62.5% drop in foreigners slammed April tourism in Japan

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excerpt

The number of foreign visitors to Japan in April dropped 62.5 percent from a year earlier, marking the sharpest ever fall for a month due to the impact of the March 11 disaster and the subsequent nuclear crisis, according to an estimate released Thursday by the Japan National Tourism Organization.

The sum of visitor arrivals came to 295,800, falling below 300,000 for the first time since May 2003 when tourism was severely hurt by the SARS epidemic, the organization said. The oldest data available is from January 1961.

The sharpness of the decline was also partly because the year-earlier figure for April registered 788,212, a record for that month.

The March total dropped 50.3 percent, but if the period was limited to March 12, the day after the massive quake, to March 31, the year-on-year decline widens to 73 percent, the organization said.

Tourist facilities were severely damaged all along the eastern Pacific coast from Chiba prefecture up to Aomori prefecture, including the popular tourist areas of Sanriku and Tokyo Disneyland. Rail and highway connections to northeastern Japan were also severely affected, and the airport at Sendai, the largest between Ibaraki (or maybe Narita) and Sapporo, was crippled.

On top of that, embassies have been advising against travel to disaster areas, and at one time even posted advisories against non-essential travel to nearly all of eastern Japan. While the United States Embassy still has an advisory in effect against travel to areas within a 50-mile radius of Fukushima Daiichi (although transiting via the Tohoku Shinkansen or Tohoku Expressway is OK), it has lifted travel advisories for all other parts of the country. However, other countries, like France, still have advisories in place for destinations like Tsukuba (which currently has no radiation or major infrastructure problems but which hosts a large number of international conferences each year), and Nikko, which is the home of the world-famous Toshogu Shrine (final resting place of Ieyasu Tokugawa and site of the famous "Three Monkeys" mural).

On top of that, the Japanese yen is extremely strong, making it an expensive destination for many foreigners.