Japan just raised visa fees by 400 percent. First increase in 47 years. A single entry visa now costs 15,000 yen instead of 3,000. Multiple entry jumped from 6,000 to 30,000.
They held the price steady since 1979. Gas was a dollar a gallon. A candy bar cost a quarter. Japan looked at inflation, currency fluctuations, and the entire global economy reshaping itself twice over and said nah, three thousand yen is fine.
Then someone in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs apparently opened a spreadsheet for the first time since the Carter administration and had a stroke. Turns out you can just charge more for things. Revolutionary concept. Waited half a century to figure that out.
The official reason is administrative costs have increased. Which makes sense if you ignore that administrative costs have been increasing for 47 consecutive years and they did nothing about it until now. Real bold stuff. Taking decisive action only five decades late.
Retail traders are already panic-searching which forex pairs this affects. None of them. It affects none of them. A visa fee hike does not move currency markets. Your YouTube guru lied to you. The yen will do whatever it was going to do anyway, and you will lose money on it for completely unrelated reasons.
Some guy named Trevor who day-trades from his studio apartment in Denver is currently calculating how this impacts his USD/JPY position. It doesn't, Trevor. You are not visiting Japan. You are not applying for a visa. This has nothing to do with you. You are going to blow up your account on a Thursday because you overleveraged a trade during Tokyo hours while you should have been sleeping.
Japan held visa fees flat for 47 years and raised them 400 percent in one move. That is not a policy adjustment. That is someone realizing they forgot to do their job since 1979 and hoping nobody notices if they fix it all at once.
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