Originally Posted by
acregal
The last time I came back to Japan (at KIX, from Korea) there were a few people in each of the lines - it literally took me a minute to go through.
Compare that to Korea, where I was 4th in line and it still took 30 minutes (guess the immigration people using their cell phones didn't help).
It's unpredictable wherever you go.
At FCO, I snapped at the passport official because the EU-queues sat vacant for twenty minutes. He said that because those EU-desks don't have stamps, they can't process everyone else. While that may be the case around the EU, it's quite the easily resolvable excuse...
My experience in Japan has often been the same. Japanese citizens desks stay idle while the
outer country people wait. I can't comment on how the deal is in the US because I'm from there, but that's not to say it's more or less efficient than elsewhere.