That figure is 10.4% higher year-on-year, with visitors from China even showing a marginal growth of 3% in November. For some context, the year-to-date visitor arrivals for Japan has breached 39 million in 2025 – well exceeding the total for 2024 already, which was 36.87 million.
As a reminder, China and Japan are engaged in a diplomatic altercation at the moment. That came about after Japan prime minister Takaichi made remarks about Japan intervening militarily if China does decide to engage to seize Taiwan.
Naturally, that didn’t go down well with Beijing as you would expect. And that resulted in China calling for a travel advisory warning for citizens to not to travel to Japan. So far, the impact seems rather muted in November. So, we’ll have to see how things go in December and January (best time for snow visits) to be more certain of any major impact.
As added context, mainland Chinese tourists have made up the largest group of visitors to Japan so far this year, accounting for almost a quarter of the total visitors.
And yesterday, China continues to reaffirm that they want Takaichi to retract her comments. The message from Beijing was that:
“On key issues, Japan is still ‘squeezing toothpaste’ and ‘burying nails,’ attempting to obfuscate and muddle through.”
That as China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, reiterated that Beijing continues to “firmly oppose” to the remarks from Tokyo over the whole debacle thus far.
This article was written by Justin Low at investinglive.com.