Japan for digital nomads: hubs, power and the visa reality

Three cities carry most of the remote-work traffic, and they are not interchangeable. Tokyo holds more than 14 million people in the city proper and 33 million across the greater area, and its 23 special wards each have their own centre, so you choose a neighbourhood rather than a city: Shinjuku and Shibuya for density and late hours, quieter wards for sleep. Osaka's Kita, around Umeda and Osaka Station, is the business half, better connected and calmer after dark. Kyoto is the smallest of the three and the most walkable, a flat grid where a bicycle is the local answer and two subway lines cover the rest.

Treat one connection as a single point of failure, and plan the electricity before you arrive. Hotel, coworking or cafe Wi-Fi, where you find it, is someone else's network and stops at the door, so keep your own mobile connection as the one that always works. Power is the part people forget: Japan uses Type A and B flat two-pin sockets at 100 V, 50 Hz in the east around Tokyo and 60 Hz in the west around Osaka. Phone and laptop chargers handle that fine, anything not rated for 100 V will underperform, and European plugs need an adapter. Goodbars sells a Japan eSIM you install at home and switch on when you land; it runs on NTT docomo, Japan's largest mobile network by mobile contracts, and our Japan coverage page shows where it reaches and what independent speed tests measure.

The working day here runs into one rule foreigners break constantly: public space is quiet space. Nobody takes a phone call on a train, and a video call in a small cafe reads as rude rather than busy. Coworking spaces and hotel lobbies are where calls belong, and a day pass is worth it on any day with meetings. Small independent cafes are often not set up for laptops at all, and many have no plug you are welcome to use, so ask before you settle in. The upside of the same rule is the quiet: a focused afternoon is easy to find, and station food halls and convenience stores mean you never lose an hour to lunch.

Be clear on one thing: visa-free entry is a tourist status, not permission to work. EU and Turkish passports enter Japan visa-free for up to 90 days as temporary visitors under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs exemption list, immigration photographs and fingerprints every foreign visitor, and you must carry your passport at all times: police can arrest you if you cannot show your status. Visit Japan Web, run by the Digital Agency, files your immigration and customs declarations in advance for a QR code, which saves queuing. If you want to stay longer or work here in any formal sense, that is a different status: check the ministry's list and your nearest embassy before you plan.

Japan is a card country with a cash habit, and the fix is to carry both. Cards and contactless work in cities and chains, but small restaurants, shrines and rural inns still want cash, and the ATMs at 7-Eleven and post offices accept some foreign cards, with the fee shown on screen before you confirm. The real time-saver is an IC card: 95.64 million Suica cards had been issued by October 2023 and 1.63 million shops accept them, so one tap covers trains, buses and lunch. Nobody tips, prices are what you pay, and money goes in the tray at the till rather than into a hand. Station names are romanised, but menus and rental paperwork often are not, so keep the translation camera handy.

Japan runs on UTC+9 all year, with no daylight saving, and that single fact shapes your calendar more than any cafe does. Your working morning is the middle of the night in Europe and the previous evening in the Americas, so a European team only becomes reachable in your late afternoon, and an American one asks you to work at night. The comfortable overlap is with Korea, eastern China, Southeast Asia and Australia. If your clients are European, plan a split day: deep work in the morning, calls from the late afternoon, and be honest with yourself about how many weeks of that you can hold.