Photo/Illutration Foreign tourists board a tour bus in Fukuoka after disembarking from a cruise ship at Hakata Port in July 2019. (Tsubasa Yokoyama)

Foreign cruise ships will be allowed to resume making port calls to Japan next spring following a relaxation of border controls imposed since March 2020 due to the COVID-19 crisis, the transport ministry said on Nov. 15.

The controls on port calls followed a mass outbreak of the novel coronavirus among passengers of the Diamond Princess that forced the vessel to be quarantined at Yokohama Port.

Cruise lines were desperate to restart operations.

Guidelines for infection prevention measures recently published by an industry body of international cruise ship companies state that for a cruise ship to take to sea, each crew member must have had three COVID-19 jabs and 95 percent of passengers must have had two.

Passengers will also be required to show negative results of COVID-19 tests taken within 72 hours of boarding.

The guidelines recommend that everybody wears a mask inside the vessel.

On 420 occasions last year when domestic cruise ships called in at Japanese ports, passengers stayed overnight or longer aboard their vessels.

The figure was down 85.3 percent compared with 2,866 port calls in 2019 prior to the pandemic, according to the ministry.

Port calls during this period were made by Japanese cruise ships plying their domestic routes.

International cruise ships departing and returning to Japan and making stops outside the country have been suspended since March 2020.

The Diamond Princess and other foreign-registered cruise ships made no port calls in Japan in 2021. They accounted for 67.4 percent of all port calls in 2019.

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, inbound tourists constituted a major market.

The number of foreign tourists entering Japan from cruise ships peaked at 2.52 million in 2017, with the annual figure hovering at over 2 million for three straight years until 2019, according to the Immigration Services Agency.

Breaking down the number of inbound tourists by country of origin, Chinese visitors topped the list, accounting for about 80 percent in 2019.

Naha Port topped the list of ports of call by cruise ships in Japan, followed by Hakata Port in Fukuoka Prefecture, Yokohama Port, Nagasaki Port, and Ishigaki and Hirara ports in Okinawa Prefecture.

The government had set a goal of attracting 5 million cruise ship passengers in 2020.

But the figure plummeted to 120,000 in 2020 because of the pandemic. It dropped to zero in 2021.

Domestic cruise companies resumed operations in Japan in October 2020 after introducing infection prevention measures, which a transport ministry official asserted are among the most stringent in the world.

For example, passengers are required to undergo infection tests on the day of boarding.

But the recovery of demand remains slow.

To revive the industry, three domestic cruise lines operating the Asuka II, Nippon Maru and Pacific Venus joined hands at the initiative of the Japan Association of Travel Agents (JATA), an industry group, and other parties, in October under a program to give away cruise travel vouchers to passengers.

They are also preparing to offer international cruises.

Nippon Maru is scheduled to embark on a 48-day cruise between December and January next year to visit the Maldives, Mauritius, Madagascar and elsewhere.

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