About Japan Harbor
Japan Harbor is a plain-English resource for the practical side of traveling in and living in Japan — tax-free shopping, money and taxes, and the paperwork. Our goal is to answer real questions with the actual numbers and the concrete steps, so you don’t have to piece it together from scratch.
How we research
- Official, primary sources. We rely on government ministries, tax and customs authorities, and other official bodies — not second-hand blog posts.
- Sources cited. Each figure and rule links to the official page we checked, with the date we checked it.
- Honest about change. Rules, amounts and deadlines change and can depend on your situation. We avoid false certainty and point you to the official body for the final word.
What we do before a page goes live
Saying “we checked the official site” is easy; it does not prove the sentence we quoted is actually there. Every time we publish or update a page, we go through these steps.
- We verify that the quote exists. Before a figure, condition or wording goes on the page, we fetch the source URL and confirm that the exact string is present. Tables inside PDFs are a known trap — extracting them as text can shift a column and attach a number to the wrong row — so for those werender the page as an image and read it with our eyes.
- If we can’t confirm it, we don’t print it. Numbers and dates that appear only in trade press or in other people’s articles do not go in, however widely they are repeated. Where it matters, we say outright that we could not confirm something officially.
- Japanese sources are quoted, then translated. Most of the rules on this site are written only in Japanese. We quote the original wording and mark our rendering as a translation, so you can check it yourself rather than take our word for it.
- We re-test our source links on a schedule. The check looks for more than dead links: a URL can keep returning a perfectly healthy page while the content behind it has been replaced or rewritten. In our experience that failure is more common than a 404.
- We link the page, not the front door. Rather than citing “the ministry” and linking its homepage, we link the specific page or PDF the statement comes from.
- We are polite to the sites we read. When checking sources we space out our requests and never hammer a single server.
Updates and corrections
Rules change. Each page carries the date we last checked it, and we revisit pages when we learn of a change that affects them. If you spot an error or something out of date, please tell us through thecontact form — we will check it against the source, correct it, and update the date on that page.
What this site can and can’t do
Japan Harbor helps you understand how things work and plan ahead. It does not provide individual legal, tax or immigration advice, and it can’t guarantee your specific case. Always confirm the details with the relevant official body — or a licensed professional — before you act.
How this is funded
Japan Harbor may earn from advertising or affiliate links (for example, money-transfer or eSIM services) to cover running costs. This never changes which facts we report, and we don’t require you to use any particular service.
Who runs this
Japan Harbor is operated and edited by Libra, a business based in Japan. For corrections or enquiries about our content, please use our contact form.