Photo/Illutration Chinese tourists on their way home at a departure lobby of Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on Oct. 7 (Daisuke Hirabayashi)

On the back of the weak yen, tourists visiting Japan are spending more than they did before the COVID-19 pandemic for the first time, with Chinese visitors leading the tourism recovery, data showed.

Inbound tourists spent 1.39 trillion yen ($9.28 billion) between July and September, an increase of 17.7 percent compared with the same period in 2019, according to the data released by the Tourism Agency on Oct. 18.

Chinese tourists spent the most, at 282.7 billion yen, or 20.3 percent of the total, followed by visitors from Taiwan at 204.6 billion yen and those from South Korea at 195.5 billion yen.

Average spending per visitor was 210,810 yen, up 29.4 percent, exceeding the government’s goal of 200,000 yen by 2025.

Japan is on track to achieve its goal of 5 trillion yen in total annual tourist spending.

In September, 2,184,300 tourists visited Japan, 96.1 percent of the number for the same month in 2019, according to data released by the Japan National Tourism Organization on Oct. 18.

The figure exceeded 2 million for the fourth consecutive month, highlighting the rapid rebound in the tourism sector.

Chinese tourist numbers, the dominant group in the pre-pandemic period, haven’t fully recovered, with 325,600 visitors in September, only 39.8 percent of the same month in 2019.

This is partly because of China’s late resumption of group tours to Japan, which only started again in August, and partly because of concerns about the treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, which Japan began releasing into the ocean this summer.