Travel from mainland China to Japan collapsed after Prime Minister Takaichi's answer in the Diet last November about a Taiwan contingency, and Beijing's subsequent call for citizens to hold off on Japanese travel. At the time an estimate put the economic loss from mainland and Hong Kong visitors at 1.79 trillion yen.
Nine months on, the first half of the fall happened as predicted. Visitors from the mainland were down 50.2 percent year on year in January–March and 52.5 percent in April–June, according to the tourism agency's inbound spending survey. Roughly halved.
The second half did not. Total foreign arrivals for January–June came to 21,084,800, against 21,518,575 in the same period of 2025 — a fall of about two percent. February and March each set records for those months. April, May and June were down year on year, by 5.5, 3.6 and 6.8 percent.
The mainland's share was taken up by Taiwan, South Korea, the United States and a wide spread of others. In June alone, fifteen markets set their own June records.
Why it is on the board
It climbed the Japanese lists on Monday, and what it is really about is a number that did not happen. A specific, published forecast of catastrophe was made in November; the piece goes back to check it against the outturn. That is a rarer kind of news story than the forecast itself was.
확인: 観光庁 · JNTO