Japan receives more than 17.7 million tourists in the first half of the year – Observador

Japan welcomed 17.7 million visitors in the first half of the year, breaking the country’s all-time record for the number of tourists, Japanese authorities announced Friday.

The Japanese tourism body JNTO indicated that this figure — 17,777,200 visitors — is more than a million higher than the previous record for the same period in 2019, year before the Covid-19 pandemic, when the country implemented strict border restrictions.

June also saw a new monthly record in the number of monthly foreign visitors with 3,135,600, a year-on-year increase of 51.2%.

These figures follow the trend of the last four months in which the number of foreign visitors per month to the Asian country exceeded three million.

In June, the largest number of tourists to Japan arrived from South Korea (703,300 visitors) followed by China (660,900), Taiwan (574,500), the USA (296,400) and Hong Kong (250,600).

Mount Fuji to impose new restrictions from Monday to control tourism

Japan is facing a tourism boom, which is causing measures to be implemented in several regions of the archipelago, such as increasing prices for tourists in some establishments or entrance fees to these areas, and in a context of growing criticism of overtourism by the local population.

The Japanese archipelago expects to attract 60 million foreign visitors a year by 2030 and plans to develop guidelines to address the problems associated with overtourism by the end of this year.