Adventures in Japan with Disabilities

In mid-February, my family and I visited Japan for nine days, traveling between Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara. It was our first trip together to Asia, as well as my first time traveling internationally by air with a portable electric wheelchair. I was inspired to take the trip not just because of a shared love for noodles, sushi, and cat shrines, but also because I found reassuring information from online forums for disabled travelers. In sharing this overview of my experience, I hope to encourage others to explore, too– however exhausting or exhilarating it can be to navigate logistics, language, and culture.

“But . . . Is it accessible?”

When I told others that we were going to Japan, I mostly got one of two responses:

• “I loved it!” Even a nurse at a doctor’s appointment before my trip ran out of the room to grab a list of tips that the office had assembled in its individual vacations to the country.
• “Is it accessible?” Friends and colleagues, knowing about my mobility limitations, often asked if it was accessible– probably out of curiosity and care. I refrained from laughing because I would not put myself in a situation where I would just find out after booking a long international trip. I also can never count on anything being readily accessible in the United States. However, I understand what they were asking. 

Japan enacted a “barrier-free” act in 2006, building on earlier commitments to improving access in building and transportations. Hosting the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics in Tokyo also drove major accessibility infrastructure improvements and awareness.

The question of accessibility is always difficult to answer, however– to whom, and in what context? I was also concerned that Japan, especially Tokyo, would be overstimulating given its size and density. However, returning to Seattle made me realize that it’s so loud in many American public spaces. I’m even louder here.

My Gear and Prep

I brought a Whill C2 portable electric wheelchair with me that was 22” wide. How do I know? I measured it carefully before contacting any hotels. “Barrier-free” hotel rooms are still difficult to find in Japan. Larger and newer hotels often just have one available, if that, but the law requires that hotels with 50+ rooms that are new or substantially renovated offer 1% of their rooms as barrier-free. Given that I was traveling with my husband and teen, I wanted to have the greatest flexibility for location, room size, and aesthetics that I could. I provided my wheelchair’s dimensions and charging needs to hotels and tried to explain that I did not need a fully accessible room, in case someone else did. However, many Japanese hotels have narrow doorways, a step into the room, or multi-level floorplans, so I began to ask more concrete questions instead of having my hotel options dwindle rapidly or receiving no response. 

I also brought a collapsible cane with a self-standing tip so that I could walk into smaller spaces, leave my chair curbside (which I did often and safely), and stretch. For potential scenarios where I would want to leave my wheelchair outside unattended, I also brought a rain poncho that would cover it and a small tracking device. However, I never used my wheelchair’s app to lock it down electronically, as I have done in the States or Canada.

For the airline travel portion, I wished that I could have made myself comfortable for the flight. Despite bringing a range of inflatable and/or tiny pillows, two different versions of foot hammocks, earplugs, a mask, and a pharmacy of Tylenol, ibuprofen, and Benadryl, I was still stiff and sore. I envied the folks who could sleep. 

Access Features: Japan Round-Up

There are excellent guides to Japan with accessibility information. My task here isn’t to replicate or replace them, but more to name a few of the features that I found most compelling in Japan.

Toilets/Ostomate Scavenger Hunt

A friend recently had an ileostomy and mentioned that they had heard about Japan’s inclusivity in the form of ostomy toilets. I promised them that I would FaceTime them from a toilet if I found one. Of course, the first one I found was on a bullet train from the airport and traveling 10+ hours already and being 16 hours different in time zones made me reconsider the live call option. However, I sent my friend videos and pictures of several ostomate locations during our travels, from that train to a national garden in Tokyo. One of the best features of the public bathrooms was also their cleanliness. 

Tactile Pavements

Japan excels in providing tactile pavements for Blind and Low-Vision individuals in many areas. While my omnidirectional wheelchair tires do not love bumps or straight lines, I appreciated seeing the bright yellow pathways leading to and within transit stations. They lead to exits, including elevators– which have priority disability access and a second lower set of disability buttons.

Mind the Gap– or Don’t

We noticed narrower gaps and marked disability boarding zones at train stations. Sometimes, the platform in that part extended out a bit to reduce the gap to the train or subway door. Other trains have reserved areas for strollers and wheelchairs making it easier to get out of the way of the doors and human traffic with multiple stops. In terms of information accessibility, I will continue to appreciate that the Tokyo metro informed passengers visually and auditorily in multiple languages where they were on the train, where elevators and exits were located, and which doors were opening at the next stop.

At train stations, attendants are available for assistance– whether it’s bringing a portable suitcase-style ramp, operating a stair lift (truly a harrowing experience as the rider), or asking other passengers to “Make way”– as was our experience at one station. Similarly, I found bus drivers to be quite accommodating with lowering built-in ramps or bringing a portable ramp for boarding.

Send Your Bag 

One of my favorite access features was sending our bags to our next location or even the airport. While these services were not designed as disability access, they benefit disabled people who are already loaded down with equipment. They also mean that others are not necessarily bringing a set of human-sized bags on public transit, which seems to be a common scenario in Seattle where too many folks overtake priority seating with their roller bags.

Commitments to Barrier-Free Travel

In planning the trip, I often noticed that hotel or venue websites had more accurate information if I skipped the English pages and went with the full text Japanese versions and translation through my phone or computer. Sometimes, information about disability accessibility appeared there but not in the condensed translated version.

Several cities and visitor centers expressed commitments to barrier-free travel. For example, in Nara, we booked a tea ceremony because they communicated through the visitor center at the local hotel that they wanted to support travelers with disabilities. I appreciated their responsiveness about seating and language access, too. 

When I made reservations at restaurants in advance, I often flagged that I was a customer with a disability and described what my needs were. One restaurant did not acknowledge that portion of my message, but when I arrived, they’d clearly brainstormed a path for me. Another restaurant responded promptly and offered detailed instructions based on the weather about how we would troubleshoot their tiny space. 

Access Misses

It wouldn’t be living with disabilities and traveling with a teen if there weren’t some difficult and confusing parts of travel. My family often needed to slow down and troubleshoot the accessible entrances and exits at train stations, for example, instead of just going up the stairs or escalator. While our navigation skills improved over time, we encountered several consistent issues.

Special= Slow

There were several times that something marked as “special assistance” meant that we would be rerouted to a counter or put to the side to wait a while for someone to come to us, such as at the Narita Airport. Another time, “special” delayed our boarding of a train where we had reserved seats and landed me in a bathroom hallway for the 2.5-hour bullet train ride from Tokyo to Kyoto. I saw Mt. Fuji but I also felt a bit like cargo or the strange lurker blocking others’ access to the toilet. I thought that would be the lowest point of my travel experience, but I did have my chair flip over to the side at a station in Kyoto when people did not make enough room for me to clear the train exit.

Plus Ones

In booking hotels and train tickets, we often wondered if Japan had considered that disabled people might be traveling as families or in groups. Accessible seating, for example, was often just in one compartment of a bullet train where wheelchair spaces were not next to actual seats. I’m not sure the train system has mastered the concept of companion seating.

Many hotels seemed to envision barrier-free rooms for just one person. While they might have been in compliance, those rooms leaned more towards a hospital-style aesthetic than the rest of the facility, and often did not have room for 2-3 people to stay together.

Community and Visibility

Finally, given that Tokyo has 34 million people, I expected to see more people with apparent disabilities in public. Besides an aging population on many of the buses we took, we did not see that many people with disabilities across a range of ages at restaurants, museums, shops, or in other spaces. When I would take a ramp at a shrine, for example, I was more likely to be accompanied by tiny dogs in sweaters and a fancy stroller than anyone with a mobility impairment.

I’ve joked since returning that whenever my family stopped and looked a bit lost, we’d have a helpful stranger tell us that something we were doing would be dangerous. Wait, are you looking at me, or remarking on their sense of direction?

Take-aways

I look forward to returning to Japan soon. I would love to connect with disability communities while there because I’m curious about the experience of living with a disability in Japan and what the next frontier of advocacy is. I also never made it through even just a few items on my trip spreadsheet and there are so many regions to visit. I am confident that roasted mochi, raw denim, forest onsens, and custom pen ink await me sometime. I might even be able to locate the deer that ripped my Japan Airlines tag off my wheelchair because it was hungry in Nara.