Buying a SIM card at Narita Airport (NRT)

The counters, and exactly where they are

Narita's SIM retail is better developed than almost any airport in our data, and specific enough to plan around.

NTT Docomo has counters in Terminal 1 arrivals on B1F, past customs, and in Terminal 2 arrivals on B1F. Open 6am to 11pm. Staff serve in English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

SoftBank is in Terminal 2 arrivals on 1F, open 7am to 10pm. Its counter supports eSIM as well as physical SIMs, which is worth knowing if you want a Japanese carrier's own eSIM rather than a travel one.

Both sell data-only tourist plans — data, no calls. A passport is required, because Japan registers prepaid SIMs to an identified buyer. That is the rule nationwide, not a Narita quirk, and it is why the transaction takes longer here than in countries with no ID requirement.

We hold nothing for Terminal 3. Not a counter, not a machine, not an opening hour. If you are arriving on a low-cost carrier, assume you will be walking to another terminal or arriving with your data already sorted.

Machines that work when the counters are shut

IIJmio and b-mobile vending machines sit in Terminals 1 and 2, running 24 hours. English menus, no staff involved: press the buttons, insert a card, take the SIM. The selection is basic data-only plans rather than anything configurable.

For a flight landing at 1am this is the only option we can name at Narita, and it is a genuinely good one — no queue, no language barrier, no waiting for 6am. It is also the answer to the most common failure at this airport, which is arriving outside counter hours and assuming nothing exists.

The queue, hour by hour

Our figures split cleanly by time of day.

• Off-peak — 6 to 9am, and 9pm to midnight: 5 to 10 minutes. Fine.
• Peak — the mid-morning Korean and Chinese flight banks, and the evening North American arrivals: 20 to 30 minutes.
• High-volume days — summer peak, Golden Week, cherry blossom season: the Docomo queue specifically can push 40 minutes. The SoftBank queue is usually shorter.

That last point is the practical one. If you land in Terminal 2 during cherry blossom season and the Docomo line is long, SoftBank is in the same terminal on a different floor and is generally quicker.

NRT-Free-Wi-Fi covers the terminals in 3-hour renewable sessions — enough to configure an eSIM on arrival, or download offline maps while you wait for luggage.

What you pay, and what the same money buys online

Our data puts a typical Japanese airport SIM at around $12. That is low by international standards; Japan's airport counters are not the mark-up operation they are in some countries.

Here is what a complete Japanese data package costs bought before you fly, every row read from the seller's own site:

We used to say Japan was one of the few markets where the ladder genuinely stops, with 20GB the largest metered plan any seller offered and about $1.25 a gigabyte the best rate. That held for every seller we had checked, but Nomad's prices were then still unread. They have been read since, and Nomad sells 50GB for 30 days at $35 — $0.70 a gigabyte, and the cheapest data in the country by a distance.

Above that, the only option is unlimited, sold by duration rather than allowance: Nomad from $11 for 3 days to $49 for 21, Airalo at $11.50 for 3 days, $27 for a week and $69 for 30 days. Airalo's Japanese product is branded Moshi Moshi at checkout; that is a product name, not a network.

Our eSIM Go and Holafly figures for Japan are indicative and unverified, so treat them as something to check rather than a price to plan around. eSIMCard's rows have been withdrawn: we read its own pages on 18 August 2026, found the figures we held were wrong, and could not store the real ones. See our eSIMCard page.

The one real advantage of buying at Narita

In most countries we would tell you the airport counter is beaten on every measure. Japan is the exception, for one reason: the counters are the only place you know which network you are on.

No travel eSIM seller confirms its Japanese host network. Airalo, Saily and Nomad do not publish one at all. Holafly does not publish one either, in Japan or in any country — the NTT Docomo and SoftBank pairing this page used to carry against it came from our own data, not from Holafly. eSIM Go's own listing points to SoftBank, an unconfirmed claim we have never been able to check in either direction. Buy a SIM at the Docomo counter and you are on Docomo, which has the widest rural and mountain coverage in Japan. If your trip is Tokyo, Kyoto and the Shinkansen between them, this hardly matters. If it involves the Japanese Alps, Tohoku or rural Hokkaido, it might be worth 30 minutes and a passport scan.

Otherwise, install before you fly. From Narita you have the N'EX to Shinjuku in about an hour, the Keisei Skyliner to Ueno in 41 minutes, or the Limousine Bus at around 90 minutes to hotels on its route — all of which are easier with a phone that came online at the gate. Full Japanese plan pricing and the local-SIM comparison are on the Japan hub.