We Left Our Stroller at Home in Seoul. Here’s How We Survived Nagoya with a Toddler.
It seemed like a reasonable decision at the time.
We were already packing for two adults and a 30-month-old, which means the luggage situation was already operating at maximum capacity before a stroller entered the equation. Our portable one folds down to almost nothing, technically. But technically and actually are different things when you’re navigating airport check-in at 6am with a toddler who has decided today is the day she will not use her legs.
We left the stroller at home. We arrived in Nagoya. And by the afternoon of day one, my arms were finished.
The thing nobody warns you about toddlers in unfamiliar places is that they will not walk. They will look at an entirely walkable distance and go completely boneless. New environments are stimulating and overwhelming and wonderful and exhausting for small people, and when they hit a wall, they hit it fast. Our daughter hit hers somewhere between the hotel lobby and lunch.
That evening, I went looking for stroller rental options in Nagoya. I found Babycal.
What Is Babycal?
Babycal is a stroller rental service available at locations across Japan — over 265 of them nationwide. The Nagoya location at Sakae Station launched in November 2025, which meant the stroller we eventually rented looked almost new. Clean, well-maintained, smooth to push. The timing worked in our favor.
You can use a rented stroller anywhere — not just inside the rental facility — and return it to the same location when you’re done. Rentals go by the hour, with a maximum period of seven days. No membership fee, and the service is available to international visitors.
Pricing works out to roughly 250–300 yen per hour. For our two-day rental, the total came to approximately 4,000 yen — around 36,000 KRW. Given how much easier it made the rest of the trip, I’d pay it again without hesitation.
How to Register (Even Without Japanese)
The Babycal website offers language options including English, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese — so you don’t need to navigate Japanese to get set up. Google Chrome’s auto-translate handles anything that isn’t covered.
Registration is straightforward:
- Create an account with your email address
- Enter your personal information
- Add your child’s details
- Register a payment card
That’s it. Once your card is on file, you’re ready to book.
I’d recommend doing this before you leave home — not because it’s complicated, but because it’s one less thing to figure out when you’re already jet-lagged and operating on toddler time.
Picking Up the Stroller at Sakae Station
The Babycal location at Sakae Station is between Exit 6 and Exit 7, and it’s unmanned — which I was slightly nervous about before we arrived, and then not at all once we were standing there.
The process:
- Reserve through the website and receive a QR code by email
- Go to the rental machine at the location
- Scan the QR code, select your stroller, take it out
We were done in under five minutes. No Japanese required. At our location, the available option was a Combi stroller — three units on site when we checked, which felt reassuring for a service that had only recently launched in the city.
What the Stroller Was Actually Like
Solid. Noticeably clean — the near-new quality of a service that hadn’t been running long. It rolled well, felt stable, and our daughter sat in it comfortably for a full day of sightseeing.
There’s a particular relief that comes with having a stroller in a city you don’t know. You stop calculating distances in terms of how long you can carry a child. You stop rationing energy. You just go places. That shift is hard to quantify, but it made the trip feel genuinely different.
Returning It
Even easier than picking it up.
Return the stroller to the original location, connect the USB cable attached to the stroller to the machine, and the system handles the rest. Rental time is calculated automatically, payment goes to your registered card, and a receipt lands in your email.
Clean, frictionless, exactly what you want at the end of a day out with a toddler.
Would We Use Babycal Again?
Without question.
If we’re back in Japan and there’s a Babycal location near where we’re staying, it’s going on the list before we book accommodation. The flexibility of hourly rental, the convenience of not adding a stroller to checked luggage, and the quality of what we actually got — it all added up to something that made a real difference to how the trip felt.
A few things worth knowing before you go:
Check availability before your trip — popular locations may have limited strollers, and it’s worth confirming what types are available at your specific site. Book in advance, especially around holidays. Bring a baby carrier as a backup for crowded areas or stations without elevators. And set up your Babycal account while you still have reliable wifi at home.
The trip to Nagoya was wonderful. Our daughter loved it. My arms recovered eventually.
Have you used a stroller rental service while traveling in Japan? I’d love to know which one and how it went.
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