http:\/\/www.terrie.com<\/a>)
\nGeneral Edition Sunday, June 17, 2007 Issue No. 425<\/b><\/p>\nTourism is important for any country, both in terms of foreign exchange
\nearned and the goodwill that a delighted visitor shares with friends and
\nfamily once they get back home. Japan is no exception, and in 2005 the
\nnation earned about JPY55trn (US$45bn) in tourist yen, in addition to
\nthe sector employing about 4.6m people. That’s about 10% of the GDP and
\n8% of the work force respectively. So when the country saw its
\ndesirability as a tourist destination sink to around 45th place by
\npollees in the USA back in the early 2000’s, it was no wonder that
\nthen-PM Junichi Koizumi, famously declared a national goal of increasing
\nthe number of tourists visiting Japan from 5.21m to 10m by 2010.<\/p>\n
The government department in charge of increasing tourism was the
\nMinistry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport, which came up with the
\nYokoso Japan campaign. We fired arrows in Terrie’s Take at the campaign
\nwhen it was first announced, not least of which because “Yokoso” means
\nnothing to anyone who doesn’t speak Japanese — i.e., 95% of tourists.
\nThe bureaucrats had a field day telling the Japanese public how they had
\nthis great plan, but then the reality was that they allocated a trifling
\namount, we heard a budget of just JPY350m, for marketing and chose
\nDentsu over a number of better qualified foreign firms to conduct the
\ncampaign. As a result, most of the Yokoso campaign has been little more
\nthan local ads, in Japanese! Compare the piffling JPY350m with Hawaii’s
\ntourism marketing budget of US$38m (JPY4.5bn) a year, and you start to
\nrealize that the Japanese government has no idea how to go about the
\ntask of increasing visitor numbers.<\/p>\n
Despite the government’s cheapskate efforts to focus marketing on
\ncountries they think tourists should come from: mainly the USA, UK, and
\nother western nations, the number of visitors has in fact surprisingly
\nbeen rising — but from countries receiving very little attention (with
\nthe possible exception of Korea) — Japan’s nearest neighbors.<\/p>\n
Of the 7.33m tourists who visited Japan in 2006, up about 600,000 over
\n2005, 71% came from Asia. More than 2.2m people, or 29%, flew or ferried
\nin from South Korea, up 21% over last year. In second slot were 1.3m
\nTaiwanese, comprising 17.8% of total visitors, followed by 810,000
\nChinese nationals and 820,000 Americans, comprising around 11.1% each.
\nThe number of Chinese has soared 25% in just the last 12 months thanks
\nto an easing in the issuance of tour group visas from that country.
\nSouth Koreans and Taiwanese have had relaxed visa rules since 2005 and
\nthe Aichi Expo, and this has substantially increased their numbers as
\nwell.<\/p>\n
You could think of the government’s fixation on the West as racial bias,
\nor more likely an indication of its inability to change its thinking on
\nwho globally has money to travel these days. Friends in Kyushu tell us
\nthat the locals there have no such illusions, and restaurants, souvenir
\nshops, tour companies, and hotels are quickly putting up Korean and
\nChinese menus to cater for the surge of new tourists entering Japan for
\na few days of comfort and pampering. Maybe in a few years time, the
\nTransport Ministry will be filled in by someone from the Japan Hotel
\nAssociation as to just who is really booking the hotel rooms every
\nweekend.<\/p>\n
This same fixation with where tourists should be coming from also
\npermeates Japan’s big travel and hotel companies. We find it laughable
\nthat traditional Japanese tour and accommodation operators are cutting
\ncosts and services, and lamenting that their massive losses are due to
\npoor tourist numbers. And yet, Asia luxury hotels opening in the last
\nfew months are running at capacity. Most likely the real problem for the
\nJapanese operators is that they need to start learning Chinese and not
\nEnglish.<\/p>\n
Our impression is that most western visitors to Japan today are young
\nbudget travellers and they are here to taste some adventure and
\nalternative entertainment as much as temples and green tea. The
\nwell-heeled wealthy Westerners that the government seems to be trying to
\nattract are in fact not even interested in Japan and instead are heading
\nfor more exotic locations in China and Vietnam, where world-class
\nresorts and warmer beaches and oceans are to be found.<\/p>\n
Now there is nothing wrong with backpackers coming to Japan — you can
\nmake some money catering to them. Take the Hotel New Koyo in Minowa,
\nNagano, for example, which charges just JPY2,500 a night for a single
\nroom. The 76-room hotel is apparently 90% occupied by foreign
\nbackpackers. Then there are the JPY3,000 – JPY4,000 a night capsule
\nhotels in Shibuya and Shinjuku — which are coming back into their own
\nas foreign travelers brought up on manga find them cheap, convenient,
\nand a great cultural experience.<\/p>\n
But the fact is that you have sell a lot of rooms at this rate to match
\nthe income from a single JPY70,000+ a night room at the Mandarin hotel
\nin the new Midtown complex in Roppongi. And the Mandarin is having no
\nproblem filling those rooms — with both upscale Japanese and visitors
\nfrom elsewhere in Asia. The fact is that as living standards rise in
\nChina, Korea, and Taiwan, those interested in traveling want to venture
\nnot too far from their own borders, go somewhere safe and not too
\nchallenging culturally, and enjoy great scenery, creature comforts,
\nfood, and shopping.<\/p>\n
For most Asians, that place is Japan, so they are flocking here as a
\nresult. Forget about Western tourists.<\/p>\n
Indeed, this contrast between western backpackers and Asian couples
\ntouring Japan so as to enjoy a taste of a better life makes for a
\ntelling contrast. The Mandarin, Conrad, and Peninsular (from September)
\nare just a few examples of swanky new Asian hotels that have been built
\non faith and a vision of a better level of customer, and which are now
\nbeing rewarded for the investment risks taken.<\/p>\n
Ironically, at the same time as this upscale market has been forming,
\nJapan’s largest hotel operator, ANA, last year entrusted its operations
\nto the Intercontinental group, then this year sold off many of its
\nproperties to Morgan Stanley. It seems that the Japanese operators are
\njust not willing to re-invest in their own infrastructure to meet
\ninternational standards, nor to market properly to the overseas markets.
\nNow they’re paying the price for this timidity and lack of vision.<\/p>\n
But is not too late to start upgrading. Jones Lang LaSalle said last
\nyear that there were only 2,148 luxury hotel rooms, i.e., those with
\naverage nightly rates of at least JPY30,000, in Tokyo. Even after an
\nadditional 2,667 new rooms come on stream through to 2010, Tokyo will
\nstill lag behind London which has 5,196 such rooms, Paris with 4,336
\nrooms, and New York with 3,754 rooms.<\/p>\n
Not just hotels, domestic tour operators also suffer from the same
\nmyopic vision of what their client base should look like and being slow
\nto invest to upgrade. Thus some of Japan’s most interesting and
\nattractive destinations have languished simply because foreign clients
\ncan’t “access” (language, transport, and quality of accommodation) them
\nproperly. Take Yakushima Island, Nagano-area skiing, Okinawa scuba
\ndiving, and even shopping for arts and crafts outside Tokyo, for
\nexample. All have potential. Temples in Kyoto are good fodder for
\nfirst-time visitors, but for the more sophisticated and repeat visitors,
\nthey are clearly losing their pulling power.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the biggest contribution that Japan could make to developing its
\ntourist industry would be to start appointing some bilingual foreign
\nnationals who represent the audiences of countries being targeted
\n(nationals of USA, China, Korea, Taiwan, UK, etc.) and to increase
\nincentives for local operators to upgrade their facilities and
\nofferings. There needs to be an understanding across the board that
\nJapan is unlikely to be successful selling itself as a low-cost
\ndestination in Asia, and instead should rise to the challenge of
\nbuilding a tourism support system that meets global standards for
\ncomfort, convenience, and cultural interest. No more lame bureaucratic
\nvisions of “what should be”, just realistic interpretation of the global
\ntrends with the most valuable of Japanese traits — simplicity, quality,
\nand style.<\/p>\n
There are plenty of good examples of foreigners already helping to
\nincrease tourism flows into Japan, and doing it at a suitably
\nvalue-added level. Look no further than the 14,000 Australian skiers
\nvisiting Nisseko each year, thanks to the efforts of two Australian
\nskiing pioneers, Ross Findlay and Glenn Goulding.<\/p>\n
Lastly, we’d note that outweighing any foreign tourism segment is that
\nof the Japanese visiting their own nation. Over the lost decade of the
\n1990’s, domestic travel volumes plummeted dramatically as people
\ntightened their purse strings and it has really only been since 2004
\nthat the numbers have started recovering. This year an estimated 21.5m
\npeople traveled during Golden Week. As a result, and to help things
\nalong, the government has said that it is planning to create in 2008 or
\n2009 a second “Golden Week” for Japanese workers.<\/p>\n
Expected to occur in early November, the idea is to group Sports Day,
\nLabor Day, and Culture Day into a single week. The plan is that
\nsalarymen will be able to take in two weekends, and get out of Tokyo
\njust as they did this year during Golden Week. The Dai-ichi Life
\nResearch Institute reckons that the financial impact of a second string
\nof holidays would be high, with the average household spending an
\nadditional JPY1.64trn (US$13bn), or about 0.7% of the current total
\nannual household budget…<\/p>\n
EXCERPT ENDS\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The bureaucrats had a field day telling the Japanese public how they had this great plan, but then the reality was that they allocated a trifling amount, we heard a budget of just JPY350m, for marketing and chose Dentsu over a number of better qualified foreign firms to conduct the campaign. As a result, most of the Yokoso campaign has been little more than local ads, in Japanese! Compare the piffling JPY350m with Hawaii’s tourism marketing budget of US$38m (JPY4.5bn) a year, and you start to realize that the Japanese government has no idea how to go about the task of increasing visitor numbers.Despite the government’s cheapskate efforts to focus marketing on countries they think tourists should come from: mainly the USA, UK, and other western nations, the number of visitors has in fact surprisingly been rising — but from countries receiving very little attention (with the possible exception of Korea) — Japan’s nearest neighbors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japanese-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}