How to Get from Tokyo to Mt. Fuji Without a Car (Including Straight from Narita)

We landed at Narita in the late afternoon, and we were headed right to Mt. Fuji, jet lag and all.

This is Japan, which means we took advantage of its frequent and reliable public transportation. That means we didn’t have to pay for a fancy shuttle or rent a car.

I wanted to do what a person who lives there would do, which is walk up to a counter and buy a ticket, and get on.

That turned out to be pretty easy. Transit in Japan can be confusing, but this was one of the smoothest trips I had.

Here’s the route, the numbers, and the one mistake I’d tell you to skip.

The short version

• You do not need a private shuttle, a rental car, or a tour. The Tokyo to Mt. Fuji run just takes a normal, frequent, cheap bus.
• There is a direct bus from Narita Airport to Kawaguchiko Station, but it only runs twice a day in the morning. My flight landed later, so it was useless to me.
• From Narita, take the Narita Express (N’EX) to Shinjuku, about 90 minutes for ¥3,250, then walk upstairs to the bus terminal.
• From Shinjuku Station, buses to Kawaguchiko Station run about every 10 to 30 minutes, take roughly 1 hour 45 minutes, and cost about ¥2,200.
• I don’t recommend pre-booking either leg. Both run often enough that walking up works, and you don’t want to have an advance ticket that you can’t cancel or change. I learned this twice.
• Look up your bus number on highway-buses.jp before you go, then buy on the day. (This will send you to highwaybus.com, but I use the other link first so you get the English site.)

The direct Narita to Mt. Fuji bus exists, and it probably won’t work for you

This is the first thing I searched.

I found on japanbusonline.com a direct bus twice a day, one that leaves at 10:25am and 10:55am. The other direction, it’s only once per day, leaving at 1:10pm. It may vary seasonally.

So if your flight lands in the wrong part of the day, and mine did, forget it exists.

If you’re thinking about revolving your flight around this, I wouldn’t. First, because flights are unpredictable, and second, because the other option is frequent and pretty easy, even if a bit longer.

So I took the Narita Express to Shinjuku

The N’EX (Narita Express) is the airport train.

It runs from all Narita terminals (terminals 2 and 3 share a station, but they’re not a far walk apart) into Tokyo. For this trip, the important thing is that Shinjuku is on the same Narita Express train as Tokyo Station.

Shinjuku comes after. You do not transfer, you do not think about it, you sit there and read the seatback map and get off when it says Shinjuku.

The ride is about 90 minutes. A one-way ordinary car seat to Shinjuku is ¥3,250, and a Green Car seat is ¥4,020. The regular seats are totally fine, so just do that.

Trains run about twice an hour through the middle of the day, thinning out early in the morning and late at night.

Buy it at the airport, not at home.

I wrote about this in my review of Klook in Japan.

You don’t know when your flight will land and you’ll pass through customs.

The N’EX does not sell out the way an American holiday flight sells out.

It’s a core airport rail corridor in a country that takes core airport rail corridors seriously. Walk to the station under the terminal, buy from a multilingual machine or a staffed JR EAST Travel Service Center window, and get on the next one.

Even in busy season, the trains will not be full. They’d plan on running more if that’s a risk.

There are also airport buses into Shinjuku. I saw one and talked to the driver outside Shinjuku Station on a different day. They’re a fine option. But the train is faster and more comfortable.

If the timing lines up for you, take whichever one is leaving sooner.

The Narita Express Shinjuku tracks are also closer to the Bus Terminal that you’ll use to get to Mt. Fuji.

Finding the bus terminal in Shinjuku is much easier than you’d think

Shinjuku Station is the busiest railway station on earth. 2.7 million people a day pass through it. The station has something like two hundred exits and a reputation, richly earned, for eating tourists. It would take a solid 10-15 minutes just to walk from one side of the station to the other.

I used the coin lockers there once, and had to be careful that I’d remember where in this giant station I’d find it again.

So I have good news. The bus terminal is directly above the Narita Express train you arrive on, and there are signs for it immediately.

Busta Shinjuku, officially the Shinjuku Expressway Bus Terminal, sits on the fourth floor straight over the JR Shinjuku south exit. Get off the N’EX. Look for the Bus Terminal signs, which start immediately. Scan your N’EX ticket at the gate to exit. Go up the escalators. You’re there.

The bus terminal is clean, it’s bright, every bus has a numbered gate, and the departure boards are enormous and cycle between Japanese and English.

This place kicks the shit out of New York’s Port Authority. So if you’re like me and that’s your reference point, this is a lot more organized and a lot nice.

On the left of this picture is where you can talk to people to buy your ticket, or take a shot buying it on the machine. You just need to know your station.

Buying the bus ticket to Mt. Fuji, and the two thing you need to know first

There are two things you need to know.

First, your bus number.

Several buses go to the same place at different times with different operators, so “the Kawaguchiko bus” isn’t specific enough to work with. What is specific is a four-digit number like 1131 or 1153, which is attached to one departure at one gate at one time. You can get away with this, but

Your bus number is the thing to know. Everything else follows from it.

So before you leave home, or on the train in, pull up highwaybus.com. This is not a reseller. It is the bus operator’s site, and the English version may not have the sleekest design, but it work. You may have to google “highwaybus.com English” to land on the right one. Look at the Shinjuku to Fuji Five Lakes timetable and note the departures around when you’ll arrive, and their numbers.

The second thing to know is which stop you’re getting off at. The “main street” stop is Kawaguchiko, which will have more of the connections, but it totally depends on where you’re staying around Mt. Fuji.

Once you know your station and the bus number, buy it there at the bus terminal when you get there.

There’s a bank of ticket machines, and there are staffed counters with humans at them. If you’re at all unsure, use the counter. The staff are used to visitors and they are ready for you with Google Translate pulled up on their phones.

Find your bus on the timetable board, which will show your gate, usually well ahead of departure. Be at the gate about ten minutes early. Cash and cards both work.

Now the part where I tell you not to do what I did

I pre-booked my bus on highwaybus.com. Weeks ahead, from home, sitting at a table in New York.

I want to be fair to myself for a second. We were meeting up with our friends from Spain who arrived in Japan a week before us. That was our lodging and our plan, so we had to make it. I bought a ticket in advance.

Then we got to the bus terminal early, and there was a bus to Kawaguchiko leaving well before ours.

So I looked into switching. I would’ve had to cancel then rebook and I wasn’t sure if I’d get my money back.

To move it you cancel and rebuy, which is a process, with its own rules and its own fees, on your phone, in a terminal, under time pressure, in Japan.

So we waited about an hour. We got on the bus we’d paid for, thirty feet from a counter where a walk-up ticket costs ¥2,200 and takes two minutes.

So my advice is the boring one. Look the schedule up. Don’t buy the ticket until you get there.

The exception, and I do mean the only one. If ticket machines and counters stress you out, buying ahead on highwaybus.com is fine, but I wouldn’t do it if you’re coming from the airport. But if you can plan your day in Tokyo around a departure time to Fuji, go for it. Just go in knowing you’re locked to that departure and plan the rest of the day around it rather than around when you feel like leaving.

What the bus is like

It’s a bus. I mean that as a compliment.

The seats are comfortable and reclined enough for a nap. There’s a toilet on board. The wifi is decent, good enough for messages and maps but not good enough to stream movies. Luggage goes underneath, and there’s overhead space for a backpack, so a big suitcase is not a problem.

There were no outlets. No outlets. Charge your phone on the N’EX or in the terminal, because you’re about to spend most of two hours navigating with it and then arrive somewhere unfamiliar.

Beyond that, there’s nothing to review. It’s a clean, quiet, reliable bus that leaves when it says it will and arrives when it says it will. It’s definitely better than a Greyhound Bus.

We drove at night and there was almost no traffic leaving Tokyo and we arrived on time.

Is Kawaguchiko the stop you want?

This is where we got off, but it depends where you’re going.

The Shinjuku to Fuji Five Lakes line makes several stops, and they are not interchangeable. Not every bus stops at all of them, either, so again, use their website and check.

Fuji-Q Highland is the amusement park, and it’s the stop before Kawaguchiko.

Fujisan Station, which used to be called Fujiyoshida, puts you in the town of Fujiyoshida and is the closer stop for the Arakurayama Sengen Park pagoda, which is the shot you’ve seen ten thousand times on Instagram.

Kawaguchiko Station is the main one and the default. It’s the hub for the lake itself, the ropeway, and the local bus network.

It’s a real station, with bathrooms, vending machines, luggage lockers and staff, and the area around it is walkable. It was pretty dead at night. This is a resort town that runs on daylight, so plan dinner accordingly.

From here, we met up with our friends in our shared Airbnb, so this is where our journey for the end ended.

The Fuji Subaru Line 5th Station is the one people mean when they say “the base of the mountain.” The 5th Station sits at about 2,300 meters, roughly halfway up, and it’s the trailhead for the Yoshida route to the summit. You don’t hike from Kawaguchiko. You ride to 2,300 meters and start there.

There’s local transport from Kawaguchiko that goes to various parts around Mt. Fuji, so my general recommendation is to take a breather at Kawguchiko, probably spend the night near there, then find the local buses to get you to the summit or otherwise the following morning.

There’s a direct Shinjuku to 5th Station bus for ¥3,800, taking about three hours, but it only runs twice a day so that one you’ll want to do more research on booking in advance. Sorry, I can’t help as I didn’t take it.

The other option is to go Kawaguchiko first and take the local bus up from there. That’s about 55 minutes, ¥1,950 one way or ¥3,000 round trip, with roughly seven departures a day.

No reservations on that one. Note that the road up closes for snow, so this is not a year-round thing.

We were meeting up with friends and we all had an Airbnb together. It was about a 20-minute walk away, but they had a rental car, so we were set from here.

Again, it’s a well-connected town, so odds are you will have transit connections from the station if you’re staying in town.

Doing it in reverse

This same route would work backwards. From Fuji, we continued on to other parts of Japan.

The other ways to get there, briefly

Again, I didn’t take these, but I found them researching as options.

There’s the Fuji Excursion is a direct limited express train from Shinjuku to Kawaguchiko in about two hours for around ¥4,200. It’s comfortable, and it’s a train, but it runs only a handful of times a day and it’s reserved seats only, which means it’s the one option here you should book ahead.

The slow train route is the JR Chuo Line to Otsuki, then a transfer onto the Fujikyu Railway to Kawaguchiko. It’s roughly ¥2,430 to Otsuki by limited express plus ¥1,170 onward. It’s cheap, flexible, and slower.

Rental cars and private transfers are what most American and European-facing travel content pushes. That’s because these travel content creators make better commissions on these bookings. Nobody makes commissions when you buy a local bus. But if you want to shell out, have fun.

Why this route works, and why it doesn’t at home

There’s a thread running through all of this and it isn’t really about Japan.

Frequency is freedom. Not speed, frequency. When a bus leaves every fifteen minutes, the timetable stops being something you organize your day around and becomes background noise. You leave when you’re ready. You change your mind. You catch an earlier one because you got there early. The service becomes a utility, like a light switch, and you stop planning around it entirely.

Americans land in Japan carrying a scarcity mindset about transportation, and it’s rational at home. Our flights sell out and get pricier as the date closes in. Our intercity trains and buses run a few times a day on most routes, and missing one can cost you the day. So we lock things in. That instinct is correct in the country that built us.

It does not transfer. And the strange part is that carrying it across the ocean costs you something real. I paid for one train ride twice, and I sat in a beautiful bus terminal watching an earlier bus leave without me, both times because some part of me could not believe there would be room.

There was room. There will be room for you.

For more related to this, check out my essay on city and town planning lessons from my trip to Japan.

And while you’re there, you can check out my review of Universal Studios Japan.

Frequently asked questions

How do I get from Narita Airport to Mt. Fuji?

There’s a direct Fujikyuko bus from Narita to Kawaguchiko Station in about three hours forty minutes, but it only runs twice a day. If your flight doesn’t line up with it, take the Narita Express to Shinjuku, about 90 minutes for ¥3,250, then a highway bus from Busta Shinjuku to Kawaguchiko, about 1 hour 45 minutes for ¥2,200.

How do I get from Tokyo to Mt. Fuji?

Highway bus from Busta Shinjuku to Kawaguchiko Station. It runs every 10 to 30 minutes through the day, takes about 1 hour 45 minutes, and costs about ¥2,200 one way. Buy it at the terminal on the day you travel.

Do I need to book the Tokyo to Mt. Fuji bus in advance?

No, and I’d argue you shouldn’t. The route runs roughly two buses an hour, more at peak. An advance ticket ties you to one departure and moving it means cancelling and rebuying.

How much does it cost to get from Tokyo to Mt. Fuji?

About ¥2,200 by highway bus from Shinjuku as of the time of writing. Coming straight from Narita, budget about ¥5,450 total for the N’EX plus the bus.

Where is the bus to Mt. Fuji in Shinjuku Station?

Busta Shinjuku, the Shinjuku Expressway Bus Terminal, on the fourth floor directly above the JR Shinjuku south exit. Follow the Bus Terminal signs from the platform, exit the gate, go up the escalators.

Does the bus go all the way up Mt. Fuji?

It goes to the Fuji Subaru Line 5th Station at about 2,300 meters, which is the Yoshida trailhead, not the summit and not the base. A direct Shinjuku bus runs there twice a day. From Kawaguchiko it’s about 55 minutes and ¥1,950 one way, around seven times a day, and the road closes for snow.

Should I get off at Kawaguchiko or Fuji-Q Highland?

Kawaguchiko Station for the lake, the ropeway and the local bus network. Fuji-Q Highland for the amusement park. Fujisan Station is closer for the Chureito Pagoda at Arakurayama Sengen Park.

Is there wifi and power on the highway bus?

Wifi yes, and it’s decent but nothing special. Power no. There were no outlets on my bus. Charge before you board.

Is the bus or the train better for Mt. Fuji?

The bus, for most people. It’s cheaper, more direct, and far more frequent. The Fuji Excursion limited express is faster and nicer but costs roughly twice as much, runs only a few times a day, and is reserved seats only.