People walk along Takeshita street at Harajuku shopping area in Tokyo, Japan, Aug. 10, 2024. Photo by Reuters
A record 21.5 million tourists visited Japan in the first six months of the year, a 21% increase year-on-year, official figures showed on Wednesday, despite visitors from Hong Kong dropping by a third last month over rumors of a quake.
“The number exceeded 20 million in six months, the fastest pace ever,” the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) said in a statement.
The figure in June alone jumped 7.6% to record 3.4 million, due to “increased demand to coincide with school holidays,” it said.
The number was boosted by a jump year-on-year in tourists from mainland China, South Korea, Singapore, India, the United States and Germany.
But the number of travelers from Hong Kong plunged 33.4% in June, with the JNTO citing online rumors warning of a huge quake in Japan.
The number of travelers from Hong Hong in the first six months declined 0.4% to 1.27 million people.
People from Hong Kong made nearly 2.7 million trips to Japan in 2024.
Although it is impossible to know exactly when earthquakes will hit, fear-inducing predictions have spread widely among the Chinese city’s residents.
Some posts cited a Japanese manga comic that predicts a major natural disaster in July 2025 – based on the author’s dream.
Japanese authorities have repeatedly said the rumors are false.
The government has set an ambitious target of almost doubling tourist numbers to 60 million annually by 2030.
Authorities say they want to spread tourists more evenly around the country, and to avoid a bottleneck of visitors eager to snap spring cherry blossoms or vivid autumn colors.
But as in other global tourist magnets like Venice in Italy, there has been a growing pushback from residents in destinations such as the ancient capital of Kyoto.
Japan, named the world’s most favorite travel destination by readers of Condé Nast Traveler in the 2024 edition of the magazine’s annual Readers’ Choice Awards, logged more than 36.8 million tourist arrivals last year.
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