Four Pieces of Tokyo Advice, Checked Against the Official Sources

What this is

Some travel advice about Tokyo gets repeated until it sounds settled. I took four widely repeated pieces and checked each one against the operator's or the government's own pages.

Three of them turned out to be wrong. The fourth has no official answer at all — and the question itself is one the railway companies are asking people to stop asking.

Here is the short version. Each one is explained below.

1. "Front-door in Tokyo, back-door everywhere else"

This is one of the most confidently repeated rules about Japanese buses. Here is a version of it, from a traveller writing up their trip:

Buses outside Tokyo work backwards. On at the back, take a numbered ticket, pay at the front when you get off. Tokyo is the other way round.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Transportation — the operator of Toei Bus — publishes its boarding instructions in two blocks on the same page.

Inside the 23 wards the heading is 前乗り・前払い, front-boarding and pay-on-boarding:

You leave through the rear door.

In the Tama area the heading on the very same page is 後乗り・後払い, rear-boarding and pay-on-exit:

You leave through the front door and pay as you get off.

The Tama area is Tokyo. This is one operator, running both systems, within the same metropolis. So the line the advice draws — Tokyo on one side, everywhere else on the other — is not where the difference actually falls.

What decides it, for Toei

Within Toei Bus, the split follows the fare system, and the Bureau states both plainly on its fares page:

A flat fare is known the moment you board, so it can be collected on the way in. A distance-based fare is not settled until you choose where to get off, so it is collected on the way out.

The correction you will see underneath it is still wrong

When someone posts the front-door rule, a common reply is that the real determinant is the fare: flat fare means you pay as you board, distance-based fare means you pay as you leave.

That is tidier, and as a general rule it does not hold.

Tokyu Bus states its method plainly:

And then, on the same page:

So on those routes the fare does depend on how far you go — and you still pay on the way in. You tell the driver your destination instead. Distance-based fare does not mean pay-on-exit. It happens to line up that way at Toei. It is not a rule you can carry to the next operator.

If you are using an IC card, the Tama procedure is different again

The "take a numbered ticket" instruction is for paying in cash. With an IC card, the Bureau's guidance is:

Two taps, no ticket. Inside the 23 wards it is one tap, as you board.

This holds for Suica, PASMO and the other nationally interoperable cards. And if your balance runs short mid-journey, you can top up on the bus itself — 1,000-yen notes only, in 1,000-yen units.

Why this matters more than it sounds: both versions of the front-door rule are the kind that make you stop looking. If you believe Tokyo means front-door, you board a Tama-area bus on autopilot and find yourself at the wrong door with people behind you. The useful habit is not a rule to memorise — it is checking the bus you are actually standing in front of.

2. "You always need the ticket and the IC card"

The "always both" version is wrong. What you need at the gate depends on how you arrived at it.

Two of those five need both. Three do not.

For the direct case, Smart-EX puts it this way:

For the transfer case, JR Central's TOICA page gives the steps in order: insert the Shinkansen ticket into the slot, tap the IC card on the reader, take the ticket back as it comes out.

And going the other way — off the Shinkansen and onto the ordinary lines — the same page describes inserting the ticket and taking it with you, then settling up at the station where you actually get off. No tap at the transfer gate in that direction.

The order is not optional

This is the part worth carrying with you. When a paper ticket and an IC card are both involved, Smart-EX states the sequence:

Ticket first. Card second. It is written as a requirement, not a preference.

This is not specific to one company. JR East gives the same instruction, and its page covers the Tohoku, Yamagata, Akita, Hokkaido, Joetsu, Hokuriku and Tokaido Shinkansen:

The same page confirms that PASMO, Kitaca, TOICA, manaca, ICOCA, PiTaPa, SUGOCA, nimoca and Hayakaken all work the same way as Suica.

One trap that is not in the table above

Look at what is printed on your Shinkansen ticket before you touch anything.

If it says 東京都区内 (Tokyo ward area), 東京山手線内, 横浜市内 or 仙台市内, and you are starting from a station inside that zone, JR East's instruction is:

The local fare inside that zone is already included in what you paid. Tapping in with an IC card at your local station means paying for it twice.

If you are starting from outside the zone, the opposite applies — tap in normally, and at the transfer gate insert the ticket then tap the card. Only the portion outside the zone is deducted from your balance.

Why this is the thing to remember: people describe the Shinkansen gate as the moment the trip stopped making sense — a machine with several slots, a queue behind them, and no clear idea which of the things in their hand goes where. The rule that actually helps is not "you need both." It is: check what zone is printed on your ticket, work out which situation you are in, and if two things are involved, paper goes in before plastic touches anything.

3. "You can't find deodorant in Japan"

This one circulates as a packing warning: bring your own, because you will not find any.

The manufacturers' own release pages say otherwise. Mandom announced two antiperspirant products for release on 23 February 2026 — a roll-on and an unscented spray — and lists the sales channel for both as:

Nationwide drugstores, stated by the company that makes the product. Kao's 8x4 brand site lists its own antiperspirant range as well: powder sprays, roll-ons, body sprays, a neck gel, a paste and a foot spray.

So "you cannot find it" does not hold up.

What I could not confirm

Two things, and they may be the whole substance of the complaint.

The format. The product types I could confirm from official pages are sprays, roll-ons, sheets, a gel and a paste. I could not confirm whether the solid stick antiperspirant common in some countries is sold here. If you are looking for a specific format rather than a specific function, I cannot tell you it will be there.

Where it sits in a given shop. No official source describes that, and this article does not invent it.

Why the distinction is worth drawing: "there is none" and "there is none of the kind I was looking for" produce very different packing decisions. The first says bring a full supply. The second says you will find something that works, but do not assume it will look like what you have at home. Only the second is supported by what I could check.

4. "Left in Tokyo, right in Osaka"

The escalator rule shows up in almost every first-trip write-up. This version is typical:

Escalators are flipped between the two cities and it caught me out. Tokyo you stand on the left, Osaka on the right. You'll get looks standing on the wrong side.

I went looking for the official version of this and could not find one — in either city.

Tokyo Metro does publish escalator guidance. So does Osaka Metro. Neither tells you which side to stand on. What they publish instead is the same campaign, run jointly: エスカレーター「歩かず立ち止まろう」, "stand still, don't walk," which ran from 22 July to 31 August 2025 together with 60 railway operators and 7 organisations nationwide, along with airports, commercial facilities and local governments.

The messages are "don't walk, stand still" and "hold the handrail."

On the habit of keeping one side clear, both companies say the same thing:

Note what that sentence is about. Someone who can grip with one hand only does not need a handrail — they need the one on their side. A cleared lane takes that away from whoever's side it happens to be.

Where it has become a rule

Saitama Prefecture — neighbouring Tokyo, not part of it — passed an ordinance that came into force on 1 October 2021. Its requirement:

There is no penalty attached. The prefecture also describes the situation it is addressing: that most people stand on the left and leave the right clear, and that someone who needs the right-hand handrail is left without one.

That description is Saitama's, about Saitama. I am not going to restate it as a fact about Tokyo, because the Tokyo pages I checked do not say it, and I did not check whether Tokyo has an ordinance of its own.

Why I would drop the question rather than answer it: the left-or-right framing takes the cleared lane as a given and asks only which side it goes on. Sixty-odd operators, two prefectural governments and a nationwide campaign are asking for the lane not to be there. Standing still, on whichever side you are on, is the behaviour every official source I opened actually asks for. Nobody is going to correct you for it.

What survived

Three of these are pieces of advice that were passed along in good faith and got more confident each time they were repeated. The one that held up best is the one that is not a rule about Tokyo at all.

Facts, dates and sources