Navigating Japan with the Garmin Fenix 7X – A Runner’s Experience

Last week I came back from a family trip in Japan, a very nice experience – being there for the second time, I wasn’t disappointed at any moment and I thoroughly enjoyed my son’s composed excitement while noticing the different environment and society.

For a regular Strava user (not a premium one though), there is a saying that “if it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen”, so naturally I carved a bit of morning time for some short runs in Kyoto and Tokyo. When deciding on the watch to wear, even though we went from one hotel to another and access to charging was not a problem, I decided for the Garmin Fenix 7X against the Apple Watch Ultra (or Polar Vantage V2) just to enjoy the longer battery life and the maps support. Having offline maps in Japan (for an European) is very useful, since I’m not familiar with the kanji/kana characters and without directions your life can become very intense (also not a lot of people are speaking English as much, though I’m under the impression they understand English alright).

But having offline maps is not always enough, I mean .. look above, the map with streets names and everything is not easy to use, they may help you to get back to your starting point but it requires more attention paid to the watch maps. Luckily, there is the course creation on Garmin (on the watch and on the mobile app, you can do it on the web version as well if you have access to a computer) which comes handy as you only need to define your course length (as an orientative value) and Garmin will generate a course for you, with turn-by-turn instructions. You can find some instructions here (link1 and link2) on how to create courses on the web interface, but for simplicity, you can even use the watch itself by accessing the menu Activity-Run-Navigate-Round-Trip Course and you’re being offered with several alternatives created on the spot, starting from the point you’re at that moment.

This capability to create courses easily (even directly on your watch) and follow them creates a safe environment to experiment even when the terrain is less known or familiar. For additional safety, you may want to save the start point as a distinctive location to be able to navigate to that point regardless of your course. If your Fenix firmware decides to give up and crushes the navigation during the course execution, you still have the initial point to navigate to.

Sure, it doesn’t say much about the safety of the neighbourhoods you’re about to cross, but you may assume that if the heatmap popularity works fine, not a lot of people had troubles following those paths. (Depending on you risk adversity, you may use some online queries to have a better understanding of what your course will cross in terms of neighbourhoods)

In Europe, I used successfully the Garmin Explore app as a companion for the watch, selecting some destination (searching the map) and using the navigation on the watch to guide me there. In Japan, I wasn’t actually able to do that because the map most probably had also the POI (point of interest) defined using Japanese characters so any attempt to find something using the Latin charset was unsuccessful – it’s not a failure of the combo Garmin Explore – Fenix but rather a limitation of the encoding of the POIs in the downloaded map. Since I didn’t face this situation in Europe, I wasn’t able to do much there with Explore, but also I didn’t try hard to fix it – Google Maps were working fine with the rented WiFi SIM router.

For those interested in understanding the GPS accuracy in Tokyo, navigating in an area with tall buildings, the results for the F7X were not that great .. but I wasn’t focusing on that and I didn’t have any other devices with me to compare with.

Other comments .. I tried the Jet Lag Adviser, it was nice, but I felt in only played the common sense tricks, nothing spectacular [also I wasn’t able to follow completely the guidelines, to be fair]. You may find more details about the feature here.