Heading to Japan with young kids? Check out my 7-8 day itinerary based on our family trip to Tokyo with a 6 and 4 year old.

Travel to Japan is HOT right now, and as someone who loves Japan, I am 100% on board with this. But traveling with young children can also be a hot mess. This past spring I took my kids to Japan for the first time, staying in Tokyo for one week. It was a totally different experience than the times I had been before as a young adult. If you’re considering taking small kids to Japan and looking for tips and family-centered things to do, this 8 day Tokyo itinerary is for you.

Table of Contents

Day 1: Get Acclimated

We arrived at Haneda Airport around 7pm local time on a Saturday, so it was past “dinner” time for our family. At the airport, we picked up our Welcome Suica cards to take the train. Our 6 year old needed her own kids Welcome Suica pass as her fare was 50% off the adult fare. Our 4 year old was free, so no card for her! For the adults in our family we loaded 5000 yen for our one week trip. We headed straight to our hotel in Ginza by the Keikyu Express train – no transfers needed and very convenient.

Our hotel was the Hotel Musse Ginza Meitetsu, which I highly recommend! The room was very small compared to American hotel rooms, but good enough for our small kids. With bigger kids, we may have needed two rooms. It would’ve been a tight squeeze. This hotel also happened to have a 7-11 on the first floor, which was extremely convenient. Since we were majorly tired and past usual dining time, after we checked into the hotel, we simply picked up some snacks at the 7-11, got washed up, and went to bed.

Day 2: Jet Lag – Sumida Aquarium and other morning activities.

Coming from the US, we woke up around 3-4am the first couple of days. You’ll quickly learn that most things in Japan don’t open until 11am. With two small kids though, we needed to get OUT of the hotel before the children started waking up the whole building.

The first thing we did was have breakfast at our hotel restaurant, which opened at 7am. Hotel breakfasts are quite popular in Japan – even locals not staying at the hotel may go to a hotel restaurant for breakfast. I kind of see it as a similar equivalent to Americans going out to weekend brunch. Since we didn’t plan too much to do that day and weren’t sure how we were going to be feeling, keeping close by for breakfast was a good idea. And we thoroughly enjoyed our hotel breakfast buffet!

After breakfast, we headed to the Sumida Aquarium at the Tokyo Skytree, which opened at 9am. I highly highly recommend this aquarium! It’s very small and doesn’t have large ocean animals, but they have incredibly beautiful displays and interior design. My favorite was the exhibit on goldfish in Japan.

Other things open early in the morning: grocery stores, convenience stores (7-11, Lawsons, etc.), Starbucks, coffee shops, and Don Quijote. Even after we adjusted to the time difference, our kids were up and ready by 7am pretty much every day.

After the aquarium, we met up with some local friends, so we didn’t plan other activities for the afternoon. However, I really enjoy the Sumida neighborhood. If you’re staying around, there’s a McDonald’s at the Skytree, which is great if your small kids are not adventurous eaters, or if you just want to see the local seasonal menu. I had the ichigo daifuku pie at Mcdonald’s when we went, and it was delicious. There’s also a Pokemon Center and other shopping nearby.

Sumida Park is also within walking distance and great for viewing cherry blossoms if you’re there in spring. If you keep heading west, you’ll hit the Asakusa neighborhood. This has the famous Senso-ji temple and many great eats. The sweet potato dessert cafe Imo Pippi is in Asakusa as well as popular ramen shops.

Day 3: Trip to Yokohama for Anpanman Museum

The next day was Monday and we had some friends we wanted to meet who lived in Yokohama. About an hour by train from Ginza, Yokohama is home to several major attractions, including the Anpanman Museum. If you don’t know, Anpanman is an internationally beloved kids character. Anpan is a red bean stuffed bread bun, and Anpanman is a superhero with an anpan head. His friends include other food-themed superheroes. He has his own TV show, movies, and of course his own line of toys and snacks. He even shows up on children’s medicine in Japan. 

If your kids like Anpanman, this is a great place for the preschool to early elementary aged crowd. It predominantly consists of pretend play stations. There are several shows with singing and dancing. The bottom floor has a huge cafeteria with Anpanman themed food and many gift shops. We spent about 3-4 hours at the museum from the morning through lunch.

After the Anpanman museum, we headed to the 0101 (Maruichi) Building for some shopping. In this shopping mall, there was a Pokemon Center, as well as several other character/anime themed shops.

We would’ve liked to stay longer in Yokohama to explore (there’s also the Cup Noodle museum and a ramen museum), but we wanted to head back to Tokyo to avoid rush hour. 

Day 4: Rest Day, shopping in Ginza

I highly recommend scheduling in whole days with 0 plans in your Tokyo itinerary, especially if you have young children. Tokyo is CROWDED and with so many people, it can be very overstimulating.

For our day with no plans, we went shopping around our hotel, which is specifically why we chose to stay in Ginza. We did all our souvenir shopping at the flagship Muji store, the Sanrio World store, and Loft, which is a large department store chain in Japan. If you’re interested to know more about the food souvenirs I like, check out my Ultimate Guide to Snacks to Bring Home from Japan post.

Malls in Japan tend to have food court type stalls in their basements and/or sit down restaurants at their top floors, so it’s pretty easy to find casual food for kids to eat. What I like about the basement food courts is that you can walk around and have your kids look at all the food before deciding what to eat. Malls like the Ginza Mitsukoshi and the Ginza Six also had garden terraces on their rooftops with open seating for people to eat. Just know that with Tokyo being SO PACKED with tourists, if you’re looking for a sit-down restaurant, the wait times can get very long during peak eating hours. Obviously this is a problem when you have small kids. I recommend checking out the basement level food courts first or just grabbing food at your local convenience stores.

Another major shopping area in Ginza is Tokyo Station. You can get lost just inside the station itself. In Tokyo Station, we went to their Okashi Land, which is just full of snacks to gift as souvenirs. They also had a section just for character shops, like popular characters from Anime. Tokyo Station also had many restaurants! We stumbled upon a sushi restaurant with a great kids menu and amazing lunch deal.

If you still have time and you’re in the area, the Imperial Palace is nearby. We did not go there as the kids were tired and it was definitely less of an interesting place for smaller kids, but could be fun and educational for teens.

Day 5: Kidzania

Kidzania is one of the major kid-friendly attractions that we prioritized on our trip. It’s sort of like a children’s museum. Inside is a mini-town with businesses representing actual, real businesses in Japan. At each business, kids can participate in adult-guided activities learning how to work that job. For example, you can work as Mos Burger and make an actual teriyaki burger that you can then eat when the activity is over. You can also make Hi-Chew at the candy factory. Or you can be an ANA airline pilot.

Kidzania is EXTREMELY popular, so you’ll need to do a lot of research before you go. Book your reservations as early as you can and basically allot the whole day to Kidzania, as it’s a 6 hour experience. I would say it almost takes the same amount of energy as going to Disneyland, so be forewarned. But the kids LOVED it and had so much fun.

Day 6: Ueno Park

​Day 6 was Thursday for us, and we actually were changing hotels to get ready for Tokyo Disney! But check in wasn’t until 3pm, so we in the morning we went to Ueno Park and met up with another friend. The park itself is huge and great for viewing cherry blossoms or just having some open space that the kids could run around. My American children desperately just needed some larger spaces to get out their energy without bumping into others.

We walked around the Ueno Zoo, which is super affordable. In fact, the zoo and the other national museums in the park are all free for kids! So I highly recommend it, even for older kids. There are lots of restaurants around the subway station and the park as well, so it was easy to grab lunch in the area.

After the zoo we headed over to the Tokyo Disney Resort and checked in to the Toy Story Hotel. For a full trip report and detailed itinerary of Tokyo Disney, check out my Youtube video! Doing the full experience of Tokyo Disney took a lot of advanced planning, so it really needs its own deep dive explanation.

Day 7 and 8: Disney and Back to the Airport

Days 7 and 8 were a whirlwind of fun because we spent all day at Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo Disneysea! There’s seriously way too much to say about these theme parks. Being able to do everything that you want requires an extreme amount of strategizing and even still may not be possible. Again, if you want to look at exactly what we did and how we did it, take a look at my Youtube recap.

But we absolutely loved it and had so much fun.

From Day 8 at Tokyo Disneysea, we went straight back to Haneda Airport via the airport limousine bus. Yup, we went from the park to the airport. Whew. What a week!

Attractions We Skipped

You might notice that this entire trip was pretty much centered on family-friendly activities and skipped a lot of the popular cultural sites. We opted not to do Tokyo Tower, Meiji Shrine, or pretty much any Buddhist temple simply because they wouldn’t really be as exciting to the kids. Also since I’d been to Tokyo and visited these tourist spots before, they really just weren’t necessary for the enjoyment of this trip.

We also opted not to go to the Shibuya crossing, even though I think it IS pretty cool to see. It’s so crowded and chaotic, however, that it was just way too much of a hassle to take our kids there just to look at a crosswalk.

We also chose not to take the shinkansen to other cities like Kyoto or do any day trips to see Mount Fuji. Again, we prioritized the kids’ interests and we felt taking the bullet train to another city would’ve been really rushed. We also figure that will definitely come back to Japan again as a family someday, and those kinds of things might be more fun to do with older kids.

More Tips: Navigating Train Stations, Strollers, Restaurants, Etc.

I’m just going to say it – traveling with kids this age was STRESSFUL. We brought our Babyzen Yoyo stroller, which was the perfect size. However, it STILL felt too big for squeezing into crowded subways. We often found ourselves having to fold up our stroller. Finding elevators was also not easy. Some malls didn’t even have elevators, or sometimes they’d be broken and you’d have no choice but to take stairs. Pro tip I learned from my friend Sabrina, who lives in Tokyo, set your Google Maps to “wheelchair accessible” for your best bet at finding stroller friendly pathways. Even then, it’s hit and miss. If your kids can manage without a stroller, I definitely recommend not bringing one. BUT I don’t think we could’ve survived all the walking at Disney without it. Note that you CAN rent strollers at Tokyo Disneyland, so if your kids are strong enough to do city walking, you can save the stroller for just your Disney days when it’s extreme.

Rush hour is also another thing to consider. Subway stations during rush hours in the morning and evening are SO CROWDED it is super easy to lose your kids. I’m not joking. Hold on to their hands tight. It feels like being Simba during the stampede. If you can avoid mornings and evenings and just be on the trains during the middle of the day, I would.

Another thing to note is that culturally, Japan really values being considerate to others, and often that means being quiet to absolutely silent on public transportation and in some coffee shops and restaurants. If you have a tantrum-prone toddler, of course people are understanding that these things happen with small kids, but it still feels like you’re attracting WAY MORE attention than you would if the same thing happened in America. I had to prep my kids before we went to Japan that expectations on how loud they can be and how much they can move around in public spaces will be different, and I highly recommend that you have that conversation too before you get there.

Alright, I think that just about covers our Japan itinerary! I hope you found this helpful and that you enjoy your trip! If you have any more questions about getting around Tokyo with small kids, please let me know in the comments.

More Japan Posts

Looking for more helpful information for your trip to Japan? Check these out: