[LINK] "Tourists Check Out a Newly Affordable Japan"

[rfmcdonald]

Facebook's Courtney linked to Miho Inada's Wall Street Journal article describing an unexpected consequence of Abenomics: tourism in Japan, by Japanese and by foreigners, has risen.

With a dollar now fetching ¥100—up from less than ¥80 in November—foreign visitors have surged, while Japanese curb overseas travel and do more sightseeing at home.

The number of foreign visitors to Japan in March, even before the yen's latest tumble, was up 26% from a year earlier to 857,000, the highest for a March since 1964, when the Japan National Tourism Organization started taking statistics.

The weaker currency has helped Japan's tourism sector overcome a number of setbacks in the past two years. The 2011 nuclear-power-plant accident scared away visitors worried about radiation. Heightened territorial tensions with Beijing have since last year led to a sharp drop in tourists from China, once the fastest-growing source of visitors to Japan. While Chinese travelers continue to shun Japan, visitors from the rest of Asia, Europe, and Russia have more than made up for the gap.

In Ginza, Tokyo's high-end shopping district, a group of 34 tourists from Sweden was riding a large tour bus after shopping on a recent afternoon.

"Japan is selected as the most desired holiday place by the Swedish," said tour guide Magnus Carlsson. "It's a hot destination, which used to be too expensive. But it's now cheaper."

Hiroshi Saito, a tourism-promotion official in Ishikawa, said his prefecture saw a 45% increase in the number of foreign visitors to its famous Kenrokuen garden for the first three months of this year, compared with the same period a year earlier.