Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) reported that international visitors to Japan were up 7.6% year on year to 2,035,800 in February 2017, which broke the previous February record.
JNTO analyzed that the single-digit growth resulted from one more day in February last year because of the bissextile year and shift of the Chinese New Year from February last year to late January this year.
The table below shows change of international visitors to Japan for the past year:
The top market was Korea with 600,000 visitors (+22.2%), outnumbering 509,100 visitors from China (+2.0%). The large year-on-year growths were also found in Thailand (+22.5%), Indonesia (+49.6%) and Philippine (+39.4%). The most visitors for February came from Korea, China, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippine, Vietnam, India, Australia, U.S., Canada, Germany, Italy and Spain.
JNTO has forecasted that the growth will be expected in March 2017, boosted by travel demands for cherry blossom.
