A short note from
the one person behind Hanabi.

I love Japan. On my first trip the JR Pass was a no-brainer — buy it, use it, done. By my second trip, regional passes had become more viable, the maths had stopped being obvious, and I built this so I could stop re-doing the same spreadsheet. I hope it makes your trip easier.

Hanabi is in open beta, so everything is free while I put it through its paces. No account, no paywall, no Supporter tier — the full station list, every regional pass, and the whole route optimiser are open to everyone. I'm using this window to check the numbers against real trips and smooth out the rough edges.

A paid Supporter tier will arrive once Hanabi is out of testing, to cover the live fare data and keep the service sustainable. Until then, plan as many trips as you like — and if something looks off, please tell me (there's a feedback link below).

The catalogue spans the JR network (West, East, Central, Kyushu, Hokkaido, Shikoku) plus the major private operators — Kintetsu, Hankyu / Hanshin / Keihan / Nankai via Kansai Railway Pass Lite, Odakyu, Tobu Nikko, Hakone Tozan, Fuji Kyuko. If you're planning a trip anywhere in the country, the optimiser has the passes it needs.

New regional passes still take time to model properly — every one has its own exclusions, surcharge quirks, and validity sub-rules. If a pass you want isn't in the catalogue yet, tell me which one and I'll prioritise it.

If a price or a covered station looks wrong, the fastest path is the in-app Report tab on the planner — it ships me your itinerary input and the optimiser's output together, so I don't have to play detective. Otherwise email blitzlabs at gmail dot com. There's a person behind this website and that person is one man, so the reply may take a beat.

One caveat before you write in: shinkansen fares move around by a few hundred yen depending on the service tier (Nozomi / Mizuho /Hikari / Sakura / Kodama on the same route) and the season (regular / peak / off-peak). The optimiser assumes Nozomi for time-optimised routing and a peak season fare, so a small gap against what you see at the ticket window usually isn't a bug — it's the JR fare structure being itself. This only affects the reserved fare component of the price. Bigger discrepancies than that, definitely tell me. If you need exact-to-the-yen numbers for a specific date and time, Jorudan or NAVITIME are the canonical sources — Hanabi pulls from NAVITIME under the hood for its base fares too.

If your enquiry verges on the commercial (ads, affiliate links, etc.), I'm open to a conversation. Same address: blitzlabs at gmail dot com. Please put “commercial” in the subject so it doesn't sit in the bug-report queue.

Praise, complaints, ideas, all of it — drop me a line at blitzlabs at gmail dot com.