Do I need a visa to travel to Japan? (Or anywhere else)

Before you start booking your tickets it’s a good idea to check the necessities required to even get in the country.
First off, the Visa. (No, not the credit card, the thing which allows you in to the country )

So the question is: Do I need a visa to travel to Japan?

Whether you need a visa or not is dependent upon a few factors. Some of these are:

• The length of your stay. Some countries requires a “tourist visa” if you are staying up to 3 months in the country while some don’t require any visa at all when your visit is below a certain amount of days.
• The country you’re from. This is one of the reasons that it’s important to check whether citizens from your country are required to apply for a visa or not. Just because your friend in another country didn’t need to apply for a visa doesn’t mean you don’t have to in your country.
• Why you are entering the country. If you are intending to go on a vacation you’ll almost certainly need a tourist visa or no visa at all. If you are on a business trip you’ll need a business visa and so forth.

How do I check if I need to apply for a visa to enter Japan?

IATA

A great site with information on visas, health information and passports is the IATA Travel Center website. This site has some good information and is easy to use. You start out by entering all the details for the trip you’re planning. After you’ve entered everything accordingly, you will be shown a summary of details on visa, health and passport information.

What is great with this site is that it lets you put in a possible transit country to see if you need a visa there. For example, When going on this Japan trip in April we will be transiting via Peking, China. By entering all the details at the IATA website it showed me that I may not stay more than 24 hours in China unless I want to apply for a visa.

Contacting the Japanese embassy in your country

This is by far the best way to be absolutely sure that the Visa won’t be an issue.
For example, I live in Sweden, so I started off by going to google and typing in “Japanese Embassy Sweden”. This brought me to this page.
Next step is to find the Visa information page, which is usually in the main menu of the site. Mine said Visa/Visum, so it was very easy to find.
There is was greeted with a telephone number to call if I wanted to but also general visa information for Japan.

Generally, a national of a foreign country who wishes to enter Japan must first obtain a visa. Under the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act of Japan, it is stipulated that any foreigner wishing to enter or land in Japan must possess a valid passport and a visa obtained from an embassy or consulate. However, travelers from certain countries (including Swedish citizens) may be eligible to visit Japan without a visa under visa exemption arrangements.   – http://www.se.emb-japan.go.jp/visa.htm

I then went to the visa exemption page linked in the quote where I found out that I will not need any visa if my stay is under 90 days.
Important: If your country is free from visa obligations under a certain period of days, you MUST have a return ticket to your home country so that they can confirm the length of your stay. Otherwise you might not be allowed to enter the country.

That’s about it for this time, I hope you enjoyed the information

And if you did, please pass it through to others by sharing it below.

Cheers!

/Jonas

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