So there’s been a lot of sharing and tagging of people to “travel” with that came with posts that say Japan is going to pay part of your travel expenses to boost its tourism industry this year.
This is of course nice and all BUT these people are actually IN the Philippines and this planned offer is only for DOMESTIC TRAVEL (based on all sources at the time of this writing) – meaning travel within Japan as opposed to international travel that includes Pinoys who are planning to take advantage of this seemingly out of this world travel offer.
Some of these news agencies claiming international travelers to Japan can avail of such subsidies include Express UK with such outright misleading news headline as:
Maybe if they didn’t put the phrase “here’s how” it would make their article so much better but it’s there merely for the click bait.
Forbes fortunately has a better article on this subject with a screenshot of its headline and first para like so:
The earliest news article on this subject we’ve found (thanks to Tito Tabz Uy for the help) is dated May 20th from the Mainichi (Japanese news company). You can read the full article they wrote here: https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200520/
Unfortunately for us Pinoys, the only way to avail of such planned subsidy is to be ALREADY in Japan by the time this rolls out as this is only for DOMESTIC TRAVEL. Excerp from the Mainichi is concrete about it as you can see below:
Come to think of it, without a vaccine in sight for 2020, there actually is no sense talking about international travel at this point unless of course you have a private jet you are naturally excluded (not to mention you wouldn’t really care about subsidies if that’s the case anyway).
So with that, again, I am sorry to say many of us have once again fell victim to the seemingly common practice of NOT READING the details these days.
Even if the Philippine Star actually mentioned DOMESTRIC tourism on their post as well as the link to the Japan Times source they based the post on, most of those who reacted show they actually have no idea what the post was about besides the fact that their supposed Japan travel goals is supposedly to be paid partially by the Japanese government.
