Relief and concern as Japan opens to tourists

Travel bosses happy, but others worry too many visitors will cause disruption

Relief and delight swept Japan’s travel sector after the country reopened to tourists without restrictions from today, although there was concern that the weak yen would bring in too many visitors.

Travellers no longer need to obtain a visa or submit a negative PCR test to enter the country, while the 50,000-a-day limit on arrivals has been abolished.

“We are delighted,” said Masaru Takayama, president of the Kyoto-based Spirit of Japan Travel. “The entire industry welcomes this development because it has been a very long and very hard three years for the sector.”

Takayama said his company had been “inundated” with requests for information from prospective travellers as well as bookings, including a good number of reservations that are being made “several months in advance”.

Kumiko Yamada, from Kagawa’s Tourism Promotion Division, echoed that optimism for operators and venues in Japan’s smallest prefecture.

“It is going to be really good to be able to have more foreign visitors back in Japan and to be able to welcome them once more. The last few years have been difficult, but we are confident that Kagawa has lots of things to do and see for foreign tourists,” she said.

Last week Google said Japan was the most-searched travel destination by Australians.

David Galt, CEO of online travel agent Webjet OTA, told Kyodo News that bookings by Australians for Japan had rocketed by 322 per cent in the five days after September 23, the date Tokyo announced that travel restrictions would be scrapped on October 11.

South Korea is also reporting a sharp spike in interest for holidays in Japan, with the country’s largest travel agency Hana Tour reporting a 1,031.8 per cent surge in bookings immediately after the announcement about travel restrictions ending, the Chosun newspaper reported.

Takayama said, however, that there were already the first murmurings of concern in Kyoto that the city may well return to the pre-pandemic days of overtourism, when local residents began to resent the huge numbers of visitors clogging up public transport and not always adhering to Japanese etiquette on disposing of rubbish or keeping quiet in the evenings.

“I think that overtourism could be a problem as the weak yen has made Japan a very affordable destination all of a sudden, and I’m not sure that we should be appealing to the budget end, the mass-market of the travel spectrum if we want to have the right balance in our travel industry,” he said.

Tourist spending in Japan came to 4.8 trillion yen (HK$259 billion) in 2019, but collapsed to 120 billion yen last year.