My understanding, yet to be confirmed, is no travel agency needs to be involved, but the news seems to keep evolving since the initial announcement - so we will see. I know people who were traveling in Japan without the tour escort by signing up for a trade show, paying the trade show registration fee, spending an hour at the show to poke around the exhibits, then going on with their vacation plans unsupervised. It was a work-around for the past year, but it could get expensive depending on the registration cost for the show or meeting you wanted to attend depending on how many people were going on the trip, figuring about $400+ per registration.

We were actually planning on doing this if we could find a medical conference that was remotely interesting to my other half - it's still a Plan B if the rules change again.