Updated: H&P's Visa Restrictions and Japan Survey

(non-commercial blog-use license from CartoonStock)

A few years ago we covered the 2013 Henley & Partners Annual "The Henley & Partners Visa Restrictions Index" in a post, noting that Japan is one of the countries that is lucky enough to be in the top five list of passports that can go to the most countries (as a visitor) without needing to apply for a visa in advance.

As Henley & Partners is a visa/international residence legal firm catering primarily to wealthy expat clients, they do a few press releases every year to draw attention to their list, and journalists that are interested in international borders and immigration lap it up like the Olympics (giving them free publicity and drumming up business) because it pits countries against each other which the internet likes to talk about. "Which country is more open / better than another country?"

Anyway, even though you can go to more countries with a Japanese passport in 2016 than you could in 2013, it dropped one rank in the list:

Source: H&P's International Visa Restrictions page

Rank	2013	2016
#1.	Score: 173 territories Finland Sweden United Kingdom	Score: 177 territories Germany
#2.	Score: 172 territories Denmark Germany Luxembourg United States	Score: 176 territories Sweden
#3.	Score: 171 territories Belgium Italy Netherlands	Score: 175 territories Finland France Italy Spain United Kingdom
#4.	Score: 170 territories Canada France Ireland Japan Norway Portugal Spain	Score: 174 territories Belgium Denmark Netherlands United States
#5.	Score: 168 territories Austria New Zealand Switzerland	Score: 173 territories Austria Japan Singapore

While Germany (the fourth largest economy in the world) is now in the top rank and Japan (the third largest economy in the world) has dropped from fourth to fifth place, Japanese nationals are still able to short-term travel to the People's Republic of China (the second largest economy in the world) for tourism or business without needing to pre-apply for a visa, whereas Germans still do need a visa.

Does the list mean anything?

To a limited extent: in my opinion, any countries with a rank ±10 of each other should be considered "equal", and from all intents and purposes most people with a passport issued by a country in the top ten list can go anywhere in the world as a visitor for tourism or business that you would want to go. Of the top five countries listed here, the only countries that can't go to are usually ones that are too unstable or dangerous to go to anyway. Often times the reason the country can't secure a visa-free arrangement with one of the countries at the top of this list is because their government is too poor or weak or in a constant state of flux to negotiate effectively with other governments or they have poor or no diplomatic relations. For example, Japanese cannot go to North Korea easily and vice versa.

Personally, I think that any nationality that allows for visa-free travel to more than 150 countries probably allows one to travel anywhere they would ever want to travel to on the spur of a moment. In the current ranking list, this is the top 23 ranks consisting of 47 countries.

Of the people I've met who have obtained Japanese nationality for business travel reasons, most are from BRICS countries: these people are upwardly mobile and often, for the purposes of getting even higher ahead in their job (usually with a multinational corporation) they want a passport that allows them to travel to many different countries at the last minute without having to apply and wait days or weeks for a visa.

BRICS countries tend to rank rather poorly when it comes to visa-exempt travel, so upwardly mobile professionals that need to travel often consider getting a passport from a rich country (which tend to have easy access to the most countries) to be desirable.

Ranking of BRICS countries for short-term visa-free travel

Country	Rank /Score
	2013	2016
Brazil	#19 (146 territories)	#21 (153 territories)
Russia	#41 (95 territories)	#48 (105 territories)
India	#74 (52 territories)	#85 (52 territories)
China	#82 (44 territories)	#87 (50 territories)
South Africa	#42 (94 territories)	#54 (97 territories)

Outlier: Saint Kitts and Nevis lost
Canadian visa-free privileges in 2014.

It's rare that countries get removed from lists entitling their citizens to visa-free travel. One recent exception is Saint Kitts and Nevis. This Carribean Island started a controversial program where they'd give its nationality and passport to anybody that paid a (relatively modest) sum of cash. After countries started to suspect that some people were obtaining this nationality for the purposes of concealing their past, they started to scrutinize people bearing this passport more carefully; Canada removed St. Kitts and Nevis from its list of countries that can travel to it without needing to pre-apply for a visa. As an emergency response, St. Kitts recalled all (there are less than 60,000 residents) of its existing passports and re-issued them so they state the person's place of birth and converting to e-Passports; the non-erasable information in the RFID page of a e-Passport is cryptographically signed and impossible to forge without possessing the government's digital certificate credentials. Additionally, adding one's birthplace to the first page of the passport and embedded chip allows foreign passport inspectors and officials to more easily determine which St. Kitts & Nevis nationals were natural-born (KNA is an unrestricted jus soli country, which while common in the Americans, is not the norm worldwide) and which naturalized, allowing those with birthright citizenship to enter foreign countries less impeded than those who naturalized and possibly obtained the nationality with money alone without being a resident.

Japan's passport, incidentally, does not list one's birthplace; it only lists one's Registered Domicile (本籍 {honseki}), which can be anything a person desires and can be changed. It's not possible to 100% determine from a Japanese passport whether a person is naturalized or natural-born.