In 2023, around 25 million people arrived from overseas and spent a record 5.3 trillion yen ($34.2 billion) in Japan.

And this year, the pace is even faster.

Accumulated foreign tourist arrivals during the first nine months of the year hit 26.8 million, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.

The figure will likely be taken as an encouraging sign by political and business leaders at both the local and national level.

The central government has been pushing tourism as the trump card to revitalize local regions grappling with depopulation and economic stagnation.

But Kazuki Fukui, an associate professor of tourism geography at Ryutsu Keizai University, has a different take on the situation.

He warns that the central government’s strategy to lift local economies by promoting tourism is the wrong approach.

Fukui asserts the strategy reflects the central government’s inability to address more fundamental problems that beset the nation’s economy.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Question: Why are you so concerned about the central government’s strategy to make Japan a world tourism powerhouse?

Answer: I am not opposed to the idea of Japan having a strong tourism industry. Affluent tourists find Japan to be an attractive destination because travelling around the country is safe and the culture is different in many respects from other Asian countries. Peace is essential to tourism. The United Nations promotes tourism under the slogan of “Tourism, passport to peace.”

But the central government pins too much hope on tourism. Portraying tourism as an engine to drive Japan’s economic growth and rejuvenate rural areas is just an illusion.

Q: But a record number of overseas tourists descended on Japan this year. Rural areas that were previously obscure are now attracting attention.

A: For sure, some local areas are benefiting from the influx of tourists. Generally speaking, though, it is the large cities like Tokyo and Osaka that are reaping the benefits. It is clear from the statistics that local regions are exhausted by the fierce competition to lure more visitors in the face of continuing central government pressure to earn revenue via the tourism industry.

Data from 2012 and 2016 shows that tourist numbers and the value of their spending increased across most of Japan. But the figures also show the fastest pace of increase during those years was limited to urban centers. Except for a handful of areas, none of the local regions saw tourism grow into an industry offering the promise of job opportunities and profits.

Officials in Tokyo often tout tourism as creating new jobs, but that is not the case on the ground. In local areas, large numbers of people in the tourism industry have an unstable employment status and the turnover rate is high.

Q: This is surely news to many people?

A: People with deep pockets who can afford long-haul travel feel refreshed by going on sightseeing trips and then returning to work. In contrast, many people in the tourism industry are essential workers serving well-to-do travelers with fragile job security. This is the reality.

Today, a growing number of young people have begun to view jobs in the tourism sector as exacting and unrewarding. And this is exacerbating the labor shortage in the sector. Businesses are competing to bring in foreign workers to fill the labor void. This brings into question the sustainability of the tourism industry.

Q: Isn’t it possible to enhance the working conditions of people in tourism by taking a different approach from the past?

A: The intrinsic nature of the industry makes it difficult. Most tasks in the tourism industry are comprised of person-to-person service work, something that cannot be done by machine. So business operators cannot enhance their productivity and give pay raises by introducing machines into the workplace.

Companies in the tourism-related sector in local regions are mostly small and midsize. There has been a chronic shortage of manpower in those areas that affects every single industry. Businesses in tourism cannot expect the shortfall of labor to be resolved even if they plan to offer better pay to prospective hires.

I am not saying that the tourism industry’s levels are low in Japan. It is an enormous challenge in the first place to ensure better work conditions for workers in tourism. Last year, I traveled to the Calabria region in southern Italy to see for myself how the local tourism industry works. Many hotels relied on foreign labor to do part of the work.

It is a common knowledge among tourism officials that tourism is an industry whose structure makes it difficult to generate profits. Leaders tend to ignore this aspect when they talk about specific measures and regional development to promote tourism. They champion the idea that tourism will bring in bigger revenues if more people are hired and the right approach is taken. But that reflects the failure of leaders to take a hard look at very basic economic principles.

Q: The central government has been urging local governments across Japan to come up with sellable products and services by fully developing their local resources.

A: What they fail to realize is that local regions are diverse and have their own characteristics that cannot be evaluated by a single, uniform measure. Some regions are suited to be a popular tourism destination, while many others are not.

Despite these differences, the central government keeps pressing local governments to make a profit through tourism by frequently underscoring successful cases and having them compete against each other to win state subsidies and wider recognition. Regions that failed to generate positive results are labeled as places that did not make a sufficient effort. I find this trend disturbing.

When I talk with local officials in charge of tourism promotion, many of them know there are limits to what they can accomplish. But they are powerless to overturn the central government’s policy and end up stuck in the status quo. I have heard stories about young employees in the civil service being initially enthusiastic about developing tourism and then losing heart and never wanting to go back to tourism. The reason is that they experience burnout from trying to coordinate the interests of politicians and other stakeholders.

Q: Why do so many politicians push local regions to attract more tourists?

A: Workers in the tourism-related industry constitute a crucial voting bloc for them.

Local leaders feel powerless to get the central government crafted tourism strategy to slow down. The job of politicians is to devise measures for tourism promotion while taking into account the circumstance of individual regions and accommodating the interests of stakeholders. Politicians are effectively shirking their responsibilities.

The stagnation of local economies stems from the central government’s poor economic policy. In all advanced nations, the key industry in local regions has shifted from manufacturing, a sector that used to provide stable growth and employment opportunities, to the service industry, a part of which is tourism.

In Japan, the central government insists on invigorating local economies through tourism because it has been unable to find a new industry with the potential to sustain stable economic growth in local regions.

A bigger problem is that sweeping tax reforms have yet to be carried out with the redistribution needed to respond to the dead end of capitalism and this country’s changing economic structure. The central government needs to address the root causes of the nation’s poor economic performance.

Instead, it is just squeezing local governments. It is a fact that metropolises are much better suited than rural regions to a capitalist economy centering on the service industry. It is asking too much to sustain and rejuvenate local economies through tourism, which after all is simply a service industry.

Q: Are you saying that not all local regions should work to become popular tourist destinations?

A: Local residents’ top priority should be to sort out by themselves what they want to do to protect and invigorate their communities as well as their well-being. Tourism is one of their options if they deem tourism will help. But not every local region has to strive to promote tourism.