Photo/Illutration Travelers wearing face masks board a Shinkansen train at Tokyo Station on July 23, the start of a four-day weekend. (Yosuke Fukudome)

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike’s call to local residents to refrain from nonessential outings over the four-day weekend from July 23 did not exactly fall on deaf ears, but not enough people heeded her advice.

Koike's plea came as Tokyo continues to grapple with a surge in new coronavirus infections.

Fewer Tokyo residents took trips to distant domestic locations such as Okinawa Prefecture and the main northern island of Hokkaido, but visits to areas closer to the capital increased significantly.

Although the central government’s much-ballyhooed “Go To Travel” subsidy program that began on July 22 did not cover Tokyo residents, that apparently did not stop people from visiting areas such as the coastal resort town of Atami in Shizuoka Prefecture and Nasu in Tochigi Prefecture.

The Asahi Shimbun analyzed data provided by Agoop Corp., a Tokyo-based subsidiary of Softbank Group that tracks people’s movements based on GPS data on their mobile phones.

The data showed where those who visited various tourist destinations came from. A comparison was made of the average for the four-day weekend with that of three weekends prior to mid-July.

The Enoshima beach area in Kanagawa Prefecture close to Tokyo and the Atami hot spring resort in Shizuoka experienced a more than 1.5-fold increase in visitors from other prefectures, and a more than two-fold increase in the number of those from Tokyo.

The upmarket mountain resort town of Karuizawa in eastern Nagano Prefecture  and Nasu in Tochigi Prefecture also had double the normal number of visitors from other prefectures. The figure was even higher when visitors from Tokyo were tallied.

However, there was only about a 20-percent increase in visitors from Tokyo to New Chitose Airport station in Hokkaido and Naha Airport station in Okinawa.

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