By Kim Tong-hyung
It was a decade ago when the local tourism industry was basking in the glow of a Korean cultural boom, sparked by television tearjerkers such as “Winter Sonata,” which supercharged the influx of Japanese travelers here.
The sentiment is gloomier now as the combination of a low yen, political tension and probably fatigue from the decade-long “hallyu” marketing overdrive has fueled a sharp fall in the number of Japanese tourists.
Korean travel companies expressed their concern in a joint statement Monday that demanded the government do something about the situation.
“We have been trying our best to meet the government objectives of luring 16 million inbound travelers by 2017, but since the former President Lee Myung-bak’s visit to Dokdo in August last year, the number of Japanese travelers has been declining dramatically. This has led to bankruptcies and layoffs at companies that had been dependent on Japanese tourists,” said the Korea Association of Travel Agents (KATA), which represent more than 15,000 travel industry businesses.
“The situation has deteriorated enough to threaten the very ecosystem of the domestic tourism industry ... the government should introduce supportive measures, such as financing marketing and organizing promotional events and festivals.”
“Golden Week,” an annual series of Japanese national holidays from late April to early May, was a time of the year Korean travel agencies awaited with the gleeful rubbing of hands. However, the bump-up may not be as significant this year as it was in previous ones.
The number of inbound Japanese travelers attracted by 19 of Korea’s biggest traveling agencies in the month to April 19 was measured at 88,100, more than a 33 percent decline from last year. Reservations during Golden Week are visibly down from 2012 as well, KATA officials said.
“We project that the number of Japanese travelers visiting Korea in Golden Week will be around 114,000, which would represent about an 11 percent drop from last year,” said Park Jong-gap, a researcher from the Korea Chamber of Commerce, providing an estimate based on a survey of 60 local tourism companies.
The decline in Japanese travelers is alarming for the tourism industry because they represented the biggest spenders. More than 3.29 million visited Korea in 2011 and spent an average of $234 per day, compared to $124 by Americans and $133 by French tourists, according to Korean government data.
The number of Japanese tourists coming to Korea has dropped every month since September last year, a month after Lee sparked a diplomatic row with his visit to Dokdo, the country’s easternmost islets that Japan argues it has a historical claim to.
The 698,000 who visited Korea in the first three months this year represented a year-on-year decline of 22.5 percent, according to the government. The drop in travelers was partially offset by an increase of inbound Chinese tourists, whose number increased by nearly 38 percent in the first quarter to 723,000.
The relationship between Japan and Korea remains icy. Korean foreign minister Yun Byung-se has canceled a trip to Japan this week to protest against a series of visits by Japan’s cabinet members to the controversial Yasukuni War Shrine. The increasingly aggressive threats by North Korea could also be making the South less attractive as a tourist destination.
However, it seems apparent that nothing is repelling Japanese travelers more than the sliding value of the yen, kept artificially low by the government in Tokyo to jolt its slumbering economy.