A lot of changes are coming to Japan’s laid-back unlimited ride ticket, and most of them aren’t good.

For many years, the Seishun 18 Ticket has been one of Japan’s best rail travel bargains. Though seishun is the Japanese word for “youth,” there’s no age limit for the Seishun 18 Ticket, with the name being meant to evoke images of slower-paced, off-the-beaten-path travel with a touch of adventurousness.

In many ways, the Seishun 18 Ticket exists as a sort of an opposite-benefit counterpart to the more-famous-among-foreign tourists Japan Rail Pass. Whereas the Japan Rail Pass has a higher price that gives you unlimited access to some of the fastest trains in Japan to zip back and forth across the country, the Seishun 18 Ticket, which is also provided by Japan Railway Company, is lower-priced, costing only 12,050 yen (US$80) for five days of unlimited rides on JR trains and BRT highway buses anywhere in Japan, and even some ferries too.

The tradeoff for the Seishun 18 Ticket’s lower price is that you can only use local and rapid trains, so the Shinkansen and other high-speed limited express trains are out. Truth be told, though, that limitation hasn’t been so hard to plan around, since the five unlimited travel days could be used at any time during the roughly five weeks the Seishun 18 Ticket is valid. You could use one day of your pass for the first leg of your trip to head to someplace you want to spend a few days exploring, then hold off on using your second day until you’re ready to move to your next far-off destination.

▼ A beautiful view from the Tohoku region taken during a Seishun 18 Ticket trip

In other words, the Seishun 18 Ticket is tailored for people who’ve got more time than money to spend traveling, making it a favorite of backpackers, college students, and young adults with a case of wanderlust. But Japan Railway Company has just announced the details for the upcoming winter Seishun 18 Ticket (the passes are offered three times a year), and very few of the changes are going to make people happy.

Let’s start with the good news, which is even though prices for just about everything are going up in Japan these days, the five-day Seishun 18 Ticket price remains the same, 12,050 yen. In addition, there’s a new three-day Seishun 18 Ticket priced at 10,000 yen, making the economic hurdle even easier to clear. Also, the new Seishun 18 Tickets can be used in automated ticket gates, unlike the old versions which required you to find a manned gate and show your ticket to the staff when entering or exiting a station.

▼ Until now, Seishun 18 Tickets (青春１８きっぷ)  had to be manually stamped with the date on the days they were being used.

Now for the bad news: the Seishun 18 Ticket must now be used on consecutive days, starting from when you activate it. No more using the pass to roll into one town, spend multiple days leisurely soaking up the local atmosphere and seeing nearby sights, and waiting to use your next day of free rides until you’re ready to move on to another spot to base yourself at for a while, stretching out your trip for a week-plus and making the time spent on slower trains feel like not such a big deal. Under the new Seishun 18 Ticket system, if you activate a five-day pass on Monday, its validity runs straight on through to Friday, and on Saturday it’s just a piece of paper. Same deal for the three-day pass: the days of validity are consecutive.

There’s one more bummer with the new format. Up until now, you’ve been able to share the Seishun 18 Ticket among multiple people, as long as you’re all entering/exiting the station together as a group. So while you could use all five days of the pass just for yourself, you and a friend or friends could divvy up the days between you. Five friends, for example, could use the whole ticket for all of them to have unlimited rides on the same day. This feature, though, is also ending with the new Seishun 18 Ticket format, as the unlimited ride privileges are now exclusively for the single purchaser of the pass, and not transferrable.

The winter Seishun 18 Tickets go on sale November 26 at major JR stations and travel offices, and can be used between December 10 and January 1.

With the SoraNews24 team of writers having taken some awesome trips with the Seishun 18 Ticket, even going all the way up through Japan’s northeastern Tohoku region and ending up in Hokkaido, it’s sad to see its awesomeness being scaled back. That said, 10,000/12,050 yen for three/five days of unlimited rail rides can still be a good deal, but having to use those days consecutively leaves you with less space in the schedule to enjoy the slow-life sites along the way, so the Seishun 18 Ticket’s characteristic sense of unhurried discovery might end up feeling like a wistful, bittersweet childhood memory.

Source: JR East via IT Media
Photos ©SoraNews24
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