Correction:
This article about Japan’s tourism industry incorrectly said that Frommer’s had decided not to publish a 2012 Tokyo guidebook. Frommer’s never canceled its plans for a 2012 volume and is working on it now.
TOKYO — Beth Reiber, the freelance writer responsible for the set of Frommer’s guidebooks on Japan, felt lucky just to get on the plane. Her editors had canceled plans to publish a Tokyo guidebook for 2012, thinking it didn’t make sense to spend all that money to publish a book that nobody would buy.
But Reiber pushed back and gave them the same message that Japan is struggling to give the world: Tokyo remains radiation-free and just as safe as always.
Japan tourism faces an uphill battle.
The plane from Minneapolis to Tokyo was “packed,” Reiber said, “and I was thinking, ‘That’s great. People are coming to Japan.’ Then we arrived at Narita [airport in Tokyo], and about 30 people got off the plane. The rest went on to Vietnam.”
Although the triple catastrophe of three months ago caused its most acute damage along Japan’s northeastern coast, it changed the image of the entire country, with millions across the globe following the news and concluding that one of the world’s safest nations was no longer so.
Much of this is founded on misperception: A region was battered, not all of Japan. But the March 11 disaster has dealt a severe blow to a tourism industry the nation had been counting on to help offset static domestic consumer demand due to a shrinking population. Tourism and its secondary industries contributed 5.3 percent to Japan’s gross domestic product and accounted for 4.3 million jobs in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, according to the government-run Japan Tourism Agency.
Now, when Japanese officials speak about a brisk recovery powered by necessary reconstruction spending, they acknowledge that the tourism industry could face a particularly long-term setback amid lingering fears about radiation, food safety and the possibility of future quakes.
“Everybody else in the world thinks Japan is saturated with radiation,” said Zensuke Suzuki, an international travel executive at the Japan Tourism Agency. “And we can try to convince people otherwise, but whatever Japan itself says, people won’t really trust.”
Amid the ongoing nuclear crisis, Japanese travel officials have not tried to calculate the effect on foreign tourism. But eventually they will promote not just Tokyo but also major cities such as Kyoto and Osaka that are farther from the disaster zone. They will also promote travel to the tsunami-battered Tohoku region, in the hopes that tourism can boost its ailing economy.
Radiation fears
Japan’s travel agencies used to base their campaigns on postcard images: geishas, white-capped mountains, plates of sushi. Buses docked every afternoon along the main shopping streets in Tokyo’s ritzy Ginza district, depositing Chinese tourists who thronged department stores that had signs in Mandarin and ATMs from Beijing-based banks. The Japanese government designated 2011 as a benchmark year for tourism, hoping for the first time to exceed 10 million international travelers.
Now, the Japan National Tourism Organization posts radiation levels from around the world on its Web site. (Most days, Seoul has twice the background radiation that Tokyo does.) In April, the number of tourists visiting Japan was down 62.5 percent from the same month last year, and a comparable decline was expected for May, though statistics have not been released. Airlines have slashed flights. Small-hotel owners fear for their businesses. New York’s Metropolitan Opera came recently to Japan for a three-week tour, but two of its superstar singers backed out at the last moment because of radiation concerns.
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