So. traveling in the times of COVID-19.
To be honest, the preparations to fly into Nepal are pretty simple. If you have been fully vaccinated, you need to bring your vaccination records, and there is a simple form to fill out. No testing necessary. Show up with the form and your vaccination records, and you can get into Nepal with the same visa on arrival as always. Pretty straightforward.
Or it would be, if I hadn’t been vaccinated in Japan. Because, of course, all of those vaccination records are in Japanese only. Who would ever need vaccination records in any other language than Japanese, right?
So, after a good deal of internet sleuthing, I find that you can get a translation of your vaccination records from the government by mailing your records to them, and waiting about 2 business weeks. There is no option for going in person, it must be mailed. I should note, all of this information is available in Japanese only. I should also note, we managed to find this information well less than 2 business weeks from the date of travel.
Damn.
But wait! There’s another option: There’s a special app you can install on your phone that allows you to use my My Number Card (a form of ID here in Japan) to access your vaccine records, and create a bilingual version viewable on your phone.
It is important to note here that not everybody in Japan has a My Number card because it’s not actually required. Like many things from the government, it is politely suggested that you have one, but not required. You are, however, required to have a number – much like a social security number in the states, but completely unrelated to your government pension – but you are not necessarily required to have the card. Because that’s how the government works here. There’s a chart online in Japanese somewhere that explains all of this. In Japan, there’s always a chart. They are like religious totems for Japanese government offices that empower documents with deep ancient magic.
Luckily, I have the card.
However, life is not so simple. The ONLY way to make the card work with the special bespoke government phone app is to use the NFC Reader on the phone, a tool I have never used before in my life. I should note, the application itself does not include the ability to access the NFC reading hardware on the phone. That has to be installed separately. Oh, and the application is only available by reading a QR code on a website. There is no direct link. Because… Why would anyone want that?
Of course not all phones have an NFC Reader. Mine does, thankfully. But it has no NFC or QR code reading applications pre installed. So I got a free reader app from the net. It immediately makes me watch a 30 second ad for a free-to-play game that involves scantily clad ladies tied up in a tower somewhere that can only be saved by solving simple math equations. There is a “X to cancel” button, but it’s too small to actually touch, so I end up inadvertently going to the Google Play site for a cartoon bondage app.
Because that’s the world we live in now.
Of course they could have just let me enter in My Number from the card. It’s just a number. I mean, it’s literally called “My Number.” But of course that’s not cool and future enough and some marketing agency or app development company convinced the government that it would be way better to ONLY allow entering that number from reading the number from the NFC card. And those people who don’t have a phone with the hardware to support a NFC reader… Well, they can always mail the government and wait two weeks. Because that’s more convenient than… Entering a number.
Luckily, my phone does have the hardware, and after rubbing the card on the back of my phone for 10 minutes and thinking the reader does not work, we look up a diagram on the internet that shows exactly the placement of the unmarked sensor on my phone. Using this secret knowledge, we manage to get the phone to read the card.
Thank god we didn’t have to physically enter in a 9 digit number.
That would have been inconvenient.
Anyway, after sorting through all of that, the silly vaccine app read my passport through a scanning app with the camera, because again entering in my passport number is too gauche for the Japanese government. Great. now have a bilingual vaccine record on my phone. There is, of course, no way to PRINT this. So I pray my phone has a battery and isn’t stolen, and that the Nepal government accepts this when I arrive as valid proof. Will it? Who knows.
Now, the hard part. Preparing the documents to get back into Japan after I am done in Nepal.
For starters, you need to be fully vaccinated. Fair enough. And now I have a Japanese app that proves it. One assumes that they will accept their own government app as proof. So, that’s done. One hopes. Who knows. I should look for a chart, but I don’t have the energy.
Next, I need to see if I need to quarantine. Is there a chart for this? You bet your ass there is. It seems to indicate that because I am vaccinated, but I am returning from a “designated country”, and am a permanent resident, but am not a citizen, and am arriving at a “designated airport” I MAY have to quarantine for 3 days on arrival, but whether that is at a Government facility or in my own home is up to the whim of the immigration and quarantine officials at the time of my arrival interview. Also, whether or not I am allowed to use public transit to get to that location… also to be decided by the immigration quarantine officials at a later date. If not, I’ll have to hire a special quarantine cab, which costs a few hundred dollars to transport me… to an unknown location. So… There’s that.
Regardless, it’s obviously time to install another app on my phone. The MySOS app. This is a tracking app that they can use to follow me around during quarantine. It also includes the Fast Track system, which, in theory, helps me get through the airport faster on arrival. Again with the QR reader. Again I get to watch an ad for a hyper casual game. This one involves throwing rings on bottles, ostensibly to win prizes from scantily clad Japanese schoolgirls. I am concerned about what I have done in my life to target these ads, but… whatever. Half dressed schoolgirls are now part of the journey to COVID safety in Japan, it seems, so I will tolerate it and move on.
Again I fail to manage to hit the tiny “Skip” button and almost install it on my phone.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Of course when you open up the MySOS application there are like thirty pages worth of legal documents that you have to read through before swearing that you have read it all carefully and agree. I browsed through them, but no human could read all of that. What I did manage to read sounded super scary, but you can’t get back into the country unless you agree… So yeah. I pressed the buttons at the bottom like a good boy. This spawned another twenty or so pages of strongly worded legal agreements that on inspection all seemed to say “You’ll not hold the makers of this app liable for anything ever, so please never contact us, we had nothing to do with it!” I agreed to that, too. Because what else am I gonna do?
The MySOS app does not use any of the fancy tech of the other app. Everything is entered manually. In many cases, twice or three times. Somewhere along the process of filling out all of the parts, it’s clear that I need to do this later, since it’s asking a lot of questions about who or what I may or may not have coughed on, or slept next to, or ran my tongue along in the future… so I stop. This will be some fun for later in Nepal.
And now… The paperwork. There are questionnaires. There are pledges. There is, before it’s over, over 50 pages of god knows what gleaned from at least 4 different government sources on the web. Most of it reads like stereo instructions. It all sounds very threatening. And there are so many charts. Could all of this be added to the MySOS application? Sure. Was it? Dunno. Can’t get to that part of the app until I register, which requires me to know who I shared a toilet seat with or whatnot in May. So… I print it all out. Just in case.
The most important of these is a very specific form that needs to be filled out by a doctor in Nepal before I return, clarifying that I have had my PCR test. This is the PCR test you get before the other PCR test you will get on arrival. Because… Reasons.
On the documentation surrounding the form, it is made clear that it needs to be THIS form and no other. Well, that’s not true. What they SAY is that any form containing all of the same information will be accepted, as long as it is in English and has a stamp from a doctor. But on this, I call bullshit.
I call bullshit because my friend who just arrived from Germany had a slightly differently formatted form, and was almost deported back to Germany to get a new form before someone suggested that the world still has FAX machines, and maybe they could use one. The world has email and the internet, too, but this is Japan and email scares the old people who run things. And taking away the joy of firing up a FAX machine would be cruel to them. Nothing makes a Japanese government official happy like the dulcet tones of a fax carrier signal. It’s like catnip to them. In any case, for my friend, eight hours in an immigration holding tank and a fax machine was required to overcome the wrongly formatted form.
I printed three copies of the right one, just in case.
Did my printer run out of ink while printing the 50+ pages of paperwork required? Yes, of course it did. Did the printer demand cyan ink, even though all of the forms were black and white, and I had plenty of black ink? Of course it did. Did I have extra cyan ink cartridges? Of course not. Did the Japanese government put big, huge, unnecessary black bars on the top of all of the pages of their documents to waste my printer ink? Of course they did.
And so on.
How long did finding and printing all of the documents I needed for entering Nepal take? About 15 minutes. Preparations for reentering Japan? Almost a full day. A day of extreme frustration, anger, and stress. And I am unsure if I am even done yet. Every day or so my wife finds some other website with some other requirement. Usually only in Japanese. Usually somehow contradicting something else we have read. I don’t expect this to end soon.
The message from the Japanese government was loud and clear: Fuck you. Don’t go anywhere. The world outside is unsafe and unclean. Stay here.
It is an inauspicious start.
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