Photo/Illutration Passengers wait to board a Shinkansen bullet train at JR Nagoya Station on April 29, the first day of the Golden Week holiday period. (Kazuhiro Nagashima)

Crowds at major train stations across the country swelled as much as four-fold compared with a year earlier during the Golden Week holidays in the absence of travel restrictions for the first time since the pandemic hit in early 2020.

Osaka and Nagoya stations posted notable increases of 5 percent and 14 percent, respectively, against even the pre-pandemic year of 2019.

Estimates based on location information of cellphone users by NTT Docomo Inc. showed that many transportation hubs and tourist destinations experienced significant jumps in visitor numbers this year compared with last year.

Crowd levels at those sites were on a par with those recorded in 2019 even though a sixth wave of novel coronavirus infections that emerged in early January is still a concern despite a sharp drop in cases over the past month or so.

Visitor numbers were estimated for Tokyo Station, Nagoya Station, Osaka Station and five other major rail hubs, as well as the Kokusai-dori main thoroughfare in Naha, a tourist draw in Okinawa Prefecture.

The estimates were based on data taken from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on May 3 to May 5 and compared with the figures in 2019, 2020 and 2021.

The study found that the nine locations still proved particularly popular with visitors after a plunge in numbers in 2020.

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The Asahi Shimbun

Crowds at Tokyo and Osaka stations were markedly higher this year, compared with last year. The former logged three times as many travelers and the latter registered a 4.3-fold increase.

Still, crowds at Tokyo Station this year were smaller than in 2019, accounting for 59 percent of the figure back then.

Takamatsu Station in Kagawa Prefecture on the island of Shikoku posted a decline of 32 percent while Kokusai-dori street saw a 24 percent drop in visitor numbers.

But the falloff from 2019 was less than 10 percent at Sapporo, Sendai and Hakata stations.

Japan’s first case of the novel coronavirus was confirmed in January 2020.

It prompted authorities to call on people to refrain from making unessential trips to other prefectures during the Golden Week holidays that year as a state of emergency was declared nationwide.

During last year’s Golden Week holidays, emergency curbs were applied to Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures. Pre-emergency measures covered many prefectures, including Miyagi, Aichi and Okinawa.

But this year, pre-emergency steps that at one point applied to up to 36 prefectures, including Tokyo, were lifted on March 21.

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