If there is one thing military spouses just can’t get enough of, it’s acronyms. Cricket chirp…cricket chirp — OK, OK, we kid. Acronymns are the worst. But, if you’re OCONUS in Japan, you get some bonus, all-caps wonders in addition to the starter set: PCS, BAH, DET, and COLA. When you muster up the courage to conquer the Japanese local train system, you’re going to encounter the acronyms JR and ICOCA (along with a whole mess of colored train routes and intimidating ticketing kiosks).
JR stands for Japan Railway (this is the train system shuttling you all over the country on the cheap), and ICOCA stands for IC Operating Card. IC stands for — oh, who cares?
Mastering the acronyms is great and all, but in order to really get Japanese local train travel, we need our friends from Live Iwakuni to walk us through it. Even if you’ve never been a public-transit person, Live Iwakuni will have you saying, “‘Shut the front door.’ I can totally do that.”
Follow them from absolute point A — just getting to the local train station, through purchasing the ICOCA, and finding the right platform. They make it look easy, and with their help, we’re going to look like we know what we’re doing the next time we step into a Japanese train station.
Photo Credits: Unsplash | Pixabay
