By Rocky Swift
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan welcomed more than 2 million foreign visitors for the fourth straight month in September, official data showed on Wednesday, marking a near-full return to pre-pandemic levels, although the Chinese market has been slow to recover.
The number of foreign business and leisure visitors rose to 2. 18 million last month, according to data from the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), up from 2. 16 million in August.
Visitor numbers rose to 96. 1% of 2019 degrees before the COVID-19 outbreak prompted restrictions around the world.
Japan ended some of the world’s strictest COVID-19 border restrictions a year ago by resuming visa-waiving for many countries, then scrapped all remaining controls in May.
Arrivals maintained a recovery speed, peaking at 2. 32 million in July, as airlines ramped up overseas flights and the yen’s fall to its lowest level in 33 years made Japan a win-win destination.
“With inflation in the U. S. , everything is outrageously expensive, and coming here is much cheaper,” said John Hardisty, a 48-year-old Hawaiian engineer, recently shopping for groceries in Tokyo. “It’s like a difference between day and night. “night. “
The number of arrivals from 15 markets, including the United States, South Korea and Singapore, reached record levels for the month of September, JNTO said. Travelers from Mexico were a record for any given month.
Strong demand from these markets is helping to offset mainland China’s figures, which are still 60% lower than in 2019, when the Chinese accounted for about a third of all visitors and 40% of all tourist spending in Japan.
Chinese arrivals have declined slightly since August, when Beijing lifted restrictions on organizing travel to Japan. Diplomatic relations have deteriorated following Japan’s decision to discharge treated water from its Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean.
The treated water factor appears to be weighing on Chinese tourism demand, but “the recovery trend is expected to remain unchanged,” Masato Koike, an economist at the Sompo Institute Plus, said in a note.
More than 17 million visitors came to Japan in the first nine months of 2023, according to JNTO data, up from a 2019 record of around 32 million.
(Reporting via Rocky Swift, Chris Gallagher and Miyu Ito in Tokyo; editing by Jamie Freed and Miral Fahmy)
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