Though its reopening has come much later than many other nations, Japan sees a big spike in tourist arrivals since it began reopening its borders, albeit in a guarded and phased manner.

According to the latest data released by the Japan National Tourist Organisation (JNTO), the number of foreign tourist arrivals in the country more than doubled in April 2022, as compared to the previous month. JNTO says that 139500 foreign tourists visited the country in April, more than double of the 66,100 arrivals recorded in March, 2022.

The country’s government has also announced several other measures to help the sector return to normalcy after well over two years of a near-total shutdown. It says it will double the limit of foreign arrivals from the current 10,000 per day to 20,000. It also says that 80 pc travellers would not be required to furnish proof of negative Covid-19 tests, nor would they have to quarantine on arrival. This facility is currently available only to people from other G7 nations.

In addition, Japan has also planned to roll out a series of trial package tours, but only open to the residents of four nations – Singapore, Australia, Thailand and the United States — on an experimental basis.

Though it may be opening up, but Japan is being ultra-cautious in moving forward with reopening of borders. Not only is it limiting the experiment to residents of these four countries but there are other conditions as well. For instance, all participants must be triple-vaccinated and the tours must have guides and fixed itineraries, says JNTO. Also, each tour can have a maximum of four people and the entire experiment itself is limited to only 50 persons. The participants will enter Japan on a special visa, not a tourist visa. The results will be used to compile coronavirus guidelines for tour operators, hotels and other related businesses.

Ending blanket ban

Indeed, at a time when most other countries around the world have decided to go ahead and fully reopen their borders and remove most of the checks and controls related to Covid-19 infection, Japan is amongst the few, if not the only nation besides China and Taiwan, that still remains largely closed to most international visitors. Although Japan had recently allowed business travellers, foreign students and academics back, until now it remains closed to tourists, save for the experimental tours that will start now.

It would mark well over two years as Japan had imposed a blanket ban on inbound tourists in April 2020 during the first wave. Since then, the country has remained closed off, leading to immense losses in its tourism and hospitality sectors, that are now resigned to a slow recovery before returning to pre-pandemic levels of sales and traffic. A recent hotels of luxury hotels throughout Japan found that most hotels believed that if there is is no major negative event related to the pandemic, it will take about two years before the industry thrives again thanks to the international visitations.

Just before the clamp down, Japan had witnessed inbound tourism growth for eight consecutive years, with overseas visitors peaking at 32 million arrivals in 2019. This boom was essentially due to loosening of visa rules under the then prime minister Shinzo Abe. Before the pandemic, Japan had expected to continue its good run in 2020 as well since about 40 million visitors were predicted for 2020, the year the Tokyo Olympics were initially scheduled to take place, while the government set a target of 60 million visitors by 2030.

As the Japanese society is largely insular, the border closures have been very popular with the locals. But those in the tourism segment are keen on a rapid return to business as usual, especially as the road to recovery will be a long-drawn one and could well exceed the two years that some players expect.