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Most visitors now complete Japan’s entry paperwork online and never touch a pen. But the paper disembarkation card and customs declaration still exist, cabin crew still hand them out on the aircraft, and a fair number of travellers end up filling one in anyway — because Visit Japan Web wasn’t set up in time, because the gate agent runs out of QR scanners, or because the port of entry is a cruise terminal rather than an airport. Here is exactly what each card asks for, in what order, and the mistakes that send people back to the end of the queue to redo them.
The short answer
- Two separate forms: the disembarkation card (immigration) and the customs declaration (Form C No. 5360) do different jobs.
- One customs form per family travelling together — not one per person.
- Visit Japan Web replaces both with QR codes, but the paper versions are still handed out on the aircraft as a fallback.
- Name order matters. Write it exactly as it appears on the machine-readable strip at the bottom of your passport photo page.
- The address line means your first night’s accommodation, with its phone number — not your home address.
The two cards, and what each one is for
They arrive together, usually stapled or clipped to the seat-back safety card, and it is easy to assume they are one form. They are not.
- The disembarkation card for foreign nationals — immigration paperwork. Name, date of birth, nationality, passport number, flight number, purpose of visit, intended length of stay, and your address in Japan.
- The customs declaration (Form C No. 5360) — what you are bringing into the country. Filled out once per family, handed to the customs officer after baggage reclaim, or scanned as a QR code at the electronic gates if you registered in advance.
Both existed long before Visit Japan Web did, and both still work exactly the same way if the portal is down, your phone is dead, or you simply never got round to registering.
You probably don't need the paper version
If you registered on Visit Japan Web and have your QR codes ready, you can skip the paper cards entirely — hand your passport and scan the codes at the gates instead. This guide is for the cases where paper is still the plan: cruise and ferry arrivals, a portal outage, or simply arriving without having registered.
The disembarkation card, field by field
Cabin crew distribute it roughly an hour before landing. It is a single small card, printed in English and Japanese, and it asks for the same details on every arrival:
| Field | What to write |
|---|---|
| Name | Family name, then given names — exactly as printed on the passport’s machine-readable strip, capital letters. |
| Date of birth | Day, month, year, in that order. |
| Nationality / Home address | Country of citizenship and your home city — not a Japan address. |
| Purpose of visit | Tick one box: tourism, business, visiting relatives, and so on. Tourism covers almost every leisure trip. |
| Flight number | From your boarding pass, not the airline name alone. |
| Intended length of stay | In days. Round trips are fine to estimate. |
| Address in Japan | Your first night’s hotel, with its telephone number if the card has space for one. |
| Signature | Sign it. An unsigned card is sent back at the counter. |
The address field is the one people improvise on, and it shouldn’t be. Immigration officers sometimes ask where you are staying as a spoken follow-up question, and the answer needs to match what you wrote. Put the actual first hotel, even if you are switching cities every two days after that.
The customs declaration, field by field
Form C No. 5360 is longer, and it is the one people get nervous about, mostly without needing to. It asks about the contents of your baggage, not your finances.
- Passenger information — name, address in Japan, flight number, again.
- A short list of yes/no questions — whether you are carrying prohibited or restricted items, commercial goods, unaccompanied baggage arriving separately, or cash and cheques over ¥1,000,000.
- A declaration of accompanying family members, if you are filing one form for the household.
- A back page for itemising anything you answered “yes” to — model, quantity, value.
If every answer is genuinely no, the form takes under a minute. Read the cash threshold and the prohibited-items line twice, though — what counts as restricted is stricter here than in most visitors’ home countries, and medicines containing pseudoephedrine or codeine are the ones that catch people most often. The full allowances and the medicine exceptions are covered in Japan’s customs and duty-free allowances, which is worth a look before you tick anything on the back page.
One form per family, not one per person
This is the detail that trips up groups. Japan Customs treats a family travelling together as a single declaring unit: one adult fills in and signs one form covering everyone in the party, listing the other members’ names on the back. Unrelated adults travelling together — friends splitting a trip, colleagues on the same flight — each complete their own.
| Situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Solo traveller | One form, your name only |
| Couple or family sharing a hotel room | One form for the group, signed by one adult |
| Friends on the same flight, separate accommodation | Each person declares separately |
| Unaccompanied minor | A responsible adult or airline staff assist with the form |
The mistakes that actually slow people down
None of these are complicated once you know to look for them, and all of them are avoidable by filling the cards in on the plane rather than at the counter.
- Name order reversed. Some nationalities write family name first on ID at home; the card wants it in passport order, matching the machine-readable strip exactly.
- Today’s date instead of arrival details. The flight number and length-of-stay fields get confused with departure information more often than you’d expect.
- A home address on the “address in Japan” line. That field is for where you are sleeping tonight, not where you live.
- Missing signature. Both cards need one; a blank signature line is the single most common reason a form gets handed back.
- Printing instead of writing clearly in block capitals. Officers process a high volume of these by hand — legible capitals move faster than cursive.
Do it seated, before you land
Both cards take about three minutes combined if you fill them in during the descent, with your passport open on your lap for reference. Doing it standing at the immigration counter, digging for your flight number while the queue behind you grows, is where almost every mistake on this list actually happens.
If you didn’t register for Visit Japan Web at all
Nothing about arriving without a QR code changes your entry. Cabin crew carry a stock of both cards for exactly this situation, and staffed counters exist at every checkpoint for travellers on paper. The paper route and the QR route converge at the same immigration and customs desks; nobody is turned away for using one over the other. What changes is simply the amount of time it takes to compare notes with an officer instead of scanning a screen — worth knowing before you land, covered step by step in the arrival procedure from aircraft door to arrivals hall.
Sources
- Immigration Services Agency of Japan — disembarkation card requirements and landing procedures for foreign nationals.
- Japan Customs — customs declaration Form C No. 5360 and passenger clearance procedure.
- Digital Agency of Japan — Visit Japan Web service description and the paper-form fallback.
Data checked: 2026-09-27
