Originally Posted by
MSPeconomist
Unless one is confident of knowing a foreign language extremely well, it would seem risky to go through immigration and customs processing in some foreign language. This is not the time to practice your language skills.
In general this is true, and you can certainly just use English in Japanese airports.
But in practice, my interaction with immigration (except in the US) is,
at maximum:
RG (presents passport): Hello/Bonjour/Ohayo gozaimasu
Officer (pages through passport, checks computer, stamps passport): Have a good day/Bon journee/Have a good day.
RG: Thanks/merci/arigato
and my interaction with customs consists of walking through the green door instead of the red door.
Pretty hard to screw that up, even with my limited French and even more limited Japanese.
It seems polite to at least make some effort to use what I can of the local language, even though it's pretty obvious that I'm not a native speaker. And invariably the other person will switch to English as soon as the conversation becomes too complicated for me.