Guide: How to extend your 90 day tourist visa to 180 days (total) if you’re from an eligible country.

I’m sharing this as I couldn’t find any information online to help me with my own application and hope it will help others in the future.

For those with passports from Austria, Germany, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Mexico, Switzerland & UK, Japan allows for a 90 day extension to your initial 90 day tourist visa meaning you can stay and travel in Japan for a total of 6 months.

What I did:
Step 1: at around the 2.5 month mark, I went with my passport to the immigration office of the region I was currently in. In my case it was the Osaka regional immigration office (right near Cosmosquare station) and the office was on the 2nd floor of the building.

Step 2: go to the information desk and ask how to extend the tourist visa in your “X country” passport. The staff should give you 3 A4 pages to fill out and tell you which counter to go to once you’ve filled it out.

Step 3: fill in the 3 pages. 2 pages are full of questions. From what I remember there were questions about passport and personal details, home address, current hotel you’re staying at, where have you visited in the time you’ve been in Japan, where do you intend to visit next, do you have a flight booked out of Japan and if so when and what the flight number is, how much money you have to spend in Japan. The 3rd page is a lined piece of paper for you to write a paragraph or so explaining the reason why you wish to extend your tourist visa – I used about1/3 of the page with my explanation. Note there’s no need for any passport photos of yourself.

Step 4: go to the counter you were directed to (in Osaka it was the “application counter”) and hand in your forms along with your passport. The staff member will give you a ticket number and tell you which counter to wait at. (For me it was counter # 5). Then you just sit and wait. Bring something to occupy yourself with or just make sure your phone has enough battery life!

Step 5: I sat for about 2 hours at the counter until someone turned up behind the counter and confirmed that my application was approved. I would have to pay 4000 yen for the application but they don’t take cash, you have to give them some sort of government postal stamp that’s equivalent to that amount. To do that in the Osaka office, I had to go to the shop that’s opposite the entrance to the application area (same floor) and pay the shop clerk there 4000 yen in cash and they’ll hand you the required stamp. Go back to the counter and wait for the person to appear again and show them the stamp. (Tbh you could probably go and buy the stamp during your wait time but I didn’t know how much it would cost at the time) They’ll then give you a new ticket number and tell you that your number will be called to another counter. You keep hold of your postage stamps still.

Step 6: wait for your ticket number to be called (in my case it was over the tannoy and the screens in the office showed ticket numbers and their respective counters). I ended up only waiting about 5 minutes before being called up. Then go to the counter and hand over your postage stamp payment. They’ll accept your stamps, stick them on your forms and then hand over your passport with your 90 day extension. Note that the extension is from the time your current visa expires, so if it says it expires 31st Jan, then your new visa extension date will be 90 days from 31st Jan. I’m being pedantic here with the explanation on dates as some other countries (Thailand for example) only extend from the date of your application itself which means you lose some days, but Japan is nice here and you’ll get your full allocation of days!

Step 7: breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy the rest of your day!