Pacific Magazine > Magazine > January 1, 2008

Japan Tourism

More Than A Religious Experience

Japan’s Travel Culture Is Deeply Rooted

By Suzanne Chutaro, Marshall Islands Journal

Tetsuro Hirata, Ministry for Land Infrastructure and Transport. PHOTO: Pacific Magazine

TOKYO—It is no secret that Japanese like to travel. Every nation that has a tourism industry or wants to develop one is trying to figure out what it takes to entice travelers from Japan.

Those efforts would be more successful if tourism planners understood the cultural and historical roots of travel of Japanese. And those roots run deep. Japanese caught the travel bug four hundred years ago.

From the 1600s to the mid-1800s, Japanese had severe restrictions placed on their movement within the country. The shogun governments imposed the restrictions to ensure economic productivity and to control the populace.  But there was one major exception: villages could send representatives to major Shinto shrines scattered across the island nation.

These pilgrimages would last weeks, if not months. Small groups of travelers, all carrying money collected by the village, would walk from hamlet to hamlet on their way to shrines. Inns, restaurants and shops began to proliferate, particularly around the major shrine sites.

Fast-forward to 2007. Today, while more than 17 million Japanese head to other lands to see the sights, only about six million foreigners travel to Japan. The Japanese government has made development of inbound tourism a major policy. The “Yokoso! Japan” (Welcome to Japan) campaign aims to have 10 million foreigners travel to this country by 2010.

“Tourism has a large economic ripple,” says Tetsuro Hirata, director of the Policy Bureau International Tourism Promotion Division, of the Ministry for Land Infrastructure and Transport.

In terms of Japan’s 903 trillion yen ($7.9 trillion) annual gross domestic product, tourism contributes 24.4 trillion yen ($213 billion). Of that amount, some 6 percent, or $12.3 billion, comes from spending by foreign tourists. “But that 6 percent is an area where we’re seeing rapid growth in sales therefore we are pay attention to it,” says Hirata.

Launched in 2003 to promote international travel to Japan, the goal of Yokoso! Japan is to increase foreign inbound travel to 10 million by the year 2010. Japan’s travel market, however, is still predominantly domestic travel by Japanese and it produces about $22.8 billion a year. Foreign travelers generate about $1.6 billion for Japan’s economy.