Covid-19 Vaccination in Japan

Well, I was not expecting this, but I had my first shot of the Moderna vaccine through my employer on Wednesday. This post is going to describe that experience in the hope that it will be useful/interesting for people in Japan who are hoping to get vaccinated soon.

Routes to vaccination

As far as I understand, there are currently four ways to get a Covid-19 vaccination in Japan.

  1. At a local clinic, after receiving a vaccination voucher from your local government
  2. At a mass vaccination center, after receiving a vaccination voucher from your local government
  3. Through your employer (no voucher required)
  4. At a local clinic, having signed up for a waiting list (voucher may or may not be required)

The first option is still only available to the elderly in most locations, although some places are moving a bit quicker. The second option now seems to be open to anyone, except that many local governments have not sent out vouchers to everyone yet. Hopefully that will happen soon.

I think option 3 was a fantastic idea from the government, as it is likely to speed up vaccinations considerably. There are now plenty of vaccines in Japan, the main bottleneck now seems to be the public reservation and delivery systems.

By allowing companies and universities to run their own vaccination programs in-house, this scheme should take a lot of the pressure off the public sites. It will also hopefully encourage more people to get vaccinated -imagine turning down the vaccine at work only to get Covid a couple of months later and shut down the office. A near untenable situation for most company workers.

Vaccination through your employer

My university had been in the news a lot as one of the ones that would be vaccinating students and staff, so it wasn’t a surprise when I got an email last week announcing the program and encouraging teaching staff to get vaccinated as soon as possible in order to encourage the students to do so too.

Registration was incredibly smooth: log into the university website with my regular ID and choose a date/time from a dropdown list. The second shot was automatically scheduled for the same day/time four weeks later. That was it, and it took less than a minute.

I got an email confirmation, along with two very short forms to fill out and take with me on the day. The forms were in Japanese but we were also sent an English guide to filling them out.

On the day

It kind of reminded me of the tax office in peak season: hundreds of temp staff and a system designed to hurry thousands of people through a somewhat complex process by breaking it into bite-sized pieces.

There were at least ten different ‘stations’ to check things, help you complete paperwork, or have you wait for various things. My time slot was 11:30-11:45, I arrived at 11:28 or so, had my injection at 11:44, and was on my way by 12:00. Very smooth indeed.

The injection itself was incredibly quick: felt like it took less than a second. The dose is small (0.5ml) and they inject it into the muscle at the top of the arm, so there is no messing around looking for a vein or anything.

After the injection you are asked to sit and wait for a bit (15 minutes or 30 minutes) to see if you experience any severe side effects. If not, you are then free to go.

My arm felt a bit sore a few hours later, but I didn’t notice any other side effects. The next day it was less sore, and now three days later the pain is barely noticeable.

I’ll have my second shot four weeks after the first, and will be fully protected two weeks after that. Seems kind of unreal after the last fifteen months.

Vaccine hesitancy

I’ve seen a lot more vaccine hesitancy in Japan than I was expecting. The TV news doesn’t seem to be helping either, as they appear to be trying to be as fair as possible by listing all possible side effects, listening sympathetically to people who distrust the vaccines, and completely failing to make the case for vaccination across the community. Eerily reminiscent of Brexit. And social media is… ay ay ay.

Hopefully this will improve as more people get their jabs uneventfully and the benefits of being vaccinated (easier travel, access to events and services, etc.) become clearer.

I’m doing my best to encourage my students and friends. With some luck we’ll be able to start moving on from Covid sometime next year.

29 Responses

  1. Getting my second about three hours from now, fingers crossed on the possible reaction. (pfizer)

      1. Well, you’re the lucky one! Still don’t for my invitation. Maybe autumn this year?

      2. Second was virtually the same as the first–my arm -may- have been slightly more tender overnight (vs the first), but otherwise nothing. No fever, not ‘knocked back’ for a day of two (as some people say), none of that. (again, this the Pfizer shot)

        Also, was to a hospital this morning for some otherwise normally scheduled blood work, this would be almost exactly 48hrs after the shot. CRP (0.43) and creatine (1.03) were slightly high, I suppose due to the shot. But I think those are close enough to normal that in other circumstances the levels could be attributed to many other things.

      3. I had the same reaction to the first Modern shot as you. I got the second shot about a month ago and the following day was not great. Felt like a bad flu was starting, some fever and chills and very tired. The day after that was fine, everything back to normal. My wife was the same , without the fever.
        Not a big deal, but if you can, it might be a good idea to not have anything too important lined up for the day following the shot.

  2. If no voucher is needed for vaccination at universities and place of employment; how are they tracking who has been done and who hasn’t? Do you need to show you Residence card or My Number card at the university?

    1. No, we have employee or student numbers because we work/study there. HR/admin make lists and run the registration process.

      When we eventually get issued with vouchers from local government, we’re supposed to submit them to the university and they will do the paperwork.

  3. I was offered a vaccination shot at my part-time job at a private university, but could not accept it since it is on a day that I cannot go. My national university should be making the vaccinations available in July .

  4. Hi Ben, thanks for the detailed walk-through. My uni seems to start with vaccination at the end of the month. I think it might help some people to alleviate the stress from not knowing how is it going to happen, how long it takes etc. With your comment on fair media you inspired a thought that if there is (for example) 1% of people with severe side effects, it would be fair to get 1% of the news time for that. After all, news are full (at least in my country) of car crashes and dead and I haven’t heard anyone saying, yeah I don’t buy a car or go by a car, cos it can kill you!

    1. The figure I hear a lot is that 200 people died after getting the vaccine in Japan. Now, this is not ‘died from the vaccine’ although a lot of people seem to be interpreting it that way.

      Japan has done almost 30m shots so far, which means that 0.00066% of people happened to die after getting vaccinated. Seems entirely within random death kind of range.

      1. I consider traffic deaths as a useful statistic to compare to Covid; on average 8 people die in Japan each day and many more suffer life-changing injuries as a result of traffic crashes, yet you will never hear people talk about car hesitancy.

  5. Thanks for the informative write-up.

    I’m still reeling from missing a priority round of vaccinations for school staff. The office staff at my school made a mistake with my date of birth. This was enough to have the city completely reject my participation in the first round. Utterly frustrating! So if anyone is in the same boat please keep on top of your employers on this – imagine they work for SBI!

    1. Oh, that must be incredibly frustrating. Sorry to hear.
      Hopefully they can get that sorted out for you soon.

  6. Governments around the world really need to do better at promoting the benefits of being vaccinated I feel. This is where I expect the business community to become even more vocal over coming months. It’s not sustainable for businesses to have their employees quarantining/self isolating for two weeks (or more in some cases) every time they need to travel. I can’t imagine how airlines are managing their flight crews that need to quarantine after each flight into Australia, for example. But it seems that for governments to restrict the politically approved position of keeping their citizens safe by forcing everyone into some form of quarantine/self isolation, we’re going to need to have a large majority of populations vaccinated. Once that starts to ramp up I strongly hope business leads the drive to reopen international borders. From that perspective, I agree that opening up vaccinations at work was a master stroke. But my wife is a nurse at a large company in Tokyo, and the decision has thrown their world into chaos! There’s massive questions of who will take responsibility of anyone has a reaction (most companies lack the medical facilities to deal with reactions in a timely manner, so the equipment and medication need to be sourced and available onsite). It’s meant that any other normal day to day work has been put on hold to prioritise this. Many companies are outsourcing it external health clinics, and the costs for those services have SKYROCKETED since the government announced this policy. And those costs are borne by the company; there’s no government support for them to cover the costs. I maintain the benefits will flow to them eventually and the ROI will be proven, or even that the government may allow some sort of tax deduction for those costs. But it’s a typical example of Japanese policy making on the run without much consideration for how the people at the coal face will have to implement it. Not that I disagree with it, but I do think it could have been thought through and planned a little better before announcing it.

    1. I get the feeling the company vaccination thing was not planned from the start, but was a reaction to the poor initial public roll out, the widespread criticism, and the plunging government popularity numbers 😉

      Hence the rather ad hoc implementation.

    1. My neighbour, an otherwise intelligent businesswoman, has become convinced that the vaccines are a slow-acting poison that will kill all recipients within five years, as a planned culling of the Earth’s population.
      This time last year she was telling me about some white paper that would expose the truth about the Clinton, Bush and Obama families and take down all the Jewish bankers, while Mr. Trump would kindly continue “cleaning” for us, which I assuming is the Japanese version of the “drain the swamp” trope.

      Putting aside the loony extremes though, Japan has had a history of dud vaccines so the population’s wariness is somewhat understandable.
      https://www.asiapacific.ca/publication/japans-vaccine-hesitancy-implications-covid-olympics

  9. My university will start vaccinating soon but only teachers that have to go to hospitals or care homes as part of student work experience can get it. The rest of the teaching staff and admin are ineligible!

    1. Sorry to hear that! Hopefully they will expand the program soon, or the public sites will catch up to younger age groups.

  10. Thanks for the very timely information, before my first Moderna on Wednesday.

    Our local government office will not be sending out local area vouchers till the end of this month. But under pressure from citizens, it suddenly started issuing special vouchers to those who went to the local city office and queued up, only valid for the mass-vax center in Otemachi.

    With that mass-vax voucher, it was then possible to log in to the government’s booking website at
    https://www.vaccine.mrso.jp/sdftokyo/VisitNumbers/visitnoAuth/

    This site showed all slots fully booked for 10 days ahead, impossible to book beyond that. With 10 days x 10,000 daily shots = 100,000, a few cancellations suddenly appear as a triangle. It took several hours of rapid clicking to secure one of these, amid nationwide competition. Difficult, but possible if you’re lucky.

    So, if you’re desperate to get vaccinated, it may be worth asking your local city office if they can issue you a voucher for the mass-vax centers in Tokyo and Osaka.

    ** Another possibility is, if you have already received a regular voucher from your local city office but cannot get a booking locally, you may be able to transfer your desired jabbing locality, e.g. to a relative’s address in the quiet countryside, where it’s generally easier to get an appointment.

  11. I’ve had both vaccinations but I do feel some skepticism – the speed at which the vaccine has gone through trials and the big money behind it. Ultimately, we all have to decide these things for ourselves. The extreme alternative to that would be forced vaccinations – surely unacceptable.

    1. I don’t think anyone is proposing forced vaccinations, but I would like to see better messaging and opening up certain things to people who have been vaccinated. The US is currently doing big concerts only for fully vaccinated people, which makes sense to me. I’d like to see something similar for planes, etc. At least give me the choice to be on a fully vaccinated plane 😉

  12. Hi, Ben! Up here in Iwate, I received an envelope with forms to fill out and vaccine info from the city on March 31st . Since my doctor is also my student, I gave them to her at our next class and she immediately filled them out and said she would have her staff hold them. Then I went in for a BP check/Rx renewal about a month ago and the nurse handed me an appointment form for the vaccine. I had my first shot this past Friday and have an appt for the next one in July, three weeks later. The location was a small hospital next to my doc’s clinic. It was busy but everything was organized and efficient, plenty of people to help. In and out in 30 minutes! No reactions except for a sore injection site the next day. I’m very grateful for all of this, especially my doctor! She’s 81, had her two shots, and is still going strong!