are not free parking if you are not shopping. Many rural attractions have free car parks; almost nothing central does.

Petrol stations close. In rural areas, evening and Sunday closures are common, and the gap between stations on a mountain road can be long. Fill up when you are at half a tank rather than when the light comes on.

Mobile data is not optional in a rental car

If you are navigating from your phone — and most people end up doing that, because live traffic and reviews are better than any built-in unit — then losing data in a valley in Nagano is a genuine problem rather than an inconvenience. Sort connectivity before you land, not at the rental counter.

For most visitors a travel eSIM is the least fussy answer, and Airalo is the one I point friends at most often because installation happens before you fly. Check your handset first, though: eSIM support depends on the model and on whether the phone is carrier-locked, and I have watched that go wrong. The details are in is my phone eSIM compatible and the options are compared in the eSIMs for Japan I'd actually recommend.

Booking: what to compare

Japanese rental companies each run their own reservation site, and several of those sites are Japanese-only or have an English version with a thinner inventory. A comparison site is usually the faster way in, because it shows several operators for the same branch and date.

Tabirai is the one I would start with for a domestic rental. It aggregates the Japanese operators rather than a handful of international brands, its published inclusions are unusually explicit — car, collision damage waiver, GPS and tax in the price, with the ETC card, fuel and tolls separate — and it runs an English-language version of the site at en.tabirai.net alongside the Japanese one. This site has a paid partner arrangement with Tabirai, so a booking made through the promotional placements on this page can earn me a commission. The rate you pay is the same either way, and the JAF and JNTO pages I linked above earn me nothing.

Worth comparing before you commit:

• Total including the ETC card, not the headline daily rate.
• Pick-up branch. An airport branch is convenient and often dearer than a city branch fifteen minutes away.
• Drop-off location. One-way fees can exceed the rental itself on long routes.
• Whether a regional expressway pass is offered on that booking, and whether the pass duration can match your rental days — JNTO's conditions require the visitor documentation at purchase.
• Automatic versus manual, if your home licence is automatic-only.

If, having read all this, you conclude the trip does not need a car — that is a perfectly good outcome, and probably the right one for a first visit. In that case the money is better spent on the rail and transfer side, and Klook covers airport transfers, rail tickets and attraction entry in one place for most of the routes in this site's rail articles.

Who should rent, and who should not

Rent a car if your itinerary is built around one region rather than the Tokyo–Kyoto–Osaka corridor; if you are going to Hokkaido, Tohoku, Kyushu, Shikoku or a peninsula; if you are travelling with small children or someone with limited mobility and the thought of station stairs with luggage is the problem you are solving; or if the drive itself is the point.

Do not rent a car if your trip is city-based, if this is a first visit with a standard first-visit itinerary, or if you would be driving on the left for the first time on the day you land. And do not rent one at all unless the permit paperwork is already done — an IDP under the 1949 Geneva Convention obtained at home, or, for the six jurisdictions JAF lists, the official Japanese translation.

The middle path is the one I would actually recommend to a friend: trains for the cities, a car for the four days in the middle where the trains stop being useful. It costs less than a fortnight of rental, and it puts the car exactly where it earns its money.

Before you book anything, it is worth reading how much cash you actually need — rural petrol stations and small car parks are among the last places in Japan where cash still settles arguments.