Japan Embassy’s Promise: Release Travel Visas ‘Within 5 Days’
Amid the surge in interest in travel to Japan, the country’s embassy in the Philippines issued a vow to process and release visas within five working days.
Embassy of Japan on the Release of Travel Visas
The Embassy of Japan made the promise in a Facebook post over the weekend, saying it “will continue to make efforts to complete the procedures and return the visa within five (5) working days, after it is submitted to the Embassy by the travel agencies.”
According to the Japan Information and Culture Center (JICC), the Embassy only accepts visa applications through the latter’s “accredited travel agencies,” regardless of whether these are for group tours or individual trips.
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A report in the BusinessMirror newspaper said about 92 percent of the visas issued by the Embassy of Japan to Filipinos were for short-term visits.
“While we do not have statistics specifically for tourist visas, the most recent data available (for 2023) shows that over 92 percent of the visas issued by our embassy that year were short-term stay visas (including those for business and visiting relatives),” the JICC said.
That’s 455,087 of the 488,549 visas issued in the Philippines that year.
The latest update follows a report in early February of the Japanese embassy urging travelers to apply for their visas at least two months before their intended date of travel. That advisory, the embassy said, was to accommodate the surge in Filipino travelers looking to fly to Japan.
“The examination of visa applications for tourism purposes which normally took five working days, might now take several weeks—period longer than the standard processing time,” the advisory said.
New Visa Examination System
The Embassy also said it is in the process of migrating to a new visa examination system, which it added was to “maintain the quality and enhance the efficiency of visa processing.”
This could mean that the Japanese Embassy could finally subcontract the visa processing system to a third-party agency such as VFS, which many other foreign embassies use here in the Philippines and elsewhere.
“We are now in the process of transition and have just completed the bidding process,” JICC told BusinessMirror. “We would like to refrain from talking about the details until the contract has been signed and the details can be announced to the public.”
