Emerging Country on Tourism

Wikia Travel, for example, listed only one in Japan, Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, in “100 places to visit before you die.” Known as one of the great economies in the world, at least the Japanese believe so, Japan is not a great power to be visited. The government of Japan decided on Tuesday to increase the amount of purchases of foreign travelers by four times by 2030, in order to support economic growth of Japan. The target is Southeast Asia.

The government of Japan will ease the visa regulation to the travelers from South East Asia from this summer. Travelers from Thailand and Malaysia will not need visa to travel to Japan. The Philippines and the Vietnamese are going to be able to get visas for multiple uses. The Indonesians, for whom multiple visas are already available, can extend their stay from fifteen days to the longer.

With those deregulations, the government of Japan counts on increasing the consumption of foreign travelers from $11 billion in 2012 to $47 billion in 2030. Nikkei Newspaper reported that Japan Tourism Agency estimated the consumption average of a Thai or a Malaysian traveler was eighty percent higher than that of a Korean. Digital cameras, cosmetic goods and thermal bottles are popular for Thais. Current tendency of cheap yen against US dollar supports more visit from Southeast Asia.

The numbers of visitors to Japan in 2012 was 8.37 millions, sixty percent more than ten years before. But Japan was still located around the thirtieth position in the world ranking in 2010. Japan is obviously not a developed, but an emerging power in terms of tourism. Although there are a lot of places to see for foreign travelers in Japan, the Japanese have not been good at sell them. While people in tourism business are enthusiastic about letting tourism resources be listed in the World Heritage of UNESCO to earn good reputation, they are not serious about making their own effort, something like improving social networking services.

A couple of years ago, one typical course of Chinese travelers to Japan was landing on the Kansai International Airport, going to Kyoto to see historical buildings, moving to Nagoya to see Toyota car factories, visiting Tokyo and test their fortunes by lottery in Ginza town, and finally leave Narita International Airport. The tourism agency needs to develop more of that kind of popular story of travel in Japan. Concerning the popularity of Japanese girls idol groups in Southeast Asia, establishing AKB 48 museum may work for tourism strategy. This is a sort of effort to sell Japanese soft power, different from exporting missile technologies or nuclear reactors.