Originally Posted by
NewbieRunner
Make sure you complete Visit Japan Web as it is supposed to speed things up on arrival. Someone I know recently arrived in Japan without knowing anything about it. I don’t know how she got on but it was her first visit to Japan so there was nothing to compare her experience with. Another friend who had visited Japan a few times before didn’t think anything was necessary...
VJW is not required, but it will save you from having to fill out paper forms and bypass the health check prior to passport control. This can save some time since you'll likely be behind everyone who has this in the line for passport control if you go the manual route. It's also easier to flash the QR code to the staff at the airline ticket counters when checking in for your flight.
I can't speak for passport control or customs itself if you didn't use VJW, but with VJW they are doing some facial recognition thing at customs now at both NRT and HND. The paper customs form appeared to get more scrutiny and a manual inspection from the handful of people I saw going that route. With VJW you just walked out while passing through the facial recognition.