Since Japan will finally allow visa-free travel to independent tourists from 11th October, Japanese media has been running various segments preparing the public for pale-skinned unmasked biohazards wandering the streets and spewing their foreign pathogens upon the high-mindo natives.
So what attempts are being made to convince the Japanese public to accept higher risks of encountering contaminated foreigners?
Yep, the yen has been in the toilet for months, so Japan might as well make the most of it.
So how likely to come true are xenophobic Covidians’ worst fears and the business community’s highest hopes about surging visitor numbers?
Well for a start, according to The Nikkei, the highest hopes aren’t that high.
Admittedly, 0.7% overall isn’t earth shattering, but it enough to get Japan’s hospitality industry excited. But this is the optimist’s case since it’s dependent on visitor numbers soon returning to 50% of their 2019 level. Visitor numbers in August 2022 (169,800) were only 6.7% of those in August 2019, but will bare-faced barbarians soon be invading in large numbers?
Probably not. For one thing, although Japanese TV likes to focus on free-breathing westerners, only 13.5% of tourists in 2019 came from Europe, the Americas, Australia, and the Middle East. Southeast Asia and India sent a similar amount: 12.6%.
For another thing, many potential western tourists will still be put off because 1) Japan continues to insist on Covid theatre, 2) the unboosted still need to play the PCR lottery to enter, and 3) most importantly, Europeans are having a hard enough time paying their energy bills, so I doubt too many will splash out on plane tickets to the far east, which cost twice as much as they did pre-Covid.
So westerners may not be about to flood in, but what about East Asians? After all, the majority of visitors to Japan (70.1%) in 2019 were from the East Asian Gang of Four: China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan. And they’re mask obsessives too, so even xenophobic Covidians should be able to tolerate them. Win-win!
But as you’re no doubt aware, China’s Zero Covid policy means the Chinese find it hard enough to leave the house at any given moment, let alone the country. This is unlucky for the Japanese economy since Chinese visitors accounted for 36.8% of tourist spending in 2019.
Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea are relaxing their testing/quarantine requirements for returning travelers, but it’ll still take a while for inbound travel from those places to reach 50% of 2019. All three are still under varying levels of domestic Covid tyranny, which suppresses the desire to travel to scary plague-ridden lands overseas. For example, outbound travel from Japan itself recovered to only 18.3% of its 2019 level in August even though quarantine requirements were lifted months ago.
So the xenophobic Covidians needn’t worry too much about uncultured westerners breathing unrestrictedly in their general direction, and the business community shouldn’t get its hopes up about the full-scale return of big-spending Chinese or other East Asians just yet.
But even if Japan’s full reopening is an economic anti-climax, it’ll be good to finally put Sakoku 2.0 behind us (for now). It really wasn’t fun while it lasted.