If you’re going to be climbing mountains in Japan and are looking for a GPS hiking app, I highly recommend YAMAP. It’s the most popular app for hikers in Japan, and you are guaranteed to find recent activity diaries and routes for even the smallest of local mountains.
Unfortunately YAMAP can be a little hard to navigate if you’re not fluent in Japanese, since it only has partial English translations. But I think with any UI, once you get used to where all of the buttons are it gets easier to use so I hope this guide can help you out.
⛰️ If you have any other YAMAP questions, feel free to reach out to me on my Yamap account or Instagram!
Finding your mountain, and using a model course
When you first open the app, you’ll land on the home page. There’s an activity feed (if you follow other YAMAP users), an online store and other useful things like recommmended routes.
You’ll notice 5 menu items down the bottom:
- ホーム: Home page / activity feed
- さがす: Search for mountains
- のぼる: Your planned hiking routes
- お知らせ: Notifications
- マイページ: Your profile page
For the moment we’ll be assuming that you already have a mountain in mind that you want to climb. So first let’s click on the second menu button from the left (さがす) to search for a mountain.
Once you type in the mountain you are looking for - this step seems to work in both English and Japanese - it will probably return a lot of results, since mountains aren’t that uniquely named in Japan. It’s useful if you know the elevation of the mountain or which prefecture it’s in, as this will help you narrow down your search.
Once you’ve picked the mountain, you’ll get to see the mountain on a map - if you know the general area of where the mountain is, this also helps you verify that you’ve found the right one!
From here, click the grey 山の情報 button on the bottom right, which will give you more detailed information about the mountain.
Now you will be on the official YAMAP page for that mountain. There’s quite a lot of information to see here but the two things that we’re interested in for the moment are:
- モデルコース: A list of model courses, created by YAMAP
- 関連する活動日記: The most recent activities logged by people who have climbed that mountain
Generally I have to do a bit of research outside of YAMAP first to figure out what trailhead I want to start at, so once I’ve done that I check the model courses to see if the one I want to do is listed there.
The recent activities section is also nice to get a sense of what the mountain is like, but we’ll come back to that bit later!
Let’s assume we want to create a hiking plan based on a model course.
Click on the one you want, and it will give you a example hiking plan with a time schedule of where you’ll hit what checkpoints.
To copy this course and create your own plan, click the big black button (このコースから登山計画を作成).
After you copy the model course, it will open a new draft plan with the map already open.
From this screen you can:
- See the course you’ll be taking. Your path is the bit that’s highlighted in yellow, and red is for alternative routes used by other courses.
- Change the hike start time (in the screenshot it’s set to 08:00am)
- In the bottom left there is a course time modifier to make your hiking plan longer or shorter e.g. If you have a 10 hour course and you set it to a modifier of 0.9x, the timing will be updated to finish in 9 hours.
Click the black save button (保存) in the bottom right once you’re done making changes to the map.
Once you’ve closed the map you can optionally fill in the title and memo fields, as well as a date field for when you will be doing your hike.
Once you’re done, click the save button (保存) in the top right.
Now you’re done with your plan! You’ll see a big black black button to download the course map (地図をダウンロード). If you click that, you’ll see a list of map download options pictured in the screenshot.
I always just choose the top LABO one, because it lets you rotate the map (the other ones are in fixed position).
You will most likely not have cell reception on the mountains, so I highly recommend doing this step before you forget to.
Before you set out for your hike, optionally you can also submit your hiking plan and personal information to YAMAP. This will get used if you happen to go missing while on the mountain. Since it requires a Japanese address, if are coming from overseas, you can put the hotel you will be staying at after your hike.
Going on your hike
When it comes time for your hike, you can find all your hiking plans via the middle のぼる menu item at the bottom of the app.
The green lozenge next to your plan indicates that you have the map already downloaded for your route.
Click the black 地図を見る button to view the map for your plan.
This map show you useful information like danger spots, toilet locations, as well as notes left by other YAMAP users.
Click the 活動を開始 start button in the bottom right when you are ready to start your hike.
While hiking, you can pause the activity using the 一時停止 button on the bottom left. You don’t need to do this on a dayhike as YAMAP automatically calculates your breaks for you, but it’s useful if you are doing an overnight hike - YAMAP will record longer stops as an “overnight stay” in your activity diary.
When you’re finished with your hike, hit the white 終了 button in the bottom right.
Viewing your completed hike
After your hike you can see the total time, distance, and elevation gain.
There’s also some additional stats around how much faster you were than the average course time, as well as how “hard” YAMAP deems this course to have been.
By default your activity diary will be set to private, and you have the option to edit it and add photos, etc. before making it public (only if you want to!)
Copying other people’s plans
When viewing information about a mountain, there’s also a section to view other people who had recently completed a hike at the same mountain (関連する活動日記).
While viewing someone’s activity diary, you can copy and paste their plan with the black この軌跡から登山計画を作成 button. After this, you go through the same steps that I’ve outlined above.
Viewing other people’s activity diaries is super useful if you want to double-check the conditions on the trail, or to see how popular the trail is. And sometimes the model courses don’t quite cover the route you want to take, so being able to copy other people’s activities is a feature I use quite a lot.
How I use YAMAP
I’m a big YAMAP fan, and along with the stuff I mentioned above, the other things that I like about the app are:
- The app can notify you if you’ve gone off the course trail
- You can follow other users and bookmark their activity diaries if you find mountains that look interesting
- The day before a hike, I can doublecheck the photos taken that day from the trail, which can be useful if you’re worried about snow or mud
- The app has a bit of gamification built-in with collectible badges depending on which mountains you climb
- You can have it set up to automatically notify LINE users as you hike, which is useful if you want to keep your loved ones in the loop on where you are on the hike
- There’s also a “people near you” feature which shows other YAMAP users you passed on your hike. More than once I’ve passed someone that I follow on YAMAP without realising it (one time, it was all the way up in Aomori!)
Although hiking can be a very solitary hobby at times, even when you hike alone the fact that you have a community of other hikers in your back pocket is kind of heart-warming so I’ve really enjoyed my time hiking in Japan, partly thanks to YAMAP. ♥️ I hope you can get some use out of it too!
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