Photo/Illutration Foreign tourists enjoy the view from Kyoto's Togetsukyo bridge on Nov. 15. (Yoshiaki Arai)

The monthly number of foreign tourists exceeded levels recorded before the novel coronavirus pandemic for the first time in October.

The Japan National Tourism Organization announced on Nov. 15 that 2,516,500 tourists arrived in Japan in October. That figure was a 0.8-percent increase over the 2,496,568 tourists who arrived in October 2019.

A weaker yen contributed to the swift recovery of inbound tourists.
South Korea had the most tourists visiting Japan in October, with 631,100, or a 3.2-fold increase over October 2019. Taiwan followed with 424,800, an increase of 2.7 percent.

The number of tourists from many Asian and Western nations exceeded the figures from the pre-COVID-19 period.

But the number of visitors from China, where the most tourists came from before the pandemic, was only 256,300, a decrease of 64.9 percent over October 2019.

The low number reflects sharp criticism arising in China over treated contaminated water from the grounds of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant being discharged into the ocean.

That has led many Chinese to refrain from visiting Japan even though group tours were allowed to restart from August.

The weak yen has made products and services in Japan much cheaper for foreign tourists. While the yen was trading at about 110 yen to the dollar in 2019, it is now at around 150 yen.

(This article was written by Daisuke Hirabayashi and Akifumi Nagahashi.)

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