Best Insurance for Japan's Digital Nomad Visa (2026): What the ¥10 Million Rule Actually Says

Disclosure: the two SafetyWing links below are affiliate links and the only paid links on this page — buy through one and a commission may come my way, at no extra cost to you. Nothing else here is monetised. Genki, World Nomads and the Japanese insurers are named because they belong in the comparison, and those links are plain references. I have not bought, held or claimed on any of these policies, I am not an immigration lawyer or an insurance broker, and nothing here is legal or insurance advice. Immigration decides applications; I can only put the published rule next to the published policy terms. Every figure below is tagged with where it came from and when I pulled it, and the full source list is at the bottom.

Japan’s digital nomad visa asks for one document that the rest of the application doesn’t prepare you for: proof that you’re insured. Attached to it is a number — ¥10,000,000 — that gets quoted in every English guide and explained in almost none of them.

Part of the confusion is arithmetic. Japanese writes ten million as 1,000万円 — “one thousand ten-thousands” — and skimmed by someone counting comma groups instead of reading the unit 万 (ten thousand), it becomes “one million”. I watched that happen twice on 3 September 2026 while pulling sources: two machine summaries of the Immigration Services Agency page turned 年収1,000万円 into “annual income of 1 million yen.” Off by a factor of ten, in both the income rule and the insurance rule.

The second problem costs people more. The ¥10 million figure does not apply to your whole policy. It applies to exactly one line of it. And there is a second insurance condition, sitting in a PDF, with no yen figure attached at all — which is why nobody repeats it, and why it’s the one that quietly disqualifies otherwise excellent policies.

I live in Japan. That doesn’t make me an immigration officer, and I’ve never applied for this visa — I don’t need it. What living here gives me is the ability to read the Japanese source documents, the application form itself, and the hospital pricing that explains why ¥10 million was the number they picked.

What the rule actually says

Two documents matter. The Immigration Services Agency’s status-of-residence page for Designated Activities (Notice No. 53), and the Agency’s Q&A PDF, dated July 2024. I read both on 3 September 2026.

The residence page states the insurance condition in one sentence, plus a footnote:

死亡、負傷及び疾病に係る海外旅行傷害保険等の医療保険に加入していること（滞在予定期間をカバーするもの）。※ 傷害疾病への治療費用補償額は１，０００万円以上が必要。

That is: you must hold overseas travel accident insurance or similar medical insurance covering death, injury and illness, and it must cover the intended period of stay. The footnote adds that the coverage amount for medical treatment costs arising from injury and illness must be ¥10,000,000 or more.

Read that carefully. The ¥10 million attaches to treatment costs for injury and illness. It is not a demand for a ¥10 million death benefit, not an overall policy limit, not an evacuation limit.

So what does death have to satisfy? For that you need Q10 of the Agency’s Q&A, quoted here from the Agency’s own English edition so there’s no translation dispute:

Regarding compensation items, death, injury, or illness during the stay in Japan must be covered. Specifically, the amount of compensation for medical treatment must be 10 million yen or more for injuries and illnesses, and for death, compensation must include transportation of the body or insurance payment in the event of death. There is no stipulation on the amount of compensation for death.

The Japanese original is 遺体輸送費又は死亡した場合の保険金支給 — repatriation of remains, or a death benefit payout.

So the published requirement has two limbs, not one:

1. Injury and illness treatment costs: ¥10,000,000 or more.
2. Death: either repatriation of the body or a death benefit must be included — with no minimum amount specified.

This is where English write-ups go wrong most often. “Medical repatriation” and “repatriation of remains” are different benefits: one flies a living patient home, the other ships a body. A policy can have a generous medical repatriation benefit and say nothing about mortal remains — and limb two is about the second thing (or a cash death benefit instead).

Two more conditions from the same page, since they change who this is even for: your individual annual income must be ¥10,000,000 or more at the time of application, and you must hold the nationality of one of the countries on the Agency’s list. On the 3 September 2026 version of that PDF I counted 51 countries and regions for the nomad status itself, including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and Singapore. The list for accompanying spouses and children is longer — 73 — because that one only requires a visa-exemption arrangement, while the nomad list requires a tax treaty as well. So a Maltese or Cypriot spouse can come along, but a Maltese or Cypriot freelancer cannot be the main applicant.

Stay is six months, no extension, no residence card.

Why ¥10 million, and why private cover isn’t optional

That last line — no residence card — is the entire causal chain, and Q5 and Q10 of the Q&A spell it out.

Because the stay is capped at six months, a digital nomad on this status is not a 中長期在留者 (“mid- to long-term resident”) under Japanese law. No residence card is issued. Without a residence card you cannot complete 住民登録, residence registration at a city or ward office. And without residence registration you cannot enrol in 国民健康保険, National Health Insurance. The Agency states the consequence itself: holders “are not eligible to enrol in Japan’s public medical insurance,” which is precisely why private cover was made a condition.

Now the price side. Japanese public health insurance reimburses on a national fee schedule, priced in points at ¥10 per point. Someone without public insurance is billed under 自由診療 — free pricing — and the hospital sets its own rate. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s manual for hospitals receiving foreign patients, produced under its Health Policy Science research programme, reports that among hospitals with high foreign-patient volume (n=147), 61% billed at ¥10 per point but 27% billed at ¥20 or more per point. The same manual instructs staff to explain to foreign visitors that their care is priced at each hospital’s own free-pricing rate because they aren’t covered by public insurance.

Roughly: the identical treatment can be billed at up to double.

For what ¥10 million buys, the Japan Tourism Agency publishes two worked cases on the JNTO page that the Immigration Services Agency itself links to as reference material, sourced to Tokio Marine International Assistance:

• Collision with a bicycle, traumatic pneumothorax and fractured ribs: surgery, 19-day hospital stay, attending physician, and a business-class flight back to the US — ¥7.5 million.
• Heart attack: surgery, 45-day hospital stay, attending physician, and a business-class flight back to Singapore — ¥10,000,000.

The threshold isn’t arbitrary. It’s roughly one cardiac event with a flight home attached. The same page also warns that foreign visitors who fail to pay their medical bills may be refused entry to Japan later.

Who this article is NOT for

• If you’re moving to Japan properly. A work visa, spouse visa or Business Manager visa gets you a residence card, residence registration and enrolment in public health insurance or 社会保険. Buying nomad travel cover on top of that is usually money burned. Everything below assumes the six-month, no-residence-card route.
• If you earn under ¥10 million a year. The income floor is a hard published condition and no insurance policy fixes it. Q9 of the Q&A is worth reading if you’re self-employed and close to the line: for sole traders, immigration evaluates profit after necessary expenses, not contract value.
• If you have a chronic or pre-existing condition. Every travel-medical policy in this comparison excludes pre-existing conditions. If that’s your situation, the policies that will serve you are the expensive international health plans, and you want a broker rather than a comparison article.
• If you want a guarantee your application clears. Nobody selling insurance can give you that, and neither can I. The decision is the Agency’s.

Three things I checked

1. Does the published medical limit clear ¥10,000,000 today? Converted at a stated rate on a stated date, not “does it sound big”. At the European Central Bank reference rates for 14 September 2026 — ¥154.55 to the US dollar, ¥178.52 to the euro — ¥10,000,000 is about US$64,705 or €56,016. A foreign-currency policy with a limit near that line is exposed to the yen moving, and the yen moves.

2. Does the policy do something on death? Repatriation of mortal remains, or a death benefit. I looked for it on each insurer’s published pages rather than assuming “medical repatriation” covers it, because it doesn’t.

3. Can the policy produce the two documents, with fixed dates? The criterion nobody writes about. It gets its own section below.

The comparison

Currency conversions at ¥154.55/USD and ¥178.52/EUR, ECB reference rates for 14 September 2026. Insurer figures pulled from each company’s own public pages on 3 September 2026 and re-checked, unchanged, on 15 September 2026.

The policies, one by one

SafetyWing Nomad Insurance

Essential is US$62.72 per 4 weeks for ages 18–39, with a US$250,000 overall limit. Both figures were still live on SafetyWing’s own page on 15 September 2026. Six months is 26 weeks, or 6.5 four-week blocks, so the visa-length run costs about US$407.68 at list price — roughly ¥63,000, or about $2.24 a day.

Against limb one, US$250,000 is about ¥38.6 million at the 14 September rate — roughly four times the threshold, so yen movement doesn’t put it near the line. A US$70,000 policy stops clearing at ¥10,000,000 ÷ 70,000 = ¥142.86. On 2 September it was worth ¥11.2 million, clearing by 12%; twelve days later, ¥10.8 million and 8%. The policy didn’t change; a 3.2% slide in the dollar took a third of its headroom.

Against limb two, SafetyWing’s coverage table lists, under “Arrangements in the event of your death,” US$20,000 for transport and US$10,000 for local burial. That’s a published repatriation-of-remains benefit, which is the limb most policies are vague about. There’s no stipulated minimum on the death side, so the small figure isn’t the point — its presence is.

The detail that matters most here is not on any list of benefits. SafetyWing’s default product is a rolling subscription that renews every four weeks, and “it renews until I cancel” is not something you can write in a box marked 保険期間満了日. The fix is in the pricing panel: a “Pay in full for specific dates” option, from 4 weeks to 364 days, with a 10% discount. Six months bought that way runs about US$367 instead of US$408, and — the larger half — it has a start date and an end date, which is what the application form needs (see below). This is a SafetyWing-specific trap rather than a general one: Genki writes its cover as an Insurance Period with a defined End Date from the outset.

Cons, stated plainly. Essential excludes pre-existing conditions, maternity and cancer treatment — it’s travel medical cover, not health insurance. Home-country coverage is limited to 30 days, and US coverage is a paid extra, which is irrelevant if you’re going to Japan. And the published price is the 18–39 band; the calculator has separate bands above 40 that I could not pull from the page source, so if you’re over 40, run it yourself before believing my per-day maths.

Who it’s for: the standard case. Under 40, healthy, six months, wants the cheapest thing that clears both limbs on paper with fixed dates on the certificate.

Check SafetyWing’s current Nomad Insurance pricing

Complete is US$177.50 a month for the same age band — about US$1,065 for six months, two and a half times Essential. It adds routine and emergency care worldwide, cancer treatment, mental health support and no home-country restriction. For a six-month visa run it’s more insurance than the rule asks for, and it earns its price only if you were going to carry year-round cover anyway.

Genki Traveler

Traveler is travel health insurance with a €1,000,000 overall limit — about ¥178.5 million, comfortably over limb one — with a €50 deductible per case and no deductible for inpatient stays. Squarelife is the insurer; Genki is the agent and policyholder of the group contract.

Traveler’s marketing page is where limb two nearly caught me out. It lists medical repatriation — “a medically necessary return transport to your home country,” a living-patient benefit — and says nothing about mortal remains. The Genki Native page does list “Repatriation: transport of mortal remains to another country”, noting it “can be important for visa applications.” Read only the product pages and you’d conclude the benefit is on Native and missing from Traveler.

It isn’t. Genki publishes Traveler’s full Insurance Conditions as a plain PDF, and §2.2 of the 1 June 2025 edition ticks both:

✔ Repatriation of Your mortal remains to Your Home Country. Your family is covered for returning Your body to Your Home Country in case of Your death.

So Traveler clears limb two in the 約款 — the exact document the application asks for. One condition attaches: it “must be managed by the Emergency Assistance or the Insurer,” so a family that arranges transport privately and claims afterwards is outside the wording.

Genki doesn’t publish a Traveler price without a quote, which is why the table above has a blank there. Other notes: a 14-day waiting period during which only emergencies are covered if you’re already abroad with no prior cover, and the usual exclusions — no dental except accidents, no mental health care, no maternity, no preventive care.

Who it’s for: people who want a European-style health insurance structure with a very high medical ceiling, and who would rather read a policy document than a benefits grid.

Genki Native

The international health insurance tier. Basic is €189 a month in Genki’s published example (age 30, no deductible), Premium €273. Basic carries a €1 million per-year limit; Premium has no overall limit and adds maternity, dental, vision, mental health, preventive and alternative care. Both explicitly list transport of mortal remains.

Six months of Basic is about €1,134 — roughly ¥202,000, or three times SafetyWing Essential. Premium is about €1,638, near ¥292,000. Native has a one-year minimum, so it isn’t a six-month product at all; it’s a “this is my insurance now” product that happens to satisfy a six-month visa condition along the way.

Who it’s for: nomads with no health insurance anywhere who have decided to fix that permanently. Not a sensible way to buy six months.

World Nomads

Well known, widely recommended for Japan trips, and I could not verify it for this purpose. Limits vary by country of residence, and World Nomads doesn’t publish a benefit table without a quote — the plans-and-benefits URL returned a 404 on 3 September 2026. So when a guide tells you flatly that World Nomads meets Japan’s ¥10 million rule, ask which country’s wording they read. To use them: get your quote, download the policy document for your residence, check both limbs yourself.

The credit card you already have

This is the option English guides skip and Japanese immigration explicitly permits. The Agency’s required-documents list says, in the Japanese original: if the insurance attached to a credit card can cover the required content, submit materials proving that coverage.

So it’s allowed. It’s just rarely sufficient. Card-attached travel medical benefits are built for trip-length emergencies, and the treatment-cost limits on mainstream cards tend to land far below US$64,705, often by an order of magnitude. Two other traps: card cover frequently only activates if you paid for the trip on that card, and it’s typically capped at 30, 60 or 90 days per trip — against a stay of up to 182 days.

Who it’s for: almost nobody as a primary policy. But pull your card’s benefit guide before you buy anything else. It costs nothing to check, and it occasionally covers an accompanying spouse in a way that saves a second premium.

Japanese domestic visitor policies

Japan’s own insurers sell 訪日外国人旅行保険 (inbound visitor travel insurance), and it fits the rule better than anything else here: designed around Japanese hospital billing, commonly offering coverage up to ¥10 million, with Japanese-language medical interpretation and cashless settlement so the hospital bills the insurer instead of you at the counter. If your only concern were being ill in Japan, this category would win on merit.

There is one structural problem, and it’s on the Japan Tourism Agency’s own page: this insurance can be purchased after you arrive, and the page carries the footnote “Cannot be accessed before entering Japan.”

The visa doesn’t work in that order: you need proof of insurance at the Certificate of Eligibility or visa stage, before you enter. So the category best suited to the medical risk is largely unavailable at the moment you must prove you bought it. Some inbound products do sell to overseas buyers, but you’d check each one individually, in Japanese, against your timeline.

Who it’s for: a top-up after arrival if you want the interpretation and cashless-billing services. Not a substitute for the policy you show immigration.

The paperwork trap nobody mentions

The Agency’s document list asks for two things about your insurance, not one:

1. 民間医療保険の補償内容に係る説明書 — an “Explanation of Coverage under Private Medical Insurance,” on the Agency’s own bilingual template.
2. 民間医療保険の加入証書及び約款の写し — a copy of your certificate of enrolment and the policy wording.

I downloaded the template. It’s short, and every field on it is a test:

• Name of the insurance company, name of the insurance plan.
• Insurance effective date and insurance expiry date, both in dd/mm/yyyy — with the note “The insurance coverage must be valid for the duration of stay in Japan.”
• Coverage amount for medical expenses, with tick-boxes for an amount or “Unlimited,” and the note that it must be more than ¥10 million.
• Death benefit or repatriation costs in case of death (死亡保険金又は遺体の本国搬送費用), amount or “Unlimited.”
• “Please attach the documents that verify the above information.”

Three practical consequences. First, that expiry-date field is why a fixed-date policy is easier to evidence than a rolling monthly subscription. Second, the form has a dedicated death box, so a policy that’s silent on death leaves you with a blank you can’t fill. Third — and this is the one that catches people — the Agency wants the 約款, the full policy wording, not a one-page summary certificate. Before you pay any insurer, confirm they will give you a downloadable policy document, in a language you can submit with a Japanese translation attached.

Which one, by situation

Under 40, healthy, going for the full six months, want the cheapest policy that clears both published limbs with clean dates. SafetyWing Nomad Insurance Essential, bought with the pay-in-full option for your exact dates: about US$367 after the 10% discount, a US$250,000 medical limit sitting around four times the threshold, and a published mortal-remains benefit.

Over 40. Same reasoning, different price. Run SafetyWing’s calculator for your band before you commit; I won’t guess at numbers I couldn’t retrieve.

You have no health insurance anywhere and want to solve that permanently. Genki Native Basic, and treat the visa condition as a side effect. It costs roughly three times as much and it’s a one-year minimum, so only choose it if the year is the point.

You want the highest medical ceiling for a six-month stay. Genki Traveler: €1,000,000, and both limbs are in a policy document you can download and attach. Get the quote, because they don’t publish the price.

Bringing a spouse or child. Check the family-coverage route first. The Agency’s document list allows a dependant’s requirement to be met through the main applicant’s policy where family coverage applies — you submit evidence of that policy’s scope instead of buying a second one.

See what SafetyWing Nomad Insurance covers

Before you buy anything

Three things, in this order.

Read the Agency’s Q&A PDF yourself. It’s eleven questions, it exists in English, and it holds the death-cover condition, the sole-trader income test, and the fact that if you’re outside Japan you apply directly at an embassy or consulate because there’s nobody here who can act as your agent. Ten minutes, and it outranks every guide including this one.

Download the coverage-explanation template before you choose a policy, not after. The blanks on that form are the actual specification.

Then check both limbs against the wording of the policy you’re about to buy, converted at the day’s rate. Everything here was accurate to its source on 3 September 2026 — prices move, the yen moves, insurers rewrite policy wordings without telling anyone. The published rule is the fixed point. Nothing else on this page is.

Sources

Government sources, all retrieved 3 September 2026 and re-checked on publication day, 17 September 2026 (all thirteen URLs below still resolve; the quoted wording is unchanged):

• Immigration Services Agency, 在留資格「特定活動」（デジタルノマド…） — moj.go.jp
• Immigration Services Agency, Status of Residence of “Designated Activities” (for Digital Nomad / Spouse or child of Digital Nomad) — moj.go.jp
• Immigration Services Agency, Q&A (English edition, as of July 2024) — moj.go.jp
• Immigration Services Agency, Q&A (Japanese, 令和6年7月時点) — moj.go.jp
• Immigration Services Agency, デジタルノマド向け在留資格について (outline) — moj.go.jp
• Immigration Services Agency, 対象国・地域一覧 (country list PDF) — moj.go.jp
• Immigration Services Agency, Explanation of Coverage under Private Medical Insurance / 民間医療保険の補償内容に係る説明書 (template) — moj.go.jp
• Japan Tourism Agency / JNTO, travel insurance guidance for visitors (linked as reference material from the Agency’s digital nomad page) — jnto.go.jp
• Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Health Policy Science research programme, 外国人患者の受入れのための医療機関向けマニュアル (FY2018 research; copy retrieved from Saitama Prefecture) — pref.saitama.lg.jp

Insurer sources, retrieved 3 September 2026 and re-checked 4, 15 and 17 September 2026 — every premium and limit quoted here was identical on all four dates:

• SafetyWing Nomad Insurance — safetywing.com
• Genki Traveler — genki.world
• Genki Traveler, Insurance Conditions (36pp, edition dated 1 June 2025) — genki.world
• Genki Native — genki.world
• World Nomads (plans-and-benefits URL returned 404) — worldnomads.com

Exchange rates: European Central Bank reference rates for 14 September 2026, ¥154.55/USD and ¥178.52/EUR (derived from the ECB’s euro reference rates: ¥178.52/EUR ÷ US$1.1551/EUR). The 2 September rates used in the first draft were ¥159.60/USD and ¥184.78/EUR. Re-checked on publication day: the ECB’s latest available reference rates, for 16 September 2026, give ¥155.05/USD (¥178.88/EUR ÷ US$1.1537/EUR) — 0.3% from the figures used above, so the yen conversions have been left as they stand rather than re-cut for a rounding-level move.