Q.Is the Keinawa Expressway fully connected yet?

A ~120 km artery linking Kyoto, Nara and Wakayama

The Keinawa Expressway is a roughly 120 km trunk road running from Jōyō City in Kyoto, down through Nara Prefecture, to Wakayama City (a National Route 24 motorway, numbered E24). As part of the Kinki region's ring road, it links the hub cities of three prefectures and supports tourism by cutting travel time. About 70% of it is already open.

Two missing links remain in Nara

The two unfinished stretches are both inside Nara Prefecture: the Yamato-Kita Road near Nara City (Nara-kita IC to Kōriyama Shimotsumichi JCT, about 12.4 km) and part of the Yamato-Gose Road in Kashihara (Kashihara-kita IC to Kashihara-Takada IC, about 4.4 km). On the Kashihara side, the Osaka-bound ramp at Kashihara JCT is due to open in March 2026, but no date has yet been given for the full route.

Only in Nara — tunneling underground to protect the ruins

The toughest part is near Nara City. The Yamato-Kita Road was originally planned to tunnel directly beneath the World Heritage Heijō Palace Site, but concern that it would affect the wooden tablets and other buried heritage preserved by the groundwater led to a 2005 reroute, shifting the line about 1 km east of the palace site. Even so, the Nara-kita IC to Nara IC section (6.1 km) is a shield tunnel running below the archaeological layer, bored while monitoring groundwater so as not to disturb it. It is uniquely Nara: an expressway and 1,300-year-old ruins contending underground.

The last piece for a prefecture thin on expressways

Nara's north–south expressway capacity is concentrated almost entirely in the Keinawa, and its construction has long lagged. That is exactly why full opening would matter so much: easing congestion on National Route 24, improving access toward Kyoto and Wakayama, and reaching the prefecture's south — southern Yamato and Yoshino. Once complete, it could redraw a Nara tourism map that has been train-centric and concentrated in the north. Start with the datasets below to see Nara's access and visitor picture today.

Datasets behind this article

• インバウンド国土交通省

  FF-Data (Inbound Visitor Flow Data)

  Origin–destination tables showing how international visitors move between prefectures — from port of entry through each destination to departure — by nationality and transport mode. Quantifies how visitors flow into Nara via Osaka and Kyoto.

  💡Questions this data can answer

  From which prefectures do international visitors flow into Nara?

  XLSX

  Updated2026-08-23
• 来訪者数日本観光振興協会

  Digital Tourism Statistics (Monthly Visitors by Municipality)

  Monthly visitor estimates for every municipality in Japan derived from mobile location data, published as CSV. Faster than annual government statistics and granular enough to track Asuka, Kashihara and Sakurai individually.

  💡Questions this data can answer

  How do monthly visitor numbers trend for Asuka, Kashihara and Sakurai?

  CSV

  Updated2026-08-23
• 観光客数奈良県

  Nara Prefecture Tourist Dynamics Survey Report

  Annual survey reports on tourist movements in Nara Prefecture, covering visitor numbers by major tourist site, day-trip vs. overnight ratios, and foreign visitor counts. Reports are available from 2006 onward, enabling long-term time-series comparison.

  💡Questions this data can answer

  How has the annual number of tourists to Nara changed over time?

  PDFXLSX

  Updated2026-08-23
• RESAS経済産業省・内閣府

  RESAS Tourism Map

  The national big-data dashboard for regional economies. Its tourism maps show destination search rankings and de-facto population by prefecture and municipality — private-sector indicators that ordinary statistics can’t provide.

  💡Questions this data can answer

  Which destinations in Nara are searched for the most?

  HTML

  Updated2026-08-23

Related reading

• Getting around Nara: Kintetsu or JR?
• Is it true that almost everyone in Nara lives in the north, and the rest is mountains?