The sealed bags are gone in 2026 — tax-free food, drinks, medicine, and cosmetics now go home in whatever bag you like, no tamper-proof plastic required. That freedom is exactly what makes this trap easy to walk into: the snack box you tear open on the train, the face mask you try on at the hotel, the throat lozenge you take because your flight’s tomorrow — each one is a refund decision that’s easy to make without noticing.
The rule, and what to do if you broke it
- Treat tax-free food, drink, medicine, and cosmetics as sealed until you’re through customs. Even without the old sealed bags forcing the point, the rule is strict: consume or use any part of it and customs can no longer confirm it’s leaving Japan — and even a merely opened package invites doubt about what’s missing.
- Put trip supplies and tax-free purchases on separate receipts. If you know you’ll eat, drink, or use something before you fly, buy it as a normal taxed purchase, not through the tax-free (registered) checkout, so it never shares a receipt with items you actually want the refund on.
- Worn or used non-consumables are fine. A jacket you’ve worn all week or a camera you’ve been shooting with the whole trip still qualifies, as long as it leaves Japan with you. The rule targets food, drink, medicine, and cosmetics, not everything you’ve touched.
- If you did consume part of something, don’t run the kiosk procedure. Go straight to the customs staff counter and tell them what happened. This is NTA’s stated procedure for exactly this situation, not a confession booth — see at the kiosk for how the normal process works.
- Expect the whole receipt containing the consumed item to be at stake. Everything else on that same receipt is now at risk too, even items you never touched. Purchases from other stores, on other receipts, aren’t affected.
Show this in Japanese日本語カードを表示 — hand your phone to the staff
店員・係員のみなさまへ:外国からのお客様がこのカードを提示しています。
【状況】
免税購入した消耗品(食品・化粧品等)の一部を、出国前に国内で消費してしまった旅行者です。端末での手続きはまだ行っていません。
【お願い】
この場合の持出確認の手続きについて、ご案内をお願いします。
【公式情報】
Why one bite can cost the whole receipt
The refund pays for goods that verifiably left Japan, not for the fact that you bought them. Customs confirms that at departure by matching what’s in your hands to what’s on your receipt, and a half-eaten box of sweets or a mostly-used tube of sunscreen can’t be confirmed as leaving the country intact, because there’s no way to verify what’s already gone.
That failure doesn’t stay contained to the one item you consumed. The customs check runs per purchase record, essentially one receipt, and the NTA’s own worked example shows what that means: one receipt covering Item A at ¥3,000, Item B at ¥75,000, and Item C at ¥13,000, ¥91,000 in total. In that example, the traveler no longer has Item C at the check, and the result is that none of the three items gets confirmed, not just C. The same logic applies if Item C is a box of crackers you finished on the train instead of a missing item: customs can’t confirm it, so the whole ¥91,000 receipt fails.
In practice, the danger isn’t eating one souvenir snack, it’s that the snack shared a receipt with your expensive items. Separate receipts contain the damage to just the receipt with the problem, so buying anything you plan to eat or use during the trip as a normal taxed purchase, off the tax-free receipt entirely, is the simplest way to make sure a broken habit on day two doesn’t cost you the refund on day six’s electronics.
For the basics of what qualifies at all, see eligible items; the official pages below cover both rules in full.