The fast ferry to Korea
is gone. This one isn’t.

If you've read that you can hop a hydrofoil to Korea in under four hours, that information is dead.

JR Kyushu ran a high-speed craft on the Hakata–Busan route for decades. Its last ship, the Queen Beetle, was pulled from service after hull leaks were concealed rather than reported, and in April 2025 JR Kyushu sold it to the Busan company Panstar — on condition that it never again sails a Japan–Korea route — and left the business. The Korean-side jetfoil that once shared the run has not come back either. Every English page still describing a 3h40 crossing is describing a service that no longer exists.

What survives is the conventional ferry. Camellia Line's New Camellia is a proper ship rather than a jetfoil: it carries cars, it has cabins, tatami rooms and a bath, and it takes six hours in daylight going out and sits on the strait overnight coming back. That is a different product with a different reason to buy it. You are not saving time; you are buying a crossing, a luggage allowance that laughs at LCC baggage rules, and — on the overnight return — a bed that doubles as a hotel night.

Being right about this is the whole value of this page, which is why it is dated: we re-checked it against Camellia Line's own fare page in October 2026. Fares rose on 1 October 2026 — the cheapest class is now ¥15,000 (~$100) one way, return discounts have been abolished, and the ¥7,200 that still circulates in older guides and aggregator listings is years out of date.

Two separate systems, and travellers keep conflating them. K-ETA — Korea's electronic travel authorisation — is temporarily waived through 31 December 2026 for a list of visa-waiver countries and regions that includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Singapore and Japan — check your own passport on the official K-ETA site. So most Western passport holders on a short visit need no K-ETA in 2026. The waiver has been extended year by year since 2023; for a crossing in January 2027 or later, check the official K-ETA site before you book, because the current extension ends with the year.

The e-Arrival Card is the one that catches people. Korea's arrival declaration is now filed online, free, on the Ministry of Justice's e-Arrival Card portal, from three days before you arrive. K-ETA holders and registered residents don't need it — which means the K-ETA waiver that saves you one step is exactly what puts you in line for the other. Paper cards are being phased out, so don't count on one at Busan port: file it from your hotel in Fukuoka the day before you sail. It takes minutes.

Beyond that: carry your passport (this is an international border crossing, with immigration at both ends), keep some won for incidentals on arrival, and check Japan's tax-free rules if you've been shopping — the money page covers them. Check-in at Hakata runs 10:30–11:30 for the 12:30 sailing.

A same-day return is impossible: the outbound sailing reaches Busan at 18:30 and the only boat back leaves at 22:30 the same evening — four hours ashore, in the dark, after six at sea. The shape that works is sail out at 12:30, a night (or two) in Busan, then the 22:30 overnight back, waking in Hakata at 07:30 — one hotel night plus one night on the ship, bolted to the end of a Fukuoka stay. That's a genuinely appealing trip, and it's the right way to think about a return that starts around ¥35,000 (~$233): it's the price of a leg of your itinerary, not the price of an excursion.

The variant worth knowing: a separate ferry runs between Busan and Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi, from which you work back through Kokura — check that operator's current timetable before planning on it, but it pairs neatly with the Mojiko and Kokura day. And the context that makes all of this feel less exotic than it sounds: Fukuoka and Busan are close neighbours, and Korean visitors are the biggest share of this city's foreign arrivals.

Fukuoka's crowds don't follow Japan's national pattern: about half of all foreign arrivals into Kyushu are South Korean (50.5% in April 2026), with Taiwan next at about 18%, and roughly three in four of Kyushu's foreign arrivals come in through Fukuoka's airport and port. This is Asia's short-break city, not a Western tour-bus stop. Practical consequence: weekends and Korean holidays are the crush; Western-peak months matter less than you'd think.