The money bit you sort before you fly.
Almost none of this is difficult. It is a short list of small jobs that are easy at your kitchen table and genuinely annoying from a hotel room eight time zones away. Here is what actually has a deadline, in the order the deadlines arrive, plus the handful of Japan costs that changed in 2026.
We travelled in September 2025, which is before every change in section V. That part is researched rather than lived, and we have said where the official detail was still missing. Reviewed August 2026.
Six jobs, and when to do them.
Most Japan money advice is about what to do once you are there. This is the other half, and it is shorter than you would think. If you only read one section, read this one.
Buy the travel insurance
The only item here with a deadline you cannot move. Cancellation cover starts when you buy the policy, not when you fly, so a policy bought the week before departure has quietly skipped the months when most cancellations actually happen.
Check the cards, not just the balance
Expiry dates, PIN length, and whether your bank can still reach you abroad. All three are five-minute jobs at home and genuinely awkward to fix from a hotel in Osaka.
Decide on a rail pass, or decide against one
Not because it is urgent, but because the price moved this year and the cheapest window for buying one is not open forever. Work out whether your route even justifies a pass first.
Buy the eSIM and the adapter
Both cost more at the airport than they do at home, and the eSIM is the thing that keeps your bank able to text you. Order the eSIM a few days early so you can install it without a queue behind you.
Fill in Visit Japan Web
Free, official, and it turns immigration and customs into one QR scan at the big airports. Screenshot the code before you fly rather than trusting airport wifi to load it.
Sort the landing float and split the cards
A small amount of yen to land with, and your two cards in two different bags. That is the whole job. Everything else can be done from a convenience store on day one.
Four checks, five minutes.
Japan takes cards far more happily than its reputation suggests, so the risk is not really that cards do not work. It is that one specific card stops working on a Saturday night and you have no second plan. These are the four things worth confirming while you are still standing in your own kitchen.
Two cards, two networks, two banks
One card is a single point of failure. Take a second on a different network and ideally a different bank, and keep it somewhere other than the first. Visa and Mastercard are the ones that reliably work here, so if your favourite card is an Amex, make it the backup rather than the whole plan.
A four-digit PIN
Japanese cash machines are built around four digits. A six-digit PIN is a common reason a perfectly good foreign card gets refused. If yours is longer, ask your bank to change it before you fly, because that is not something you can fix quickly from overseas.
Expiry dates past your return
A card that expires mid-trip is an obvious problem and an easy one to miss when the expiry is months away at the time you book. Check every card in every wallet, including the kids’ if they carry one.
A phone number your bank can actually reach
When a payment gets flagged, the bank sends a code to the number on file. If that number is unreachable because you swapped the SIM out, the card stays blocked until you find wifi and a way to call an international support line. More on avoiding that below.
What each card actually costs you to use, which machines dispense yen, and how the kids’ IC cards end up doubling as pocket money are all covered properly in our money in Japan guide. This page stops at the front door.
Ringing the bank is mostly obsolete.
The advice to phone your bank before you travel has been passed down so many times that it now outlives the thing it was for. Several of the largest card issuers have stopped taking travel notices altogether, because their fraud systems read the transaction pattern rather than a note on your file. Others still ask for one. There is no universal answer, which is why the only sensible move is thirty seconds in your own banking app rather than a rule you read on a blog.
The genuinely useful version of this job is different, and almost nobody mentions it. When a payment does get flagged, the bank resolves it by contacting you. That means a text, a push notification or a call to the number they hold. So the question is not whether they know you are in Japan. It is whether they can reach you once you are.
This is the quiet reason an eSIM belongs on a money page. If you pull your home SIM out and drop a Japanese one in its place, your bank’s verification text goes to a phone number sitting in a drawer at home. An eSIM sidesteps it: the Japanese data plan loads alongside your existing number instead of replacing it, so a blocked card can be sorted out from a train platform in about a minute.
Two small things finish the job. Turn on push notifications for card transactions before you fly, so a decline explains itself instead of being a mystery. And save your bank’s international number somewhere offline, because the number printed on the back of a card is not much help when the card is the thing you have lost.
Land with a float, not a fortune.
The temptation is to arrive with a thick envelope of yen because Japan has a cash-heavy reputation. Resist it. You are flying into an airport with cash machines that take foreign cards perfectly happily, and the exchange desk at your departure airport is offering you one of the worst rates you will see all trip.
A modest float is still worth having, because arriving with nothing means your first interaction in a new country is a queue at a cash machine with two tired kids. Enough for a train fare, a taxi if the trains have stopped, and a convenience store run is the right size. Then top up properly once you are on the ground.
Where to withdraw, which machines refuse foreign cards, and why you should always choose to be charged in yen are all in the money in Japan guide.
Insurance is the one you cannot do late.
Every other job on this page can be done the week you fly without costing you anything. Insurance cannot, and the reason is worth understanding rather than just obeying.
A travel policy does two separate jobs. The medical half matters from the moment you land, so buying late does not weaken it. The cancellation half works backwards: it covers you from the day the policy starts until you go. Buy it the day you book and you are protected across the whole run-up, which is precisely the stretch where illness, injury and family emergencies actually turn up. Buy it a fortnight before departure and you have paid for a benefit you spent six months without.
Which insurer, what a family policy really covers, how excesses stack per person, and the add-ons that catch people out are a whole guide of their own: travel insurance for Japan, written for families buying from Australia, the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand or Singapore.
Four costs that moved this year.
None of these will change whether you go. Together they are worth a few hundred dollars to a family of four, and three of the four are invisible until they have already happened to you. We travelled before all of them, so this section is desk research rather than experience, and we have flagged the bits the authorities had not published yet.
The departure tax tripled
Japan’s international tourist tax went from ¥1,000 to ¥3,000 per person. It applies to almost everyone leaving the country by air or sea, visitors and residents alike, from age two up. You do not queue to pay it. Airlines and ferry operators collect it inside the ticket price, which is exactly why it is easy to miss. For a family of four it is ¥12,000 already sitting in your airfare.
Kyoto’s accommodation tax jumped
Kyoto now runs the steepest lodging tax in the country, banded by room rate. Cheap rooms attract a couple of hundred yen a night. The top band reaches ¥10,000 per person per night, which is a luxury-hotel problem rather than a family-apartment one. The part worth knowing is that this is usually charged at the property, so it may not appear in the total you saw when you booked online. Other prefectures have added or raised their own, mostly in the ¥100 to ¥500 range.
The nationwide Japan Rail Pass got dearer
The seven-day ordinary pass moved from ¥50,000 to ¥53,000, the fourteen-day from ¥80,000 to ¥84,000 and the twenty-one-day from ¥100,000 to ¥105,000, with green car and child fares rising in step. JR has said pre-October prices will stay available on the official rail pass website for a limited period, but when we checked it had not published how long that window runs. If a pass is part of your budget, price it on the official site and take the answer on the day rather than from us.
Tax-free shopping becomes a refund, not a discount
Until this date you show a passport in store and simply pay less. After it, you pay the full price including the 10% consumption tax and claim the money back on the way out of the country. The ¥5,000 minimum spend in one shop on one day is unchanged, and the old split between general goods and consumables disappears, so a mixed basket can now be added together to clear the threshold. You then have 90 days to leave and complete the check at the airport, or the refund lapses. The exact refund mechanics, including how and where the money comes back, were still being finalised when we wrote this, so treat the process as settled and the detail as not.
Figures as published and as we understood them in August 2026. Taxes and pass prices move, and the tax-free refund process in particular was still being finalised, so confirm anything you are budgeting against before you rely on it.
An eSIM and an adapter, in that order.
The eSIM
Buy it a few days before you fly rather than at the airport. Not because it sells out, but because installing one involves a QR code, a settings menu and occasionally a support email, and none of that is improved by doing it at a boarding gate. Most providers let you pick the activation date, so you can set it up calmly at home and have it wake up when you land.
The reason it sits on a money page rather than a packing list is the one from section III: an eSIM adds Japanese data without evicting your existing number, which is what keeps your bank able to text you when a card gets flagged. A physical Japanese SIM that replaces your home SIM quietly breaks that.
Size it to how you travel rather than to the biggest number on the page. A family navigating, translating and posting photos is doing normal phone things, not streaming. If you plan to hotspot a laptop, that is the case for an unlimited plan.
The adapter
Japan runs on 100 volts through the flat two-pin socket the US and Canada use, so North American travellers frequently need nothing at all. Everyone else, the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore included, needs a plug adapter. It is a cheap part that costs several times more once you are standing in an airport holding a flat phone.
You almost certainly do not need a voltage converter. Look at the small print on the charger itself: if it says 100 to 240 volts, which phone, laptop, tablet and camera chargers essentially always do, a plug adapter is the whole job. The exceptions are single-voltage, high-draw things, and hair dryers and styling tools are the usual suspects. Japan’s 100 volts is also a little lower than most of the world, so a device that technically works may simply run weaker than it does at home.
One adapter per family is a false economy. Four people with phones, plus a tablet and a camera, is a queue at a single socket every night. A small multi-port charger on one adapter solves it in one go.
Quick answers before you book anything.
The same handful of questions come up every time a friend tells us they are finally booking Japan. Here is the short version of each.
- Do I need to tell my bank I am going to Japan?
- Probably not, and this advice has genuinely changed. Several of the biggest card issuers have dropped travel notices entirely and lean on fraud detection instead, while others still suggest you flag a trip. Check your own bank’s app rather than assuming either way. The job that replaced it matters more: make sure the bank can reach you by text or call while you are away.
- How much yen should we land with?
- Enough for a train, a taxi and a convenience store run, not a week of spending. You are landing at an airport with cash machines that take foreign cards, so there is no reason to carry a big float through two flights. Top up properly once you are in the country.
- Should I buy yen before I fly?
- Only a small amount, if any. Exchanging at your home airport is reliably one of the worst rates you will be offered all trip. Our money in Japan guide covers where the good rates actually are.
- Do I need a travel adapter for Japan?
- That depends where you are coming from. Japan uses the flat two-pin Type A socket, so travellers from the US and Canada often need no adapter at all, while anyone from the UK, Europe, Australia, New Zealand or Singapore does. Buy it at home. Airport prices for a two-dollar part are a well-established tax on the unprepared.
- Can I set up a Suica before I get to Japan?
- On an iPhone, yes. On a foreign Android phone, almost certainly not. Japan’s IC cards run on FeliCa, a chip most Android handsets sold outside Japan simply do not have. We travelled with Pixel phones and used physical cards for the whole trip, which worked perfectly well and is still the simplest answer for a family who need one each.
- Do I need a visa or a JESTA to visit Japan?
- Most Western passport holders need neither for a short holiday. Japan has approved an electronic travel authorisation called JESTA, but it is not due until the 2028 financial year at the earliest. Any site charging you for a Japan travel authorisation today is not an official government service. Visit Japan Web is the real system, and it is free.
- When should I buy travel insurance for Japan?
- The day you book the flights. Medical cover matters from the moment you land, but cancellation cover only protects you from the day the policy starts, so buying late means paying for a benefit you have already spent months without.
Plan it the way we would.
We planned this trip ourselves, paid for it ourselves, and wrote down what worked and what did not. All of it is on the site, free, with nothing to sign up for.
- Where to go, and how long to give each place
- What to book ahead, and what to skip
- Getting around with kids, without the guesswork
- What it actually cost us
The planning guides
Flights, trains, money, food, insurance and where to stay. Written after the trip, not before it.
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