HAVE boosters, will travel.
For the Japanese, that’s the only way they will be able to vacation in the Philippines without being required to quarantine when they arrive home.
In an interview with select reporters on Friday, Tomohiro Kaneko, vice commissioner of the Japan Tourism Agency (JTA) said, “For Japanese, outbound travel is relatively easy. If you have received [Covid] boosters, you don’t have to self-quarantine,” upon returning to Japan. “So people are slowly getting back to travel,” he said.
He added, “I believe Japanese tourists will come back soon to your country,” following the visit of Tourism Secretary Bernadette Romulo Puyat last month in Tokyo. JTA is the counterpart of the Philippines’s Department of Tourism.
However, official data indicated that less than 50 percent of Japanese citizens have received boosters. Also, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida recently said Japan is not yet considering reopening to leisure tourists, even as a number of Asian countries such as the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, have already lifted inbound travel restrictions.
The Philippines has the easiest inbound travel protocols in Southeast Asia, allowing fully vaccinated tourists and their unvaccinated children to enter since February 10. Manila has also scrapped quarantine requirements in favor of pre-departure testing from the country of origin, using either RT-PCR or laboratory-based antigen tests.
In 2019, prior to the pandemic, the country received 682,788 tourists from Japan. Since the country’s reopening to international leisure travelers, there were over 6,000 visitors from Japan from February 10 to April 18, 2022.
No solution for Pinoys’ expired visas
Kaneko said at the moment, there are still no immediate plans to allow leisure travelers. According to local travel agents, prior to the pandemic in 2019, Japan is among the popular destinations for Filipinos.
Since the pandemic, however, tourist visas for Japan of many Filipinos have since expired, with no clarity if these will be honored again. For Haneko, he said Filipinos and other would-be tourists may have to reapply for visitor visas.
“For now we are not issuing visas for Filipino [tourists], only for business, working, and study,” he said. There is still no timeline when tourist visas would be issued again, but he said, he hoped by September, his government would reopen to leisure travelers in time for Tourism Expo Japan. “We are hoping we will receive so many foreign visitors.”
He explained that Covid-19 infections are currently high in Japan, at some 40,000 cases, “higher than the Philippines. So the government is still very cautious about the domestic situation. So the tourists are not allowed to obtain visas at this point in time. Of course, gradually, we will lift our borders and hopefully soon, we will be able to [issue visitor’s visas].”
Meanwhile, Haneko said his agency is supporting moves to create a digital health pass that will contain all the vaccination information of travelers. “From our perspective, the Japan Tourism Agency, we will ask the Ministry of Health, which is responsible for the quarantine system, to adopt a standard, which is interoperable with other countries’ standard like the EU Green Pass, or like Asean, which is now harmonizing health standards. Harmonization is the key.”
At a news conference, Japan encouraged participants to attend the Tourism Expo Japan (TEJ) scheduled from September 22 to 25 at the Tokyo Big Sight. In the last TEJ at said convention center in 2018, the event attracted 207,352 visitors, with 136 countries and regions, as well as 1,441 participating.
Image credits: Bernard Testa