Izu, Japan
Almost every English-language guide to the Izu Peninsula reaches the same conclusion: rent a car. It is not bad advice. It is just the only advice most of them give, and it hides something unusual about central Izu for a rural Japanese region. One small railway terminus, with a bus forecourt outside it, connects to a mountain pass, a wasabi valley, two hot-spring towns and a working fishing port on the west coast.
The terminus is Shuzenji, at the end of the Izuhakone Railway's line from Mishima. Every trip below starts from its bus stops, and every one of them was made on public transport by TravelFeed writer @justinchicken, who lives in Mishima and has been posting his Izu days out since 2021. The constraint is frequency, not coverage. The buses reach almost everything; on the quieter routes they do it a handful of times a day.
Here is what is actually at the end of each line, what the trips cost the people who took them, and where the timetable will catch you out.
Getting to Shuzenji in the first place
Two options from Tokyo, and the slower-looking one is often the better one. JR East runs the Odoriko limited express on two branches, and one of them terminates at Shuzenji, about two hours and eight minutes from Tokyo Station. No changes, and you arrive at the bus stops rather than at a station where you still need a connection.
The alternative is the Tokaido Shinkansen to Mishima and a change onto the Izuhakone Railway's Sunzu line for the last stretch south. That is the route @justinchicken uses from home, and it is the one he recommends to visitors in his Niji no Sato write-up if speed matters more than sitting still.
Either way, the buses are run by Tokai Bus, the trading name of Tokai Jidosha, which has operated on the peninsula for more than a century. Its route network is the reason this guide is possible at all, and its free-pass page is worth opening before you buy single fares: the company sells multi-day passes covering all its Izu lines, alongside narrower ones for single areas.
South over the Amagi pass: the Odoriko trail and Namesawa Gorge
This is the long one, and the most rewarding. The Odoriko trail follows the old road over the Amagi pass, the route walked by the twenty-year-old narrator of Yasunari Kawabata's Izu no Odoriko. It runs from Joren Falls down to the Kawazu Seven Waterfalls, and the full course takes about seven hours.
Seven hours is a lot of day for a trail you also want to look at. The workaround @justinchicken used is worth copying: skip the first section by staying on the Shuzenji bus a few stops past Joren Falls to the Showa no Mori roadside station, and start there. His account of the walk puts the shortened version at six hours including lunch and stopping to look at things, ending at the Kawazu Seven Waterfalls, from where another bus goes on to Kawazu Station and the train home. He describes the bus from Shuzenji as taking just over thirty minutes.
Two details from that post change how you should plan it. The first is that the route does not climb a mountain, which he notes is unusual for a Japanese hike; it is a long walk, not an ascent. The second is the escape hatch. The trail shadows the main road, and there are several bus stops along it, so a group that runs out of daylight or enthusiasm can stop early rather than committing to the full distance.
The things worth stopping for come in the first half: Namesawa Gorge, the wasabi terraces beside the path, a memorial to Kawabata, and the old Amagi tunnel itself, a stone-portalled bore that you walk straight through. After the waterfalls the trail carries on for roughly another hour. He stopped. In his words, they "had had enough by then and wanted a beer", which is as honest an assessment of the last hour of a six-hour walk as you will find.
The wasabi valley at Yugashima, one stop short of the mountains
The same southbound bus passes through Yugashima, a hot-spring town where the Nekokoshi and Hontani rivers meet and become the Kano. If a six-hour trail is more than you want, this is the half-day version of the same valley.
@justinchicken spent an afternoon making his way up the river and wrote up what was worth the detour. There is a marked walking route around Yugashima that crosses the rivers and passes a brook known for fireflies, with a handful of hotels sitting directly on the water. He came away planning to book one of them for the autumn leaves, which tells you more about the setting than a description would.
Upstream are the wasabi fields, and they are the reason to come. Terraced beds run along a small river for kilometres, some shaded with plastic sheeting and some with trees planted for the purpose. His note for anyone arriving by car is that the small car park sits about ten minutes' walk below the main body of the fields, so the good part is not the part you can see from the road.
One warning from the same afternoon, and it applies to a lot of rural Japan. He detoured to a set of terraced paddy fields advertised on a roadside sign and found them at completely the wrong time of day and the wrong season. The sign showed what they look like in the right light in the right month. His photograph of the reality is captioned "Meh". Seasonal viewpoints in Izu are signposted year-round; the sign is not a promise.
Closer to Shuzenji, and easier to fit around a bus, there is a rice paddy planted each year in mixed varieties so the different colours form a picture. There is nowhere to park, he notes, but a wide pavement opposite serves perfectly well if you have arrived on foot.
West to Toi, for the beach and the Shimizu ferry
The westbound bus from Shuzenji crosses the peninsula to Toi, on the Suruga Bay coast. Toi is a hot-spring town with a beach, and the beach is the reason to come in high summer.
It is a family beach, and the trip report is clear about what that means: crowded through the afternoon, the sea pretty clear, the sand cleaner than Ito's, and no waves to speak of. He had bought body boards and found nothing to use them on. If you are travelling with small children, that is a recommendation. If you wanted surf, go elsewhere.
Arriving by bus has one clear advantage here. Parking in 2021 cost 1,500 yen and the car park shut at five, which pushed most day-trippers out at the same time. He stayed at a minshuku nearby, walked down without a car, and had the beach quiet in the evening. Toi is also a ferry port, with a crossing to Shimizu on the far side of Suruga Bay, so the town can be an arrival point rather than a dead end.
Walking the coast road to Heda port
North of Toi, the coast bends round to Heda, a working fishing harbour on the Suruga Bay shore. There is a bus. There is also a walk, and the walk is the better story.
On 2 January 2023, @justinchicken took the train to Shuzenji, the bus to Toi, and arrived at half past ten to walk the whole way to Heda. It took about four hours. His description is refreshingly unromantic: not many viewpoints, roughly half an hour of it on and off the main road, the rest quiet countryside, over a hill out of Toi, through the hot-spring town of Odoi, past a shrine, up into the hills again and down into Heda.
What makes it work is the end. Heda's sea road has a row of fish restaurants, and that is where he headed on arrival. Inland there is a roadside station with a hot spring, which is where he went after eating and before catching the bus back to Shuzenji. Walk, eat, soak, bus home is a good shape for a winter day, and none of it needs a car so long as you check the return times before you set off.
Niji no Sato: what you get for 1,220 yen
Niji no Sato sits in the hills above Shuzenji and is the one attraction here that a normal itinerary would flag. It is a park built around an English town and a Canadian town, connected by a small railway, with flower gardens in the valleys below.
The park's own admission page currently lists 1,220 yen for adults from middle-school age up and 610 yen for children between four and elementary school, with car parking at 300 yen. Opening hours are 10:00 to 17:00 from March through September and 10:00 to 16:00 from October to February, with last entry an hour before closing. When @justinchicken visited in June 2021 he paid 1,200 yen, so the price has barely moved in five years.
The useful part of his post is the ticketing. Rather than paying separately, he bought a combined return bus and entrance ticket from Shuzenji Station for 1,690 yen and judged it the best value on offer; the internal railway was 400 yen one way on top. Check that the combined ticket still exists when you buy, and ask at the station window rather than assuming transport and entry have to be sorted out separately.
His verdict is more useful than an endorsement would be. The park has what he calls a bubble feel, built in the boom years and gently faded since. The little train covers about 500 metres at roughly walking speed. The flowers are left largely to their own devices. He went in late June and found the hydrangeas at their peak and the irises nearly finished, on a day quiet enough that the whole thing was pleasant to wander around. Go for the gardens and the quiet, not for the theme park.
Planning around the timetable
The single thing that will ruin a car-free day in Izu is assuming the bus that brought you will take you back soon. On the main Shuzenji corridors the service is reasonable. On the quieter western routes it thins out considerably, and timetables shift with the season, so the schedule you looked up for a summer trip is not necessarily the one running in January.
Three habits fix most of it. Photograph the return timetable at the stop where you get off, before you walk away from it. Build the day around one fixed bus rather than several loose ones, which is exactly why the Toi to Heda walk works so well: it needs one bus out and one bus back, with four hours of walking in between that no timetable can disrupt. And if you are doing two or more legs, price a Tokai Bus multi-day pass against the single fares before you start; the routes that cross the peninsula are long ones.
One last note on seasons. All five of these trips were made in different months, and the reports read very differently as a result. Late June gets hydrangeas at Niji no Sato and rain. Late July gets Toi beach at its busiest. November gets the Amagi trail in autumn colour. Early January gets a cold, bright, empty coast road and open fish restaurants at the end of it. There is no closed season in central Izu, only different reasons to come.
For more from the region, the Japan destination page collects community posts from across the country, and travellers who like the idea of a Saturday morning with a fixed start time will find our guide to running parkrun in Japan useful.
FAQ
Can you visit the Izu Peninsula without a car?
Yes, for central and western Izu. Shuzenji Station is the practical hub: Tokai Bus routes run from it south over the Amagi pass toward Kawazu, west to Toi, and north up the coast to Heda, and community trip reports from 2021 to 2023 describe reaching the Odoriko trail, the Yugashima wasabi fields, Toi beach, Heda port and Niji no Sato using only trains and buses. The limitation is frequency rather than coverage, so check return times before you commit to a stop.
How do you get from Tokyo to Shuzenji?
JR East's Odoriko limited express runs direct from Tokyo, Shinjuku and Ikebukuro to Shuzenji, taking about two hours and eight minutes from Tokyo Station. The faster alternative is the Tokaido Shinkansen to Mishima, changing there onto the Izuhakone Railway's Sunzu line for the final stretch.
How long does the Odoriko trail take?
The full course from Joren Falls to the Kawazu Seven Waterfalls takes around seven hours. Starting instead from the Showa no Mori roadside station, a few bus stops further south, cuts it to about six hours including lunch and photo stops, as @justinchicken found in November 2022. The trail follows the old road rather than climbing a peak, and several bus stops along the main road let you shorten the day if you need to.
How much does Niji no Sato cost?
The park lists 1,220 yen for adults from middle-school age and 610 yen for children aged four to elementary school, with 300 yen for car parking. A one-way ride on the park railway is extra. Buying a combined return bus and entrance ticket at Shuzenji Station worked out cheaper for @justinchicken than paying for the bus and admission separately.
