Japan wants you: all 10 million of you: foreigners are called "outsiders" in Japan, the Japanese government suddenly wants lots of them—targeting 10 million visitors by 2010

Japan, Inc., Sept, 2003 by Lucille Craft

THE FEMALE TOUR GUIDE holding court aboard a recent Hato Bus tour was unusually peppy and glib. Her ebullient gift for nonstop chitchat occasionally made one yearn for an automatic "idling stop" function on the banter instead of on the gas pedal. But as the coach plied the well-worn tourist route from Tokyo Tower to the Imperial Palace to the Asakusa Senso-ji Temple, there was no disguising the fact that this was not business as usual. In fact, 2003 will go down as one of the worst years since Hato Bus, sporting its trademark pigeon logo, began offering tours to international visitors in 1951. The bus felt cavernous and depressing, its light payload of passengers illustrating all too perfectly the funk the Japanese tourism industry is struggling to emerge from this year.

Tourism has been the perennial stepchild of the Japanese business world, never considered in the same league as banking or manufacturing or other sectors of the economy. "Tourism has tended to be viewed as simply a matter of sightseeing," Keidanren said in its position paper on tourism in the 21st century. "For this reason, tourism has received markedly less priority compared to other areas of industrial activity in terms of improving the industry environment."

Perhaps it is a measure of the depths of desperation into which Japan's mandarins find themselves that they are turning to the unglamorous tourism industry for help in reviving the long-stagnant economy. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced a "Visit Japan" campaign, and for the first time in modern Japanese history the government will focus on attracting foreign tourists. Koizumi has exhorted the bureaucracy to double inbound visitors to 10 million by 2010. The tourism budget will be expanded from $25 million to $42 million. If Keidanren's math turns out right, the tourism boost will yield [yen] 48 trillion in direct and indirect revenues and create about 4.1 million jobs.

Critics have already written off the tourism campaign as half-baked. For one thing, unlike many other countries, Japan refuses to bite the bullet and set up an independent commission or ministry dedicated to marketing Japan's tourist assets abroad. Instead, responsibility for tourism lies with a few dozen staff in the tourism department of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport--and no less than 10 other ministries and agencies, a sure-fire recipe for delay and inefficiency. And Japan's tourism budget, even in its new and expanded version, is still stingy by international standards. Australia, for instance, with a GDP one-seventh that of Japan's, will spend nearly twice as much on tourism this year: $90 million.

Still, the agents of Japan's long-neglected travel industry aren't complaining, ecstatic as they are at the prospect of finally getting some respect. "No prime minister has ever been interested in tourism. Koizumi is the first [to even pay attention]," says Goto.

The Visit Japan campaigners have their work cut out for them. According to the World Tourism Organization, Japan in 2001 ranked 33rd in terms of international visitors, with fewer visitors than even Ukraine or the Czech Republic. The figures for annual expenditures by foreign visitors were equally bleak. At about $3 billion a year, Japan found itself in the same company as Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Morocco. Topping the list are the US ($72 billion), Spain ($33 billion) and France ($30 billion). The figures lump pleasure travelers together with business travelers; a full two-thirds of Japan's inbound visitors are here on business-related trips.

Figures released by the semi-governmental Japan National Tourist Organization show inbound travelers for 2002 up by 9.8 percent, to 5,238,672. But as of June this year, year-on-year tourist numbers had fallen 3.1 percent. Measured against the World Tourist Organization's estimated tourist arrivals for the top five most popular destinations--France, Spain, the US, Italy and China--which measure their arrivals in the tens of millions (France brings in nearly 77 million tourists a year), Japan's numbers are truly grim.

SARS and the Iraq war have decimated tourism across Asia, but the impact has been magnified in Japan, already considered one of the world's least desirable places to take a vacation. Long before the scourge hit Hong Kong, tourists had sidestepped Japan, branded too expensive, too remote and too difficult to navigate, since English is rarely used or understood outside of Tokyo.

Travel writer Margaret Price was hired to test the English ability of receptionists at provincial hotels, and the results were predictably disastrous. "At major hotels there's no problem. When it got down to the smaller establishments you'd just love people to come to, when I tried to make a booking, there was hesitancy and even unintentional rudeness [on behalf of the clerks]."

That's why, even in good years, only about 5 million travelers visit Japan annually, a paltry number even compared to the average for much smaller or much poorer countries such as Poland or Macau. Although deflation has made travel here much more affordable in recent years, denting basic prices, tourism experts say the word hasn't gotten out to foreign tourists.