Car rental recommendation - Kanazawa
 

I think we're going to bite the bullet and rent a car in Kanazawa to take an overnight trip to the Noto Peninsula, dropping off the next day Toyama, before heading to Takayama.

Does anyone have any experience with rental car companies in that area? I looked at Japan Experience and was particularly excited to see that we can reserve a car with an English-speaking GPS. Are there any other companies that you've used - and had a good experience with?

Thanks in advance.

I've rented from J-Net who are the other side of the main road in front of the Kanazawa train station. Elsewhere in Japan I've used Nissan, Nippon, Budget, JR Eki-ren...they're all OK and they all cost about the same.

I always arrange my rentals through tocoo: http://www2.tocoo.jp/en . They have a functional English web site and send the renting agency a bilingual script that's useful if your Japanese isn't too hot.

One way rentals are expensive. There's no discount for multi-day rentals. And driving in Japan is very slow (50 kph speed limits almost everywhere). So I usually rent for just one or two days for local sightseeing and take the train between cities. You'll need to return the car with the tank full ("mantan ni sh!te kudasai").

The so-called English GPS will have only the top-level of its menus and instructions in English. If you drill down (e.g., to search for your destination by name), you'll need to do it (and enter the name) in Japanese. In fact, the very top-level button usually says "Menu" in katakana, so you'll need to memorize this. If you can remember the Japanese for left ("hidari") and right ("migi") then a Japanese GPS isn't much less convenient than an English one. Get a car with an English one if you can, but be prepared for some challenges, and don't despair if they have only Japanese ones.

The simplest way to use a English/Japanese GPS is to use the phone number of your destination as the key. Actual lat/long coordinates are usually not supported.

I did more or less the same thing only I took the bus to Noto area and either taxi or local bus from there to what I wanted to see and do. Less freedom of course but also less hassle for me.

We rented from JR in Hakata, NOT Kanazawa, via ToCoo. "English" as someotherguy says, means the top menu is set to English prior by the rental company. But they also give us some printed English notes to identify which buttons to press further in the menus (which I don't need as being Chinese, I can read plenty of characters).

Again, the key in using the GPS is to know all the phone numbers of the business and hotels and restaurants you are likely to drive to.

Yes, what someotherguy and rkkwan said, our "English" satnav only had some aspects translated to English, and input of an address was in Japanese, but we made sure we had phone numbers for every place we wanted to visit, in advance, or got reception to obtain them for us, and entered our destinations that way, never had any problems doing that.

We loved the 50 kph limit for driving around in Kyushu, allowed us to enjoy the views much more.

Not driven in Kanazawa area myself.