Hitchhiking in Japan getting on the expressway · Getting on the expressway in Hitchhiking in Japan
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Getting on the expressway in Hitchhiking in Japan
Getting on the expressway in Hitchhiking in Japan
Due to a complex conspiracy, all SA/PAs are located as inconveniently as possible, and entrance to them from outside on foot is officially prohibited. However, the inconvenience is manageable when you know the route (are you willing to sit on a local train for an hour to save 9000 yen?) and, as so often happens in Japan, official regulations go unenforced or downright ignored.
Aside from SA/PAs, the second way to get on the expressway is to hitch outside an interchange. ICs do tend to be a bit closer to town, but in Tokyo they are usually in the middle of very heavy traffic and with few, if any, places where hitching is even remotely possible, so getting rides also takes considerably longer. It is generally preferable to sit on a local for an extra half an hour and maybe even pay a few yen for the privilege of not having to choke on exhaust for an hour.
The third method would be to take a long-distance bus that uses the expressway and stops at a parking area along the way. However, cataloguing which routes go where on which roads and which service areas they stop at would be a fairly difficult enterprise, you'll also need to buy a rather expensive bus ticket just to get on the thing, and you'll probably freak out the bus attendants who will certainly notice if the only gaijin on the bus doesn't come back from the break.
An untested but quite valid possibility along these lines is to free yourself from the difficulties of hitching out of Tokyo by taking the cheap 3500 yen Orion "youth" (misnomer) night-bus towards Gifu via Nagoya, ideally on a Friday night. You truly get what you pay for here, but it makes a stop around sunrise at a major service area just east of Nagoya. If you can perhaps persuade the driver that this is in fact close to where you want to be ("Thats my friend's house, right over there, really!" - again, this is untested) you will be both on the expressways at an optimal place and awake early enough to get a morning headstart on a long-westbound hitch.
An excellent method to make it to the expressway is simple transporting yourself to a gas station which lies on a road heading to the expressway. Be sure to go to the correct side of the road, as there will obviously be more cars actually heading to the expressway (and remember that driving directions are reversed in Japan). If possible, explain the drivers that you simply wish to go to a service area at the highway. This is easiest with a good map that shows service areas or it can be done if you know the name of the expressway and say "service area". This method was done in Yokohama (on the way to Kyoto) with a total waiting time of 2 minutes, albeit with the assistance of a Japanese speaker.
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Hitchhiking in Japan Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.