For our Obon trip home to Tokushima, we skipped the plane and took a car share from Shin-Kobe
Introduction
Hi, I’m kittchy.
From August 8 to 11, my wife and I went back to Tokushima. We live together in Asagaya, and my family home is in Tokushima.
The plane fares made my eyes pop
The first thing I looked up was flights. Flying from Haneda to Tokushima Awaodori Airport takes just over an hour in the air, so the obvious move was to fly, and there should have been no need to look at anything else.
Then I saw the prices and froze.
- Outbound: over 40,000 yen per person
- Return: 15,000 yen per person
Both are per person, and the return is the better of the two. The problem was the outbound. We’d run head-on into the Obon peak, and the round trip for two came to 110,000 yen. At that point I closed the screen.
And in Tokushima, you can’t live without a car
The airfare isn’t the end of it, and that’s the painful part of this trip.
In Tokushima, daily life doesn’t work without a car. I grew up there, so I know: from the airport to my parents’ house, and from their house to anywhere else, everything is by car. Getting a rental car for the stay adds 40,000 yen for four days and three nights.
- Flights (two people, round trip): 110,000 yen
- Rental car (four days, three nights): 40,000 yen
For a four-day trip home, travel alone came to 150,000 yen. I just couldn’t bring myself to commit.
So we took the bullet train to Shin-Kobe
So I gave up on flying and looked at going overland instead.
Tokushima is connected to Kobe by bridges via Awaji Island, so you can drive home from Kobe across the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge and the Onaruto Bridge. In other words, all we had to do was take the bullet train to Kobe.
This also changes the role of the car. It’s no longer “something you rent after arriving in Tokushima” but “something you rent in Kobe and drive all the way to Tokushima.” Getting there and getting around during the stay come down to one car, so what we paid for separately in the plane plan becomes a single cost.
We used Mitsui’s Car Shares.
What it cost
- Bullet train (Tokyo → Shin-Kobe): 15,000 yen per person one way
- Mitsui’s Car Shares (78 hours, fuel included): 35,000 yen
- Expressway tolls (Shin-Kobe → Tokushima IC, round trip): 9,120 yen
The bullet train came to 60,000 yen round trip for two, and with the car share and tolls the total was 104,000 yen. That’s 46,000 yen less than the 150,000-yen plane plan. At that price, I could pay.
The toll from Shin-Kobe to Tokushima IC is 4,560 yen one way for a standard car with ETC, over 114 km. The route goes through the Shin-Kobe Tunnel onto the Kita-Kobe Line, then via the Kobe-Awaji-Naruto Expressway and the Takamatsu Expressway onto the Tokushima Expressway. Without ETC it’s 8,000 yen one way, so that’s nearly double.
The miscalculation was time, not money
What hit harder than I expected wasn’t money but travel time.
From Shin-Kobe to Tokushima you cross the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, drive the length of Awaji Island, and cross again at the Onaruto Bridge. That’s an hour and a half to two hours one way, three to four hours of driving round trip. By plane, it’s a stretch of just over an hour in the air. We bought the 46,000 yen in savings with that driving time, which works out to about 13,000 yen an hour.
That said, I had wanted to stop in Kobe anyway, so it worked out. If we’d flown straight to Tokushima, I’d never have set foot in Kobe.
The side trip to Kobe turned out to be the main event
This was my third time in Kobe. I’d been on a school trip as a student and later on a study trip. Honestly, I didn’t expect anything new there.
But my partner is from Toyama and had never been to Kobe. Even when you visit the same places, having someone there for the first time changes how they look. She’d stop and take photos at every spot I would have brushed past with “ah, I’ve been here.”
The Kitano Ijinkan
First we went to the Kitano Ijinkan, the old foreign residences. We went into three: the Yokan Nagaya (French House), the English House, and Ben’s House.
These three are bundled in a combined ticket called the Kitano-dori 3-House Pass, which was 1,540 yen for adults. Bought separately, it’s 880 yen for the English House, 550 yen for the Yokan Nagaya, and 550 yen for Ben’s House, 1,980 yen in total, so if you’re going into all three, the combined ticket saves 440 yen.
They’re all lumped together as “Ijinkan,” but each house preserves the way of life of its home country, and you can feel the difference just walking through the rooms. The French rooms and the English rooms differ completely in how the furniture is arranged and how color is used. It felt like moving between countries within a single neighborhood.
Meriken Park and Nankinmachi
Next we moved to Meriken Park and saw the BE KOBE monument. It’s just a row of letters with the sea behind it, but if you’re taking photos, this is the spot.
We finished in Nankinmachi, Kobe’s Chinatown, with xiaolongbao and Peking duck. The xiaolongbao were amazing, and they stuck in my memory more than all my research into cutting 46,000 yen from travel costs.
Next time we’ll avoid Obon
I say this after reworking our route to save 46,000 yen, but shifting the dates probably does more.
The outbound flight was over 40,000 yen per person and the return was 15,000 yen: a gap of more than 2.5 times on the same route. That’s 25,000 yen per person, 50,000 yen for two. Almost the same amount we cut by changing routes moves with the date alone, and changing the date doesn’t come with three to four hours of driving.
It wasn’t only the plane that was expensive. Expressway weekend discounts are also suspended during Obon. In 2026 they didn’t apply from August 8 to 16, so our whole trip fell inside that window. We left on a Saturday and still paid weekday prices.
That wasn’t a route problem; it was simply because we tried to travel on August 8.
For our next trip home, I plan to avoid Obon and go at a cheaper time. In years when we really need to match the day relatives gather, we’ll think again, but otherwise shifting the dates is the saner choice.
Summary
For Tokyo to Tokushima over Obon, the plane and rental car came to 150,000 yen, and the bullet train and car share to 104,000 yen. You save 46,000 yen, but you get three to four hours of driving round trip in exchange, so if you want to stop in Kobe, I think it’s not a bad choice.
Next time I’ll shift away from Obon and see what the same route costs. If you also travel home from Tokyo to Shikoku, I’d love to hear which route you settled on. See you.