This was an interesting trip to pack for, not only is it long (almost 5 weeks), we also had to be ready for a variety of weather; Hokkaido was much more autumn like than our stops on Honshu. Traveling around the country with three large bags via train is not appealing so we brought along two packable travel bags and utilized the luggage forwarding services available in Japan. Known as Takuhaibin, you can move your luggage from hotel to hotel for a moderate cost. We took advantage of this service, as an example when we first left Tokyo we packed our travel bags for a few days in Hakone and forwarded our luggage to Kyoto. We continued this the entire trip and it worked out quite well. All our luggage have Apple Airtags in them so we could monitor their progress and this made our travels in Japan much easier. In a sense our main luggage had their own vacation.
