Japan needs to switch to sustainable tourism from numbers game

Apr 23, 2020 | News On Japan

Apr 23, 2020 (Nikkei) - The coronavirus pandemic throws a huge wrench into our public health system, economy and everyday life, leaving no corner untouched. While the sum of its long-term impact remains immeasurable, one industry already faces a destructive blow, tourism.

The immediate damage is ghastly. The international hub airports now resemble ghost towns. When demand slowly returns, the narrative of tourism will be rewritten. We will think twice before signing up to long-distance flights, being more selective about our travels. The sight of a crowd no longer excites but repels us. The trauma of social distancing will linger.

Crises accelerate and amplify existing, if subtle, undercurrents, and this crisis will bring to the fore the trend of soft or sustainable tourism, in which travelers spend longer immersed in the local culture they respect, rather than on coach tours ticking the boxes of famous sites. Agritourism in an old farmhouse is soft tourism. So is trekking Kumano Kodo, an ancient pilgrimage.

Japan is in a good place to harness soft tourism but only if it is ready to rethink its current strategy, which relies on high numbers rather than high quality.

When it jump-started its ascent as an international travel destination in the 2000s, Japan went for hard tourism. Chinese tourists arrived en masse and bought anything from cosmetics to rice cookers, which propped up sagging domestic personal consumption.

Progress was measured in the growing number of visitors. The total ballooned to 32 million in 2019, close to fivefold from 6.8 million in 2009. The success was such that it started to take a toll with overtourism in popular destinations such as Kyoto.

Now the influx has come to a screeching halt. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, the number of inbound tourists into Japan in March 2020 was down 92% year on year, to 194,000. Clearly, the Japanese government's target of 40 million inbound tourists this year is now a pipe dream.

This is devastating to the retail and hospitality sectors in the short term. In the long run, however, it is not all bad news.

Tourism benefits the destination country by making personal allies around the globe, a scarce currency in a divided world. In this light, soft tourism is better than hard, not to mention its reduced impact on the environment. Moreover, the shift to soft tourism, while causing a short-term drop in the number of visitors, would point to longer stays and the resulting increased spend per capita.

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