It may be limited, but it’s a step in the right direction – and makes this magnificent destination once again worthy of the number one spot on any wish list. This week, after tentative opening steps, the government finally scrapped the country’s pre-arrival Covid-19 test requirement, and removed the need for visitors to be part of an organised tour. Before 2020, Japan evoked a flood of clear-cut images: Mount Fuji hovering on the horizon, under cartoon blue skies the white nose of a shinkansen (bullet train) gliding into a station platform stillness punctuated by the whisk of bamboo on ceramic as forest-green matcha is prepared.įast-forward to today, and although all of these iconic elements for which Japan has long been famed are still here, the nation is perhaps now viewed through an additional prism: as one of the least accessible countries in the world, thanks to its strict border closures.įor more than two years, tightly closed to inbound tourists as part of its rigorous anti-Covid strategy – something of a modern echo of the country’s famous 265-year period of self-isolation which ended in the 19th century.

Ark lesser antidote