[kibibyte]

Most credit cards can do foreign transactions, and a number of travelers have cards that can do those transactions with no fees at fairly competitive exchange rates. In the past, most of those were limited to cards with annual fees, but it's easier now to get such cards with no fees (e.g. Apple Card). Personally, I purchased the pass online from JR in JPY with a US Visa card, which converted it to a USD price that came out ahead of all the authorized resellers that sold the pass in USD.

[wodenokoto]

But isn’t it a requirement that you are a tourist (as in, you have a 90day visa exemption or a tourist visa in your passport)? And if you are a tourist to Japan it is very unlikely that your income is denominated in yen, and therefore the cost in yen is not as relevant as the cost in USD or yuan. So the price increase should be considered against the yen depreciation.

I couldn’t buy one when I was an exchange student in Japan, due to my visa status (granted, that was over a decade ago …) but sibling comments seems to indicate maybe I could today.

It also sounds like you are making money in USD and not yen, so the price of the pass in yen is not important to you, but the price in USD.

[kibibyte]

Ah, I think we're talking about different things. I think you are talking about the overall affordability of the JR pass (and Japan tourism in general) to someone whose income is in USD, whereas I was talking about how much more expensive the JR pass is relative to the cost of train tickets (also denominated in JPY, and therefore also cheaper to people using USD), and it being possible to pay the JPY price of the pass directly without making income in JPY, despite all the authorized resellers pricing the pass in the currency of their target markets.

To give a further clarifying example, if I were planning to take the shinkansen round-trip between Tokyo and Osaka, the price is JPY 28000. Back when the JPY was stronger, the price of the 7-day pass was JPY 29650, so the pass would have been a no-brainer. Today, even though the 7-day pass costs JPY 50000, the currency is much weaker, so the USD price has increased only a little bit. However, the price of that train trip in JPY has not changed much, if at all. Therefore, because JPY 28000 (USD 184) is significantly less than JPY 50000 (USD 330), it makes no sense at all to buy the pass today if this is the only JR trip I'm planning to make.

That said, the pass is still only for those with a tourist visa (15-90 days for sightseeing), or for Japanese citizens who have lived abroad for at least 10 years.