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In Dogs and Demons, Alex Kerr identifies tourism as one of the great failures of modern Japan. He mentions that it was by no accident either, but a “deliberate national policy” that Japan chose to follow. Instead of becoming a service-based economy, national policy was that Japan would shun all industries that didn’t contribute to building things. “Tourism…merely supports menial low-paid jobs, unlike manufacturing, which creates high-tech, high-salaried jobs.”

This article from The Asahi Shinbun talks about Japanese hot spring resorts trying to target South Korean and Taiwanese customers. First they’ve identified the problem.

What attracts foreign travelers to Japan? In short, what sells?

The tourism industry has tried many approaches, yet Japan-despite its rich cultural history-continues to lag as a top-notch world destination.

Ask Kerr this question and he would probably mention that in Japan’s rapid industrialization they have managed to destroy most of what is “authentic” about Japan. For example, the destruction of many of the old wooden buildings in Kyoto.

This question leads us to an even more important question though. Why do we travel at all? I think we travel because we are searching for an “authentic” experience. What that means can depend on where you are going and why. People going to New York want to experience authentic New York, the big city, impressive skyline, Broadway and museums. People go to France for the food, for Paris, for the quaint countryside, or castles, or history, or beaches, for the Louvre, for romance, the list goes on and on.

So why visit Japan? What is the authentic Japanese experience? The answer to that question is worth millions of dollars in tourism revenue. All we can say right now is that Japan is failing as a tourist attraction. This article in the Yomiuri Shinbun reports that 6.13 million tourists visited Japan in 2004, an increase of 17.8%, according to the Japan National Tourist Organization. That might not seem so bad at first, until you consider that the number one worldwide tourist destination, France, attracted 77 million people in 2002. Japan isn’t even a top 25 world tourist destination. It’s been beaten out by such places as China, Hong Kong, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and even Croatia. More people visited South Korea from 1995-2002 than Japan. Japan also has the lowest percentage of international tourist receipts in the North-East Asia region. These figures can all be found at the World Tourism Organization, a U.N. organization.

To put that 6.13 million person figure in a different perspective, according to an article in the April 10 2005 edition of The Oregonian, 3.4 million people visit the Woodburn Company Stores each year. This makes it the number one tourist attraction in Oregon. The next biggest draw is the Spirit Mountain Casino, with 3 million visitors a year. That means a mall and a casino in Oregon, combined, attract more tourists than the entire nation of Japan.

Let’s look back to the Asahi article about hot spring resorts. The article mentions that because of outbreaks of disease and scandals involving the quality of water at Japanese hot spring resorts, “The spas were not living up to their reputation and Japanese began avoiding them.” I think it’s very telling that, “Inn operators said their only hope for survival was to try to lure Asian visitors and introduce them to the customary habit of a long, soap-free soak at the end of a busy day.”

So, because of the quality problems at the hot spring resorts, Japanese customers have decided to stay away. Instead of fixing the problems with quality and restoring their reputations in the eyes of the Japanese customer, they’ve instead decided to lure Asian customers to the hot spring resorts. The issue to me looks like this, “If Japanese tourists know what makes a real authentic hot spring experience, and we can’t live up to that, then let’s attract other tourists who don’t know better.” Quality and a lack of authenticity, these are just some of the problems that affect Japanese tourism.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 10th, 2005 at 8:20 pm and is filed under News, Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.