The Ultimate Japan Travel Guide: 5 Things a Liverpool Pharmacist Wants You to Know Before You Fly

**1. For most Japan trips, the honest answer is that you need very little.**

There is no malaria in Japan and no yellow fever, so no tablets and no certificate. Tap water is safe, food hygiene standards are high, and hepatitis A and typhoid are not routinely recommended for standard tourist or business travel in the way they are for most of South and Southeast Asia.

That is not a reason to skip the consultation, but it is a reason to be suspicious of a long list. A clinic that sells you four vaccines for a fortnight in Tokyo and Kyoto is selling you products, not advice. We would rather have a fifteen-minute conversation, check two things and send you off with nothing than have you pay for protection against something you are not going to meet.

**2. What is worth checking is your routine UK schedule, not a travel list.**

The genuinely useful part of a Japan appointment is boring. Are you up to date on tetanus, diphtheria and polio, which is a ten-yearly booster for travel? Have you had two documented doses of MMR?

That second question matters more than people expect. Japan has had substantial rubella outbreaks in recent years, concentrated in adult men whose childhood immunisation schedule did not include it, and measles continues to circulate in pockets across the region. UK adults born in the late 1970s and 1980s quite often have one dose rather than two. Two doses of MMR is the single most useful thing most Japan travellers can sort out before they go, and it is available on the NHS from your own GP at any age if you are not fully vaccinated.

If you are travelling in the northern-hemisphere winter for skiing or a tournament, seasonal flu vaccination is a reasonable thing to consider too, particularly if you will be in crowds, on long flights and in shared accommodation.

**3. Japanese encephalitis, despite the name, is a very limited risk for most travellers.**

This is the vaccine we talk people out of on this page. The virus is named after where it was first identified, not where you are most likely to encounter it. Japan runs a childhood immunisation programme against it and reports only a handful of human cases a year nationally, in rural rice-farming areas, mostly in the west and south-west, and mostly in late summer and autumn.

For a city-and-shinkansen itinerary, a ski trip, a tournament or a business week, it is not indicated. We do not stock advice differently for the sake of it, and we will say plainly that the name of the vaccine is doing more work in people's heads than the risk deserves.

Where it becomes a genuine conversation is a long rural stay in the rice-growing south or west, agricultural or field work, or extended periods sleeping and working outdoors in the transmission season. That is a small minority of the Japan travellers we see, and if it is you, the course is two doses over 28 days, so it needs deciding early.

**4. Tick-borne encephalitis is essentially a European problem, not a Japanese one.**

People who have read about hiking vaccines sometimes arrive asking for tick-borne encephalitis cover for a walking trip in the Japanese Alps or Hokkaido. The TBE vaccine is aimed at forest and hiking travel in central, eastern and northern Europe, where the virus is genuinely established. A very small number of cases have been reported in Hokkaido over the years, but vaccination is not part of routine advice for travel to Japan.

That does not mean ticks are irrelevant. Japan has its own tick-borne infections, and there is no vaccine for any of them. If you are hiking, camping or working in long grass and scrub, the answer is the unglamorous one: covered legs, repellent, checking yourself and your clothing at the end of the day, and removing any attached tick promptly and properly. We will show you how rather than sell you something.

**5. Two kinds of Japan trip do change the answer: the long stay, and the onward leg.**

A working holiday, a study year or a long secondment shifts things. Hepatitis B becomes worth discussing for anyone likely to need medical or dental care while away, or considering a tattoo or piercing, and if you are going for a year it is worth understanding how the Japanese health insurance system works before you need it rather than after. Long stays also mean you will run out of any regular UK medication, and some drugs that are unremarkable here are restricted at the Japanese border - that is worth checking on the official Japanese guidance well before you fly.

Ski season is the other one, and its risks are almost entirely mechanical. Injuries on the mountain, back-country avalanche risk in Hokkaido and Nagano, and clinics in resort towns that will expect payment up front. Travel insurance that genuinely covers winter sports, and off-piste if you intend to go off-piste, does more for you than any vaccine on this page. The GHIC does not apply in Japan.

And the most common one: Japan as one leg of a longer trip. If you are flying on to Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines or Indonesia, that is where your vaccine list actually comes from. Bring the whole itinerary, not just the Japan part, or you will get advice for the safest country on your route.

**The practical bit**

Four to six weeks before you fly is comfortable, though Japan alone rarely needs that much lead time - it is the onward legs and the multi-dose courses that do. If your trip is next week, come in anyway.

Bring your full itinerary including anywhere else you are going, your vaccination records, a list of your regular medicines - both because of the import rules and because a long stay needs planning - and your travel insurance document if you are skiing. The clinic is run by an Independent Prescriber, so where medication is genuinely appropriate it is assessed, prescribed and dispensed in the same visit rather than sending you back to a GP. For most Japan trips it will not be needed, and we will tell you that rather than find you something to buy. We are open weekdays to 6pm and Saturday mornings, and same-day appointments are usually possible with about two hours' notice.

This guide is written and reviewed by the pharmacists who run the clinic, against current NaTHNaC and UKHSA Green Book guidance. It is general information, not a personal recommendation - your own risk assessment happens at the consultation.

Guidance we work from

Frequently Asked Questions