Chinese lifting of ban on group tours fails to hike visitor numbers

China's lifting of a long ban on group tours to Japan in August failed to boost foreign tourist numbers as Beijing's total ban on Japanese seafood imports began the same month.

Visitor numbers for August saw a total of 2,156,900 foreign arrivals, according to figures released on Sept. 20 by the Japan National Tourism Organization.  

The total was 85.6 percent of the number of foreign tourists in August 2019 before the novel coronavirus pandemic disrupted travel. 

While Beijing lifted its ban on group tours on Aug. 10, it also imposed the total ban on seafood on Aug. 24, the same day Tokyo Electric Power Co. began discharging treated radioactive water into the ocean from the grounds of its crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

The seafood import ban likely put a chill on Chinese group tours to Japan because there were only 364,100 tourists from China in August, which was just 36.4 percent of the number of Chinese tourists who arrived in August 2019.

But the August figure represented an improvement over July of 6.6 percentage points.

In all of 2019, there were 9.59 million Chinese tourists visiting Japan, representing about a third of all foreign tourists coming here. Of that number of Chinese tourists, about a third came on group tours.

After the COVID-19 scare, group tours from China were banned from January 2020.

With a relaxation of COVID-19-related restrictions by March 2023, group tours to about 60 nations resumed, but Japan was not one of those destinations.

Besides Chinese visitors, there were 1,792,800 foreign tourists visiting Japan in August. That figure was 18 percent higher than the number for August 2019. August marked the second consecutive month that visitor numbers exceeded pre-COVID-19 levels.

By nation, South Korea provided the most tourists with 569,100, followed by Taiwan with 396,300, China in third place and Hong Kong with 206,300.