Cancellations + the season from now

[snowdude 44]

Kyoto and Nara are nice this time of year especially if the weather is nice.

[muikabochi 208]

Would love to go there on a lovely spring day.

Not going to happen this year, perhaps next.

[kkk 7]

Tourism dept say that 560,000 nights cancelled since March 11th.

If I understood correctly.

[BillTheBinMan 0]

Yes there have been a fair few pieces on the news about the foreigners totally disappearing from famous tourist places. Numbers now literally 0-10% of what they usually are.

[ju87 0]

I flew from Hong Kong to Sapporo on 2 Apr to hit Niseko... there were 40 people on my flight. I also noticed that mine was the only international flight landing. Niseko was pretty quiet... mostly Japanese people with very few westerners.

[griller 9]

The tourism angle is getting a lot of attention now it seems - foreigners seem to have disappeared and Japanese are cancelling in droves as well. They just showed Kinugawa and Nikko in Tochigi and Kusatsu in Gunma. Both said that numbers were around 10% of normal.

 

Very worrying.

 

How far is this spreading though - even southern Japan hit hard in terms of domestic tourism?

[Curt 1]

10-20% seems to be the number being thrown about a lot.

 

Kusatsu in Gunma, that's not even anywhere near the disaster zone is it....

[muikabochi 208]

It's not, but it is fairly close to the north Nagano that had it's shake recently too, and Kusatsu will have had a number of fairly strong shakes because of that. Don't know if that has had any effect there or whether the drop is due to a general decrease in tourism.

[fukdane 2]

This was on a travel industry website earlier this month:

 

 

24 MAR 2011: Images broadcast worldwide of Japan's crippled nuclear complex and reports of food and water contaminated by radiation have battered its reputation as a safe destination, triggering an avalanche of cancellations by foreign tourists.

 

 

 

Even though authorities insist Tokyo is safe from radiation leaking from the damaged power plant in northeast Japan, many travellers are switching destinations or cancelling completely.

 

In Ginza, a famous Tokyo shopping district, the foreign tourists who usually throng family-owned kimono stores and upmarket outlets like Prada are nowhere to be seen. The streets are plunged into gloom in the evening as lights are shut off early due to power shortages.

 

No estimates of losses for airlines, hotels and other travel businesses have been announced.

 

A Japanese tourism official, Atsuya Kawada, said that with emergency work at the Fukushima nuclear plant and quake relief still under way, it was too early to count the cost. The Cabinet announced Wednesday that disaster losses could reach $309 billion, while a spike in radiation levels in Tokyo tap water prompted a warning to not feed it to infants.

 

Shock waves are spreading through the global tourism industry as companies from Beijing to Bangkok to the US and Europe lose profitable bookings for Japan. Outbound flights from Japan are packed as foreigners and some Japanese flee but planes fly in nearly empty.

 

The triple disaster of March 11's magnitude-9.0 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis has set back a Japanese government campaign to boost tourism to help shake off economic malaise. The timing is especially damaging, coming at the start of the peak spring travel season.

 

Japan received 8.6 million foreign tourists last year, up more than a quarter from 2009. The government hoped to boost that to 11 million this year, targeting China's new rich and other Asians with advertising featuring Japanese boy band Arashi. Ambitious plans called for raising tourist numbers to 30 million a year by 2020.

 

Crucial sources of visitors include China, where rising incomes have set off a travel boom, and South Korea. Just over 1.4 million mainland Chinese visited Japan last year - second only in number to the 2.4 million South Korean visitors.

 

The backlash in both countries is dramatic.

 

Some 19,000 customers of Hana Tour in Seoul cancelled trips to Japan for March and April, said a company spokesman Cho Il-sang.

 

Chinese tour agencies suffered mass cancellations for March after Beijing sent buses to evacuate thousands of its nationals from Japan's quake-stricken northeast and issued a travel advisory about possible dangers.

 

The China Travel Service in Beijing had 1,004 tourists booked for Japan tours for March and every one cancelled, according to Dong Xiang, manager of the state-owned agency's Japan and Korea department.

 

The catastrophe has also cut into Japanese travel abroad, squeezing local travel industries in Asia, Hawaii and elsewhere.

 

Some 12,000 Japanese tourists cancelled visits to Taiwan after the quake, according to the island's Tourism Bureau. Japan accounted for a fifth of Taiwan's 1.1 million foreign visitors last year.

 

About a quarter of Japanese travellers who planned trips in the next few weeks to Thailand have cancelled, said Anake Srichivachart, president of the Association of Thai-Japan Tourism Promotion.

 

Brand Japan can bounce back, but even its official promoters say other crises have to come first.

 

Japanese officials are frustrated that the US, South Korea and some other nations warned travellers to avoid the whole country, not just the northeast. That despite an announcement by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a U.N. agency, that there was ``no medical basis for imposing restrictions'' outside tsunami areas.

 

``There is no immediate risk to the health of travellers inside Japan,'' said Kawada, the tourism official. ``We would like to ask other governments to act on this objective information.''

 

But such pleas don't sway most travellers.

 

``I love Japan, and I hope to visit the country again when the situation is back to normal,'' said a traveller in Bangkok who had switched their trip to Tokyo. ``I think it will take more than a year for us to consider a Japan trip again, because the problem of radiation might not go away too fast.''

[Thundercat 60]

If people truly think that radiation in Japan is a problem then they should never come back here. Its not like 'radiation' is going to go away in a years time.

[snowbender 3]

And perhaps they won't.

 

But I think what you said it just taking it too much the other way. Surely the fear for most is the fact that this is not sorted, still developing and there is a lot of unknown.

[iiyamadude 6]

One extreme to the other. Funny.

[Tubby Beaver 209]

BM thats why I laughed at those Gaij who ran to Osaka only to return 3 days later!!! Did they think it was gonna be fixed in 3 days?? Also if you are THAT worried about there being a major Nuke catastrophe that would affect Tokyo, chances are that it'll eventually get to Osaka too so why not just leave the country?

[klingon 10]

Wild guess: scared, whipped up into a frenzy reading stuff; Osaka further than Tokyo and no earthquakes in Osaka while lots in Tokyo; they could.

 

Who's to judge what other people are scared of and their actions in such a situation?

[Tubby Beaver 209]

The thing about the earthquakes though, just because there hasn't been one (or some) on a given day, doesn't mean there won't be an earthquake in the next few days. The whole of Japan is tectonically active and the difference in whether an earthquake will hit or not is very very small. For me, I think if you were really freaked out about it (which everyone was to a certain degree) that much that you needed to get out of Dodge, then the best and safest option was to leave the country altogether. I didn't really see moving west to Osaka as substantially safer

[muikabochi 208]

Hmmm. Actually the chances of strong earthquakes happening in Tokyo in the week after the main one in mid March were massively higher than the chance of ones in Osaka.

 

If I had the choice of being in Osaka or Tokyo that week, I sure know where I would be.

[Tubby Beaver 209]

I think that was probably right, but my main point is that an earthquake can strike anywhere in Japan and the relative saftey of Osaka compared to Tokyo was negligible IMO

[muikabochi 208]

Just to be clear.... I was meaning just earthquakes including small ones (not specifically any tokyo "the big one").

[Tubby Beaver 209]

 

Obviously I'm no expert and its a personal call thing, but if I was gonna be that worried I think I'd rather just get outta dodge altogether and retreat to a different country to recharge my batteries and get my head together. I didn't feel the need to do that, although I was more than a little concerned at what was happening.

[Jynxx 4]

Mate,

the Japanese have been living for the last 40 years for the big one to strike. Ever heard of the novel "Nippon Chinbotsu" (Japan sinks) by S. Komatsu ? The book came ou in ´73 and the movie followed.

The story is : The quake happens along the Itoigawa fault line, that is from Izu to Nigata.

Since then, we have expected that the big one would hit "off the coast of kanto" or along the Itoigawa fault line.

We thought that Sendai would be the safer place to live ...

We didn´t expect Kobe to be hit ...

 

You are in Japan mate.

[Tubby Beaver 209]

Originally Posted By: Jynxx

Mate,
the Japanese have been living for the last 40 years for the big one to strike. Ever heard of the novel "Nippon Chinbotsu" (Japan sinks) by S. Komatsu ? The book came ou in ´73 and the movie followed.
The story is : The quake happens along the Itoigawa fault line, that is from Izu to Nigata.
Since then, we have expected that the big one would hit "off the coast of kanto" or along the Itoigawa fault line.
We thought that Sendai would be the safer place to live ...
We didn´t expect Kobe to be hit ...

You are in Japan mate.

eh?

[Jynxx 4]

Really doesn´t matter where you are, does it.

A Tsunami off Hokkaido - where you gonna live? Pretty flat place where most of the population are.

Some Island ? Hatchjo-jima for example. all volcanic.

Kyushu. Sakurajima and big volcanos there.

Shikoku might be good.

[grungy-gonads 54]

TB, I think what he meant was.... actually, I don't know.

[Jynxx 4]

Nah,

I reckon you poms are all shell shocked.

or some variant of "mad cow" in ya brain.

[nippontiger 8]

I went for a few days in Kyoto and Osaka actually. Here's my reasoning: The situation at the nuclear power plant at the point I decided to leave was looking particularly serious - massive explosions occuring and it looked like a cascade of events spiralling out of control - 100 miles is not very far in the event of complete loss of containment or a fire in the fuel rod pool - the distance to Kyoto is certainly a lot better, if not perfect. Second, we had problems with power cuts, water cuts and shops closed or poorly supplied. Third, most of my friends had left and nobody was going to work that week - as I dont get much in the way of holidays, it seemed like a good opportunity to get away to a place I really like. Obviously they were not going to sort out the problems at Fukushima in a few days but I felt that over that time, it would become more clear whether or not they were going to lose control of the situation completely.

Actually, I think it was a good thing to do to get away for a while - I could relax a bit after a few very stressfull days, the situation at the NPP did stabilise somewhat in the time I was away and it put at ease all my family and friends back home who were very worried.