Japan tourism recovering a year after disaster
(AP) A year after a tsunami and earthquake devastated parts of Japan, officials say tourism to Tokyo and other areas unaffected by the disaster is on track to recover to pre-tsunami levels, with business travel leading the way.
In a conference call Thursday night, Shuichi Kameyama, director of the International Tourism Promotion Division at Japan Tourism Agency, said the number of visitors to Japan in 2011 was 6.2 million, down nearly 30 percent from the 8.6 million who visited in 2010.
But arrivals have been picking up, with a surge in January due to Lunar New Year, and more tourists expected this spring for cherry blossom season and later in the year for summer festivals.
Kameyama said foreign visitor arrivals in January 2012 were only 4 percent below January 2011, before the March 11 disaster.
Kameyama said arrivals from Korea took the biggest hit in 2011, down 35 percent.
Malcolm Thompson, general manager of The Peninsula Tokyo hotel, said that historically the hotel's guests are 70 percent business, 30 percent leisure. "Corporate business is 95 percent back," he said. "It's really the high-end leisure traveler from America and Europe. They're the ones we are not seeing yet. They're the ones who are still very tentative about Japan. We here know that everything is fine and life is back to normal in most parts of Japan, but that's not the perception."
