How to Get to Motorland Mikawa or YZ Circuit East Without a Car (2026)

Motorland Mikawa (Aichi) can be reached without a car from Monday to Saturday: a ¥400 bus from Shinshiro Station to Tsukude Takasato, then a ¥200 booked demand bus to the gate, ¥600 in all. YZ Circuit East (Gifu) has no public transport to its gate on any day, so the last leg from JR Mizunami Station is a car. Every time and fare below was checked on the official pages on 21 October 2026.

Our Motorland Mikawa guide and YZ Circuit East guide cover fees, slots and booking. This page answers one question only: how a visitor with no car gets from Nagoya or Toyohashi to the gate, and back.

Where are the two circuits, exactly?

They are often lumped together as “Nagoya tracks”. They are in different prefectures and in opposite directions from the city.

Neither circuit mentions trains or buses. So both plans are built from city and bus-company timetables.

How do you reach Motorland Mikawa by bus?

The chain has three links: get to Shinshiro, ride the S-Bus Tsukude Line up the hill, then book the Tsukude Ashigaru demand bus for the last stretch. Shinshiro City’s page for that demand bus says anyone can use it if they book ahead, and that inside the Tsukude district it picks up and drops off anywhere, not only at stops. Mikawa’s drift running happens only in the 10:00, 12:00 and 14:00 hours, so the morning bus matters.

The JR times come from the connection table printed on Toyotetsu’s own Tsukude Line timetable. The 07:27 and 18:22 buses run every day. IC cards are accepted on the Tsukude Line.

From Nagoya there is also a direct bus. Toyotetsu’s highway bus leaves Fujigaoka Station in Nagoya at 09:15 and reaches Kamehime-dori, by Shinshiro Station, at 10:36, for ¥1,000 one way or ¥2,000 return. Three run daily, weekends included. That only gets you onto the 12:07 Tsukude bus, arriving Takasato at 12:43, which leaves the 14:00 drift hour. The timetable revised on 1 October 2026 moved the last bus back to 16:08 from Kamehime-dori, and the 15:37 bus off the hill reaches Shinshiro at 16:12. You miss it by minutes, so plan to return by JR via Toyohashi.

Can you get to YZ Circuit East without a car?

You can get close, then you stop. JR Mizunami Station is about 55 minutes from Nagoya on the Chuo Line, according to Mizunami City, and on Saturdays and holidays the first train from Nagoya bound for Mizunami leaves at 05:58. YZ opens its gate at 08:00 and runs from 09:00, with the drift-friendly mixed sessions starting at 10:00 (2G).

After the station, every public option fails for a different reason.

That is primary-source confirmation, not a gap in our research: the city’s own timetable lists every stop on the line, and the hamlet in YZ’s address is not one of them. Rail fares on both routes sit inside JR Central’s interactive search rather than on a published table, so we leave them as TBC instead of guessing.

Where does the plan actually break?

Trains are the easy part. The stuck step is the last few kilometres. At Mikawa it is a Japanese phone call to book a demand bus that does not run on Sundays. At YZ there is no public leg at all, and the first useful train lands you at Mizunami with nothing scheduled to the gate before the 10:00 session.

Which day and base should you choose?

For Mikawa, choose a Saturday and sleep in Toyohashi or Shinshiro. That way the 06:21 train and 07:27 bus are a normal morning, and the 18:22 last bus gives you hours of margin after running ends. Coming from Nagoya the same morning only works for the 14:00 hour.

For YZ, the base is Nagoya or Mizunami, but the deciding question is who drives the last leg. Settle that first.

If neither works for your trip, our guide to drifting in Tokai compares every venue near Nagoya, and the track directory lists access notes for each circuit in Japan.