Japan travel tips

Japan travel health

Required is not recommended: the first is what the border asks about, the second is what a clinic would suggest. Both, for Japan, then the number to dial and what care costs a visitor. Applies to every guide in Japan: Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Hiroshima, Nara, Hakone and 5 more.

Required to enter

Nothing. No vaccination certificate is asked for at the border.

Recommended

  • Routine vaccinations up to date
  • Japanese encephalitis only for long rural stays in summer

Emergency number

119 for fire and ambulance, 110 for police

Care for visitors

Good and affordable

Superb, and ambulances are free. Treatment is not: visitors pay in full up front, and hospitals routinely refuse cards, so carry cash and real insurance. Finding English-speaking staff outside major cities is the harder problem — the JNTO medical directory is worth bookmarking before you go.

The general rules — clinic timing, water, mosquitoes, insurance — are in travel health tips.

The guides in Japan

people gathered outside buildings and vehiclesTokyoJapanWhere ancient tradition meets neon-lit futurepagoda surrounded by treesKyotoJapanA thousand temples and the old soul of JapanThe illuminated billboards of Dotonbori in Osaka, including the Glico running manOsakaJapanJapan's kitchen, and the one city where people talk to strangersThe orange Itsukushima Shrine torii gate standing in the water at Hatsukaichi, JapanHiroshimaJapanA city rebuilt around the one building it left standing, and a floating gate an hour awayDeer grazing on pavement with people in backgroundNaraJapanThe first permanent capital, with the biggest bronze Buddha in the world and twelve hundred deer that bow for a biscuitMount Fuji rising above a dark lake at night in Fujinomiya, JapanHakoneJapanHot springs in a volcanic caldera, with Fuji across the lake on the mornings it shows itselfvehicles on roadSapporoJapanDeep snow, beer brewed since 1876, and the best powder skiing in the world an hour awaywhite houseKanazawaJapanA garden three hundred years in the making, gold leaf on everything, and a samurai district that survived the warFuruzamami Beach in Zamami Island (Okinawa) in Japan.OkinawaJapanA subtropical chain with its own kingdom, its own language and the clearest water in Japana narrow street in an asian city with snow on the groundTakayamaJapanA merchant town of dark wood in the Japanese Alps, an hour from thatched villages under deep snowA building that has a lot of carvings on itNikkoJapanA shogun’s mausoleum buried in cedar forest, with waterfalls and a marshland plateau above it