While being the most active tourists in Japan, China's travel ban makes Japan worry about its crippling tourism sector ahead the 2020 Olympics. (Image via EJ Insight)

China's travel ban concerns Japan

Alfonsus Adi Putra
Business & Industry
Foods & Service
Jan 28, 2020
1447
Amid the coronavirus outbreak, China had imposed an outbound travel ban on Sunday, a day after the celebration of the Lunar New Year. In this holiday period, many Chinese tourists usually go on vacation to other parts of the world.

However, China’s neighbor, Japan, is worried that the ban will be a huge blow to its retail and tourism sectors as it had expected the tourists to spend their money there. Moreover, the ban came ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Tokyo.

Currently, many Japanese tourism companies are busy responding to the cancellation of tours by Chinese travelers, meaning that loss of revenues as well. Even then, Chinese visitors had been accounted for 30 percent of the foreign visitors to Japan.

Thanks to the gradual easing of visa requirement, in 2019, the number of Chinese visitors to Japan rose to 9.59 million, 20 times increase from 2003.

Hankyu department store in Osaka revealed that 80 percent of visiting foreign customers’ spending there are mainly Chinese. Meanwhile, last year, Japanese department stores’ sales fell by 1.4 percent for the second consecutive year.

The business people around Japan are worried that the trend will worsen. Since coronavirus had also entered Japan, the fall in inbound visitors could also mean a drop in mass gatherings leading to a decrease in consumer spending.

On the other hand, the coronavirus also did its blow on Japanese automakers. Wuhan, where the novel coronavirus was originated, houses manufacturing plants belonging to Nissan, Honda, and Renault.

Source: https://bit.ly/2RYiIcx

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