Mobile data in Hiroshima and on Miyajima

Whatever covers your Japan trip covers Hiroshima

We will not pad this out. Hiroshima is a well-covered mid-sized Japanese city and most visitors arrive on the shinkansen as one stop on a longer itinerary. The Peace Memorial Park, the A-Bomb Dome, the city centre and the tram network all have reliable 4G on any provider, with 5G in the centre and speeds averaging around 40 Mbps. Nothing here justifies buying a different plan from the one you would buy for Tokyo or Osaka.

There are two things worth reading before you go, and both are about leaving the city centre.

Miyajima, and the trail above the ropeway

The ferry over to Miyajima drops signal intermittently. The crossing is short enough that it does not matter, but you will see it happen.

On the island, the Itsukushima Shrine area and the main promenade — where the floating torii gate is — have good coverage. The mountain does not, consistently. The lower section of the Mt Misen trail has reasonable signal and the ropeway area is covered, but above the ropeway the summit trail gets sparse.

The practical problem is not the loss of data itself. It is that the trails are not well signed in English, and losing your map halfway up is a genuine nuisance on an island where the paths fork more than you expect. Download Miyajima as an offline map before you board the ferry, not after you arrive.

You may see advice to buy a particular eSIM for this hike on the grounds that it runs on NTT Docomo, which is generally credited with the widest mountain coverage in Japan. We would not act on that. No provider in our Japan data is sold as a Docomo plan — the listings that name a network at all name pairs or name SoftBank, and none of them has been confirmed against the provider's own site. The offline map is the fix, and it costs nothing.

The airport is genuinely a catch

Hiroshima Airport is small, and its SIM options are correspondingly narrow — there is a counter, but the selection is nothing like Narita, Haneda or Kansai. If Hiroshima is your first stop in Japan rather than a mid-trip one, that is a real reason to have an eSIM installed before you fly rather than plan to sort it out on landing.

In the city, Bic Camera in the Eko City building sells SIM cards with English-language assistance. A passport is required and scanned for any tourist SIM in Japan, so it is a counter transaction rather than an off-the-shelf purchase. Typical Japanese airport pricing is around $12.

What to buy

Airalo and Saily prices were read from their own sites on 13 August 2026 and Nomad's on 17 August 2026; the rest are indicative. An earlier version of this page said Japan's market stopped at 20GB. It does not — Nomad sells a 50GB month.

An eSIM Go row at $17 for 10GB used to sit in that table as the cheap option. eSIM Go sells wholesale to resellers and publishes no consumer price — checked on esim-go.com on 18 August 2026, where there is no basket, no checkout and no per-country page — so its rows cannot be bought or ever verified. See our eSIM Go page.

At 10GB for 30 days the providers sit between $16 and $19, which is not a spread worth deliberating over. The 20GB row is $1.20 a gigabyte; the 50GB row is $0.70, and it is the cheapest data we hold for Japan. "Moshi Moshi" is Airalo's retail name for its Japan product, not a network — it says nothing about coverage.

The country-wide comparison, including which providers name a host network at all, is on the Japan hub.