Originally Posted by
LTN Phobia
My major concern nowadays (which never used to be a problem) at Japanese airports for arrivals is the very long immigration queue.
It took me 55 minutes last time to get through immigration queue* at HND (no fast track for J/F seem to be available there, whereas some airlines offer it at NRT for F), and the previous time was 40 minutes. The one before was about 40 minutes too.
Whether I simply ended up at unfortunate times or not, the immigration queues are the biggest bottleneck at Japanese airports now. They used to be so quick and I used to regularly go from the aircraft pulling up at the gate to getting landside, including collecting bags, off an international flights in 20 minutes but those days seem to be over.
*Time from joining the queue to reaching the immigration desk. Non-Japanese passport, non-visa national.
With a rapidly growing number of tourists in Japan, it does seem like the immigration facilities struggle to keep up with the needed capacity. There are times that are worse than others, but I often do wonder how long long those lines actually are from a time perspective. They started doing the finger print scanning while passengers ares still in line, but I am not convinced that changed much.
As a resident in Japan I have registered for automated passport control, mainly to avoid all the stamps, but also to avoid the lines when going out of Japan.