What It's Like To Be Traveling To Japan Today

Above, a geisha photoshoot in Asakusa, Tokyo near Senso-ji temple. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Foreign tourists are now allowed into Japan. But there is a process for doing so.

Traveller.com has posted an article on what it's like to be traveling in Japan today. It is from an Australian perspective, which I find interesting to read.

They begin with:

It's not ideal to spend a week in Japan with a Cher song stuck in your head. Still, these last seven days I've been walking around Kyoto, around Hamamatsu, and around Tokyo humming the same chorus to myself: "If I could turn back time…"

Because being in Japan right now is like turning back time. Remember Australia about a year ago? Remember the way we thought about COVID-19 back then, the way we treated it, the way we planned our lives and our lifestyles around it? That's Japan, now.

Getting into Japan as a foreign tourist is very reminiscent of getting into Australia back in December last year. Then, Australia had the DPD, the dreaded, buggy app that every prospective entrant into the country had to deal with, to register all of their personal details and upload their vaccination certificate and scan their passport and start the whole thing afresh for every trip.

Now, Japan has Japan Web, a less-buggy website that performs essentially the same function, and is equally laborious – this time with the extra spice of cross-cultural confusion. You get there, in the end. But it's a process.

To read more, go here.