Hospitals in Japan

Japanese medicine is among the best in the world and Japanese hospitals are among the hardest for a visitor to walk into. The difficulty is not quality or cost but process: most large hospitals expect a referral letter from a clinic and add a surcharge for patients who arrive without one, consultation hours are short and often morning-only, and English is the exception rather than the rule even in Tokyo.

What a traveller needs, then, is not a list of the best hospitals but a list of the ones that will actually see a foreign patient. That is what these pages are: for each city, the hospitals with international departments or English-language services, plus the emergency route, which works differently and is open to everyone.

Cities

All 23 hospitals in Japan

Bed counts are approximate. Tap a name for the full page, or a city for that city’s guide.

How to get seen

For anything that is not an emergency, the intended route is a clinic first, then a hospital if the clinic refers you. Large hospitals levy a surcharge on patients who arrive without a referral letter, and many restrict first-visit consultations to weekday mornings. The hospitals listed on these pages are chosen because they have an international department, English-speaking staff or an established record of treating foreign patients, which makes them the realistic exception. Phone ahead wherever you can: an appointment and a confirmed language arrangement save hours.

What does treatment cost?

Japan’s national health insurance covers residents at roughly seventy per cent, and a visitor is not covered by it. A traveller pays the full amount, and the full amount is high: an ambulance ride is free, but the emergency-room visit behind it is not, and an admission runs to hundreds of thousands of yen. Many hospitals expect payment in cash or by card at the end of the visit and will not bill a foreign insurer directly, so travel insurance is usually pay-and-claim. Ask for an itemised receipt and a medical certificate in English.

Language

The single biggest practical obstacle. Outside the international departments listed here, expect consultations in Japanese and forms in Japanese. The Japan National Tourism Organization runs a 24-hour visitor hotline that can interpret and direct you to a hospital, and several prefectures run their own medical interpretation lines; the AMDA International Medical Information Center has long done the same. Save one of those numbers before you need it, and if a friend or hotel can send someone with you, take them.

Emergencies

Call 119 for an ambulance. The call and the ride are free, the crew will ask a short series of questions, and they choose the hospital — the referral-letter rule does not apply to emergency admissions. If you are not sure whether it is an emergency, the #7119 line in the major cities gives advice on exactly that. Ambulance crews rarely speak English, so a simple sentence naming the problem and your location, or a phone handed to a Japanese speaker, is worth preparing.

Japan travel guide / Japan visa guide / Japan tourist maps / All hospitals

Travel information, not medical advice.

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