Kyubey in April halted a lunch sale it had offered for years as rising costs for sea urchin, abalone and other shellfish made the price untenable.
But discounts aren’t needed now for Kyubey’s customers, who come mainly from Europe, the United States and elsewhere in Asia. It is sometimes completely booked out by foreigners, making it hard for Japanese diners to get in, Imada said.
ECONOMIC BOOST
Tourism to Japan all but halted for more than two years during the pandemic. But numbers have risen steadily since the government resumed visa-free travel for many countries in October and scrapped remaining COVID-19 controls on May 8.
For the first six months of the year, 10.7 million tourists arrived, the JNTO said.
Japan saw a record 32 million visitors in 2019, before COVID-19, and while no one is expecting that this year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is hoping a recovery in the industry will add 5 trillion yen a year to the economy.
The APA Hotel chain said bookings had returned to 2019 levels with demand especially high in tourist hot spots like Tokyo’s Shinjuku district.
Tokyo’s Haneda Airport restarted international flights from its Terminal 2 for the first time in three years on Thursday. A Kyoto tourism group sold 400,000 yen premium tickets to the city’s famous Gion Festival this week, 20 times the previous high, according to media.
June’s 2.07 million arrival tally was up from 1.9 million in May, though still down 28 per cent from the level in June 2019.
Inbound travellers from the US, Europe, Australia and the Middle East are already above 2019 levels, JNTO data showed.
Visitors from China, previously Japan’s biggest source of tourists, surged 55 per cent to 204,500 in June from the previous month, though are still far below 2019 levels.