Fly into Tokyo, out of Osaka: planning an open-jaw Japan trip

Book into Tokyo and out of Kansai, and you never ride the shinkansen back the way you came. The classic first trip runs Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, which is a line along the Tokaido Shinkansen rather than a loop, so a return ticket to a single city hands you a wasted travel day at the end. Kansai International is the airport for that end of the line: it sits 38 km southwest of Osaka Station, carried 34.1 million passengers in 2025, and was the first airport in Japan to operate 24 hours a day. Buy the Haruka discount ticket before you travel, because it is not sold inside Japan, and do the sums on a JR Pass rather than assuming.

An open jaw is simply a ticket that lands in one city and leaves from another, and it suits Japan because the country's most travelled corridor runs in one direction. The Tokaido Shinkansen links Tokyo and Shin-Osaka, opened on 1 October 1964 as the first railway built for regular operation above 200 km/h, and now runs at a maximum 285 km/h. You will travel along it once, westwards, stopping where you want. Flying home from the same airport you arrived at means either riding that line back or paying for a domestic flight to undo your own itinerary. Neither is a good use of the last day of a holiday.

Haneda is the closer of the two by a long way, 15 kilometres south of Tokyo Station, and its Terminal 3 and the international area of Terminal 2 are open 24 hours a day. Narita sits about 60 km east of the city and carries a mandatory night curfew prohibiting aircraft operations between midnight and 6 a.m., which quietly rules out the cheapest late-night slots. If the fares are close, take Haneda and buy yourself an hour on arrival day. If Narita is much cheaper, take it and plan the train rather than the taxi. Either way the airport choice matters most on the day you land, when you are tired and everything is written in a script you cannot read.

The fastest Nozomi covers the 515 km between Tokyo and Osaka in 2 hours 21 minutes, stopping only at Shinagawa, Shin-Yokohama, Nagoya and Kyoto on the way. That stop list is the itinerary: Kyoto is on the line, so it is not a detour but a pause. One catch matters for pass holders. Foreign tourists travelling with a Japan Rail Pass must buy a special ticket to use the Nozomi service, so a pass alone does not put you on the fastest train. The slower Hikari and the all-stations Kodama are included without that extra, and on a single westward run the difference is a matter of minutes rather than a lost afternoon.

A one-way trip down the Tokaido line is exactly the shape of itinerary a rail pass is worst at. The Ordinary pass bought online costs 50,000 yen for 7 days, 80,000 for 14 and 100,000 for 21; the Green pass costs 70,000, 110,000 and 140,000. Exchange orders bought from an overseas agency on or after 1 October 2026 cost more again: 53,000, 84,000 and 105,000 Ordinary, 74,000, 116,000 and 147,000 Green. Set that against the handful of long journeys an open jaw actually involves, add the special ticket you still need for the Nozomi, and the pass often loses. It wins when you are covering real distance, Hokkaido or Kyushu in the same two weeks, not Tokyo to Kyoto to Osaka.

Kansai International is on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, 38 km southwest of Osaka Station, and it was the first airport in Japan to operate 24 hours a day, which makes a dawn departure workable. The JR West Haruka runs there from Kyoto and Osaka, and visitors can buy a discounted one-way ticket: 2,200 yen to Kyoto, 1,800 to Osaka or Shin-Osaka, 1,300 to Tennoji, 2,000 to Kobe and 1,800 to Nara. You need a passport issued by a foreign government and entry as a Temporary Visitor, and the ticket is not available for purchase within Japan, so buy it before you fly. Goodbars sells a Japan eSIM you install at home and switch on when you land; it runs on NTT docomo, Japan's largest mobile network by mobile contracts, and our Japan coverage page shows where it reaches and what independent speed tests measure.