A Japan trip is hardly ever one city. It is four nights in Tokyo, one in the mountains, four in Kyoto, three in Osaka, and a flight home from an airport you never landed at. The visa centre wants that whole shape written down before anybody decides anything: every night accounted for, every hotel named and reachable. The files that come back with questions are rarely the ones with a thin reason to travel. They are the ones where twelve nights of flights are covered by eleven nights of beds.
Your visa arrives on a phone screen, and it will not print
Since 01-04-2024 an Indian tourist applicant gets no sticker in the passport. The Embassy of Japan in India puts it plainly: applicants “have to submit applications to the Visa Application Centers (VFS Global) as before but receive a visa issued in electronic form instead of a visa sticker”. MOFA lists India in the group that applies through an accredited agency rather than the online portal, so electronic describes what you receive, not how you apply. The counter and the queue have not moved.
What did change is the morning of the flight. eVISA holders “have to show ‘visa issuance notice’ on a mobile device at the airport (internet access is needed!). In the form of PDF, photo, screenshot or printed copy will not be accepted.” A printout of your own visa is not your visa. The agent has to watch it load, which makes a flat battery at the terminal a missed flight rather than a delay.
Two lines on the Delhi list are documents we prepare
The VFS Japan Visa Application Centre list for a temporary visitor visa for tourism, filed without a guarantor, is short. Two items on it describe travel: a “Document to show the flight/cruise schedule to/from Japan”, and an “Itinerary in Japan (including hotel information, contact information while in Japan)”. The rest is you — passport with more than two blank pages, old passports as well, the form, a recent photograph, and your latest income tax return or six months of bank statements.
Named on the checklist
The flight schedule into and out of Japan, and an itinerary carrying hotel and contact details. Both are documents we issue.Absent from it
Travel insurance. It sits on no Japanese tourist checklist, and we will not imply otherwise to sell a policy.One footnote: documents submitted are not returned, the passport excepted.
Twelve nights need twelve lines
“Itinerary” is carrying weight there. The version of the list VFS uses for Indian students says the quiet part outright — hotel booking for each day. A Japan itinerary is a ledger: the date, where you sleep, how somebody reaches you there. A first trip moves three or four times, and the Shinkansen makes moving so painless that travellers forget which side of midnight the journey falls on.
- Arrive HNDTokyo4 nights booked
- Travel dayChecked out of Tokyo, not checked in anywhere else.
- Kyoto4 nights booked
- Depart KIXOsaka3 nights booked
The flight side has the same geometry. The checklist asks for the schedule to and fromJapan, so an open-jaw trip — in at Haneda or Narita, out of Kansai once you have worked down to Kyoto and Osaka — is an ordinary thing to file. What it cannot do is argue with the ledger: if the reservation flies you home from Osaka on the 21st, the last accommodation line cannot be a Tokyo address dated the 20th. Every hotel line carries a phone number, too — that is what the checklist means by contact information in Japan.
Three months to lodge it. Three months to use it.
Japan runs two three-month clocks, and they are not the same clock. The Embassy accepts applications from three months before your travel date. MOFA governs the other end: “The period of validity of the single-entry visa is three months”, that validity cannot be extended, and the visa becomes invalid the moment you apply for landing or on its expiry date, whichever is earlier. File in March for a trip in July and the visa is dead before you board.
The examination sits between them. Five working days from the day after acceptance is the published standard, but MOFA warns it can run “from a couple of weeks to several months” where an interview or extra documents are called for, and the Embassy states that processing “cannot be expedited or prioritized according to the schedule of applicants”. Nobody moves your file up because your leave is approved.
A refusal costs six months, and comes with no explanation
MOFA publishes the circumstances in which an application will not even be accepted. The fourth: your earlier application “to visit Japan for a specific purpose was rejected and you reapply to visit Japan for the same purpose within six months from the rejection”. Six months, after a decision you cannot appeal and will never have explained — the Ministry declines to give reasons, citing the exclusion of immigration decisions from the Administrative Procedure Act.
Set that against the second of the four criteria of visa issuance: “All submitted documents are authentic, completed and satisfactory.”
Insurance is on no checklist. Buy it anyway, and buy the right sort.
The Consulate-General of Japan in Mumbai publishes a one-page notice headed “Recommendation for a travel insurance”. Recommendation is the operative word: no counter will ask for a certificate. What the notice does is tell you what to look for — cover large enough for treatment, because “medical expenses can be very high in Japan”, and a policy carrying “travel support for hospital referrals, medical interpretation, and cashless medical service”.
Those three matter where the desk of a small clinic may hold no English at all. The notice adds a line worth reading twice if anyone travelling is pregnant: perinatal care is not covered by travel insurance and can be expensive. Test any policy against that short list — ours included, before you pay.
The two Indian routes that ask for none of this
Check first whether Japan is going to ask you for these documents at all.
The first exit is the multiple-entry visa for nationals of India: ninety days a visit, five years of validity. MOFA’s procedure sheet gives five ways in, three of which turn on history rather than money — two or more visits to Japan in the last three years, one visit plus the means to pay, or a visit to Japan alongside travel to G7 countries. Then read what those categories ask for. Form, passport, old passports showing the stamps, a tax return. No flight schedule. No hotels. The sheet does warn that the mission “may issue a single entry visa after visa examination”, so keep the itinerary ready anyway.
The second is the student category, open to Indian students and graduates of institutions on the University Grants Commission and Ministry lists. It is a shorter set: confirmed travel booking, hotel booking for each day, proof of student status. The income tax return falls away. The two bookings do not.
Nobody at Haneda owes you an entry
MOFA is direct about it: a visa is “only one of the requirements for a landing permission application at the port of entry of Japan and does not guarantee that the holder of the visa will be able to enter Japan”. The inspector weighs your purpose and planned length of stay against what you say at the desk, so keep the itinerary and the bookings openable on the phone already carrying your issuance notice.
What we send lives inside the carrier’s reservation system, not a document dressed up as one.
We do not file your application and we make no claim about how the Embassy will read it.