Japan will issue vaccine passports for Japanese travelers.
On Thursday, Japan said that it will issue vaccine passports for Japanese travelers as governments around the world experimented with ways to relaunch tourism and business trips.
Top government spokesman Katsunobu Kato told reporters that the government was preparing to issue a “certificate of vaccination” for travelers who needed one when they wanted to visit foreign countries.
According to Kato, the certificate will be “paper-based” rather than digital and will be issued by local governments from sometime next month.
The European Union (EU) was working on a digital vaccine passport for this summer so that it can welcome back badly needed tourists, and some EU countries planned to introduce certificates at the national level.
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The EU version of the vaccine passport will feature information on whether a person had been vaccinated, or had the virus, tested negative, and recovered.
It was last month when Washington said that it was also considering special documentation for vaccinated Americans who wanted to travel abroad.
However, the idea was controversial in some places, with conservative US states such as Florida and Texas rejecting the idea of vaccine travel documents as a violation of peoples’ basic rights.
In Japan, company officials had been keen for a vaccine document that would help reestablish business travel.
Japan’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout started comparatively slowly, but had picked up pace in recent weeks. Just over 6% of the population was currently fully vaccinated.
The country’s borders were closed to almost all foreign arrivals, though the rules will be relaxed for the Olympic Games, which will open in Tokyo on July 23.
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