Coin Lockers in Japan: Prices, Map, and What If They Are Full

By Sachi, in NagoyaWritten from what we bought, booked and ate ourselves

Nagoya, born and raised. 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
What trips people up: none. You tap your Suica and walk away

The short version:
1. You will not need coins. The same Suica that opens the ticket gate opens the locker
2. They fill up. At big stations in peak season they are gone by mid-morning, and then your day is spent carrying the bag
3. Changing cities? Do not carry the suitcase at all. Send it ahead overnight and travel with a daypack

What a coin locker costs (the board at our Nagoya station)

Small (daypack, camera bag): ¥400 a day
Medium (cabin bag): ¥600 a day
Large (full suitcase): ¥800 a day
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

Coin locker price board: small 400 yen, medium 600 yen, large 800 yen per day — The price board at our station: 400 for small, 600 for medium, 800 for large, per day. Yours will look almost identical, since the numbers barely change nationwide.

How the machine actually works

Here is exactly what you will see, from our own station in Nagoya.

A bank of Japanese coin lockers with availability lights, at Oasis 21 in Nagoya — A wall of lockers. A lit lamp means the locker is free, and that is all you need to read to start.

The newer lockers share one touchscreen for the whole bank, not a keyhole on each door. You pick an empty locker, put your bag in, pull the lever, then pay at the screen.

Coin locker touchscreen in Japanese, choosing put in or remove baggage — The screen starts in Japanese, but look at the top row.

Coin locker touchscreen switched to English: Put in or Remove your Baggage — Tap English and the screen switches over. Put in your Baggage is on the left, Remove is on the right, and that is the only choice.

Two ways to pay, and this is the part worth knowing:

Tap your Suica or ICOCA. The card becomes your key, and you tap the same card to open the locker later, so there is nothing to lose or remember
Pay cash, and the machine prints a slip with a QR code. That slip is now your key. Lose it and you are talking to station staff

Bilingual How to Use the Lockers sign showing the put-in and remove steps — Every bank has this bilingual sign. If the screen ever confuses you, it is all here in English.

Tap the card, not the cash, and the whole thing takes about thirty seconds.

Find one near you

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…or at the station you are heading to:

Tokyo Shinjuku Shibuya Kyoto Osaka Nagoya

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When they are all full

Nobody warns you about this. 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 at 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 about the same as a locker and your space is guaranteed, which in peak season 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.

TSŪ INFORMATION
what Japanese connoisseurs know

Coin lockers are not indefinite storage. Most run on a three-day limit and 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.

Notes from a local

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. So it does not work for same-day moves, but it is fine for everything else. Drop it before 11am to be safe

Pocket recap:
• Coin locker ¥400–800/day, paid by tapping Suica
• Peak season at big stations: full by mid-morning so 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.