The Water Taxi Between USJ and Kaiyukan Costs 900 Yen, the Photo Board Is Free
Captain Line runs a 10 minute ferry between Universal Studios Japan's port and Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan. Real fares, and what's free while you wait.
Published on 3 min read
On this page
We’ve already written up what Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan costs. What we hadn’t covered is how we got there that April morning: not a train, not a taxi, but a 10 minute ferry ride straight across the water from Universal City Port, right by USJ, to Kaiyukan’s own pier.
What the ferry costs
Captain Line runs that exact route, Universal City Port to Kaiyukan’s West Pier, with 1 to 2 departures an hour. A one-way adult ticket runs 900 to 1,100 yen depending on where you book it, with a round trip closer to 1,700 yen. Kids 7 to 12 ride for about half that, and children 3 to 6 cheaper again. The boat itself has an air-conditioned lower floor with sofa seating and an open-air deck up top for the harbor view, and it takes strollers and wheelchairs without issue.
Kaiyukan to USJ ferry (Captain Line)
These are affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you book through them, at no extra cost to you. See our legal notice.
Klook code: ADAMANDLINDSKLOOK
Click through to Klook below, then enter code ADAMANDLINDSKLOOK at checkout. This is a real affiliate code, we may earn a commission on the booking too, at no extra cost to you. See our legal notice.
10% off, New Klook user
$50 minimum spend, capped at $50 off, one time use. Valid through December 31, 2026.
3% off, Existing Klook user
$50 minimum spend, capped at $50 off, up to three uses. Valid through December 31, 2026.
1% off, Selected things to do and mobility, including teamLab Planets TOKYO, teamLab Borderless, teamLab Biovortex Kyoto, Japan Shinkansen tickets, SHIBUYA SKY, Warner Bros. Studio Tour Tokyo, and Osaka Amazing Pass
No stated minimum spend for this tier. Valid through December 31, 2026.
50% off, eSIM, new eSIM customers only
No minimum spend, capped at $1.50 saved, one time use. Valid through December 31, 2026.
The land route, for comparison
Walking or taking a train and bus between USJ and Kaiyukan covers the same real distance but means backtracking inland around the water, a longer trip in practice than the straight 10 minute line a boat can take across it. We’d done the Osaka subway and plenty of walking on other days of the trip, so paying a little more for the ferry on this one wasn’t about saving money, it was about not spending half an hour of a packed day getting between two waterfront attractions that sit a few hundred meters apart by water and considerably further by road.
What’s free at the dock
Waiting at the terminal cost nothing extra: a painted face-cutout board next to the dock, a ship’s captain and a cartoon dolphin with holes cut for faces, the kind of free photo op that shows up at ferry terminals all over Japan and gets used anyway every single time.
A cruise ship we weren’t expecting
Looking out from the terminal that morning, a genuine surprise: an international cruise ship, the Celebrity Millennium, docked across the water with Osaka’s Tempozan Ferris Wheel rising behind it. Osaka’s passenger cruise terminal at Tempozan Wharf had only just reopened in a newly expanded form in 2024, roughly twice the size of the old building, built specifically to handle larger international ships calling at the port than the previous terminal could manage. Seeing one of those ships parked a few hundred meters from a Universal Studios Japan ferry stop, in the same frame as a Ferris wheel and an aquarium most visitors come for, was not something we’d planned around or expected to find on a day built entirely around theme park rides and fish tanks.
Was it worth it
Completely, and mostly because it turned a transit leg into part of the day instead of dead time between two paid attractions. Kaiyukan’s own admission is the real cost of that morning, the ferry is a 900 to 1,100 yen add-on on top of it, cheaper and more interesting than a taxi across the same stretch of Osaka Bay, with a free photo board and an unplanned cruise ship sighting thrown in for the wait. With three kids who’d already done a morning of walking and a subway ride earlier in the trip, ten minutes on an open-air deck watching the harbor go by did more to reset everyone’s patience than the same ten minutes stuck in traffic would have, and that’s worth factoring in alongside the yen cost when a water route and a land route cover the same ground.
