Our DFW-HND JAL flight landed on time around 3.30pm (Saturday) and we booked a separate cash flight from HND to Okinawa that leaves at 5.05PM on the same day. When I looked up online JAL was recommending to leave 2 hours for clearing immigration & customs and I was afraid we may miss the domestic flight. My wife used the Visit Japan Web to fill out all our passport and visit details which saved us a lot of time bypassing the need to fill out the typical immigration cards.
Our Haneda airport immigration & customs experience
When we entered the massive hallway of immigration & customs, there were at least 1000 people and there were long lines. However, the people in the lines were moving quickly, and we reached an agent within 20 minutes who cleared us after taking a picture & scanning the QR code from Visit Japan Web.
After clearing immigration, there is another short line for customs and you can choose to take a digital option for that as well. There are kiosks (see image below) that can take your picture and generate a digital code that enables you to walk out via the dedicated lines. It took us less than 10 minutes to go through this procedure and it would have been half the time if we knew the process before hand.
Inter-terminal bus in Haneda
We cleared immigration & customs within 30 minutes and came outside the airport to take the free shuttle bus to go to the domestic terminal 1. The bus took less than 10 minutes to reach the terminal 1 and we scanned our JAL boarding passes to go through a relatively empty baggage screening area. We had to remove our shoes for the screening, but the overall process was very efficient and we headed to our gate in less than 5 minutes. JAL domestic flight boarding started 15 minutes before the departure time and we had plenty of time to sit and enjoy a snack.
Conclusion
We landed in Haneda airport on a busy Saturday, but clearing the whole immigration & customs routine took less than 30 minutes plus an additional 10-15 minutes for the inter-terminal bus connection and baggage screen. I recommend leaving 1h30min to 2 hours for the connecting flights in case you have to go to the check-in counter to get paper tickets. In our case, we had scan & go JAL domestic tickets purchased with cash and it was easy to get the boarding passes on the mobile app (review).