Your Local Japanese Girl

Coin Lockers in Japan: Prices, Where to Find Them, and What to Do When They Are Full

7-Eleven convenience store front in Nagoya with the green and orange sign

A local girl in Nagoya — the thing we watch visitors do wrong most often is drag a suitcase around a city all day.

⏱ Time: two minutes at the station
💴 Cost: coin locker ¥400–800/day · booked storage ¥500–800 · suitcase forwarded to your next hotel ¥2,000–2,300
📍 Where: every station, most convenience stores, many cafés
😰 Difficulty: none — you tap your Suica and walk away
⭐ The short version:
1. Coin lockers are everywhere and cost ¥400–800 a day. Pay by tapping Suica — no coins needed
2. They fill up. At big stations in peak season they are gone by mid-morning
3. When they are full, booked luggage storage at a shop or café costs about the same
4. Changing cities? Do not carry the suitcase at all — forward it overnight for ¥2,000–2,300
5. Lockers have a 3-day limit. After that your bag is removed

What a coin locker costs

  • Small — daypack, camera bag: about ¥400
  • Medium — cabin bag: about ¥500–600
  • Large — full suitcase: about ¥700–800
  • Pay by tapping your Suica. Newer lockers have a touchscreen, take IC cards, and print a slip with the locker number. Older ones still want ¥100 coins — the change machine is beside them

Find one near you

Find coin lockers near me now
…or at the station you are heading to:
TokyoShinjukuShibuyaKyotoOsakaNagoya
Add your hotel or area after “near” and search.

When they are all full

This is the part nobody warns you about. At Kyoto Station in autumn, or Shinjuku on a Saturday, every locker is taken by mid-morning. You will walk three sets of stairs finding out.

The fix is booked luggage storage — shops, cafés and hotels near the station that hold bags by the day. You reserve on your phone, walk in, hand it over. Typical prices are ¥500 for a bag under 45cm and ¥800 for a suitcase, charged per calendar day rather than per hour, so a two-hour drop costs the same as all day. Some JR station counters charge a flat ¥1,000.

It costs roughly what a locker costs, and it is guaranteed. In peak season that is worth the extra minute of booking.

Two networks cover Japan well: ecbo cloak, which is Japanese and has the densest coverage around stations, and Radical Storage, which charges one flat daily rate per bag whatever its size. If your bag is enormous, check the second one first.

Better idea: do not carry it at all

Changing cities? Hand the suitcase to your hotel front desk in the morning and it will be waiting at the next hotel that evening. This is takkyūbin, and it is the single best travel habit in Japan.

  • Cabin-sized bag — ¥1,700–1,900
  • Standard checked suitcase — ¥2,000–2,300
  • Extra-large — ¥3,170–3,700
  • Tokyo → Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Fukuoka: next day. Tokyo → Sapporo: two days. Airports add about ¥660

Every hotel front desk does this without being asked twice — say takkyūbin onegaishimasu and point at the bag. Pack one night of clothes in a day bag and travel with your hands free.

通TSŪ INFORMATION
what Japanese connoisseurs know

Coin lockers are not indefinite storage. Most run on a three-day limit — the clock is printed on the door in Japanese, which is why visitors miss it. On day four, station staff open the locker, remove your bag to an office, and you pay the accumulated daily fee plus a retrieval charge to get it back. Nothing is lost and nobody is rude about it, but you will spend an hour of your holiday in a back room filling in a form. If a bag needs to sit for longer than a weekend, forward it or use a staffed storage counter instead.

Honest notes

  • The biggest lockers do not fit the biggest suitcases. A 28-inch case often will not go in. Check before you commit to a plan built around one
  • Photograph the locker number and the bank of lockers. Every station has several banks that look identical, and stations here are enormous
  • Forwarding takes a full day. It is useless for same-day moves and perfect for everything else. Drop it before 11am to be safe
🧳 Pocket recap — screenshot this bit:
• Coin locker ¥400–800/day, paid by tapping Suica
• Peak season at big stations: full by mid-morning — book storage instead
• Booked storage: ¥500 a bag, ¥800 a suitcase, charged per day not per hour
• Changing cities: forward the suitcase, ¥2,000–2,300, arrives next day
• 3-day locker limit — after that staff remove it and you pay to retrieve
• Photograph your locker number. The stations are bigger than they look

More from us: this is one step of the full order of preparation. Before you land, sort out getting online.

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