The number of foreign visitors to Japan is growing rapidly this year, with arrivals from January through September already topping last year’s total, statistics from the Japan National Tourism Organization released on Wednesday show.
Some 26.88 million foreign visitors arrived in Japan in the first nine months of this year, up 54.7% from the same period of last year, the organization said. The country had a total of 25.07 million visitors in the whole of 2023, it said.
In September alone, the estimated number of visitors rose 31.5% year on year to a record 2.87 million. Last month’s number is also 26.4% higher than the same month in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Visitors from China more than doubled to 652,300 in September from the same month last year, thanks to an increase in the number of flights and extended public holidays for the Mid-Autumn Festival and the China’s National Day.
South Korea accounted for the largest number of visitors last month, which, at 656,700, is 15.1% higher year on year. Visitors from Taiwan rose 22.2% on the year to 470,600, those from Hong Kong increased by 12.6% to 170,200 and the number of travelers from the United States grew 22.5% to 191,900 in the same month. Tourist arrivals from all four territories rose their highest in a single month in September.
The number of visitors from the Middle East, meanwhile, rose by 14.8% in September to 14,200, a record high, as a result of an increase in the number of direct flights, including those connecting Istanbul and the Kansai region.
Meanwhile, the number of Japanese tourists who went abroad in September totaled 1.2 million, up by 20.7% from a year earlier, but still down 30.8% from September 2019 levels.
