Booked: Japan, At Long Last

Hello from onboard the Tōkaidō Shinkansen!

After two and a half years of closing their borders due to the pandemic, Japan finally reopened to international travellers on unguided package tours as of this month, and appears poised to fully reopen without visa requirements in the near future.

Having secured my tourist e-visas by way of Japan Guide Agency a few weeks ago, I’ll be spending the next two weeks in Japan, at long last stepping foot back into one of my favourite destinations in the world.

The Trip

I last departed Tokyo on Qsuites in February 2020 during the rapidly unfolding outbreak in Asia, and have daydreamed about an eventual return ever since. 

But in thinking about my travel plans for the fall of 2022, Japan was initially nowhere near my radar. For most of 2022, the prospects of Japan reopening to tourism anytime this calendar year looked fairly bleak at best.

Indeed, for the longest time, I had planned to link up with the Prince of Travel team at Oktoberfest in Munich over this past weekend. This all changed, however, when the topic of Japan’s somewhat ambiguous easing of border controls came up on the Happy Hour for Prince of Travel members in August 2022.

With little fanfare, as it turned out, Japan’s borders looked set to be… kind of open.

The key? A payment to Japan Guide Agency – at the time of ¥20,000 ($180 CAD), then of ¥30,000 ($288 CAD), and now no longer offered – for processing your entry into the ERFS system, which was a necessary step before applying for a Japan tourist e-visa from September 7 onwards.

At the time, I had a feeling this was the kind of window that could slam shut at any moment. And while the ¥20,000 payment for ERFS processing looked to be no more than a blatant cash-grab, I considered it very much a price worth paying for a dream return to Japan at the earliest opportunity – crucially, before the crowds arrived during a full reopening! 

I said to my partner Jessy: “Listen, I’m not promising anything, but we might be going to Japan instead of Oktoberfest,” and got to work on submitting our e-visa applications.

To my utter joy and delight, the e-visas came through no more than 48 hours later. 

We’ll be spending two weeks across Tokyo and the Kansai region, rediscovering some of our old favourites after a long time away while also checking out a few new places we haven’t been before.

In particular, I’m…