By Hollie Younger / Staff writer, with CNA
The number of Taiwanese visitors to Japan last month reached a record high for July, as arrivals surpassed 700,000, with the figure only topped by South Koreans at 894,700, Japan’s tourism board said today.
Amid Sino-Japanese tensions, the number of visitors from China last month plummeted to 428,000, a decrease of 56.1 percent from July last year and marking the eighth consecutive month of decline, the Japan National Tourism Organization said.
In November last year, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said that Japan could intervene militarily in the event of a “Taiwan contingency,” sparking tensions with Beijing and contributing to a sharp decline in the number of Chinese visitors to Japan.
Photo: AFP
Last month, Japan received a total of 3.442 million international visitors, an all-time high for the month of July and an increase of 0.1 percent a year earlier, the organization said.
Of those arrivals, 763,800, or about 22 percent, were from Taiwan, the organization’s data showed.
From January through last month, Taiwanese arrivals to Japan reached 4.736 million, up 21.8 percent from the same period last year, the data showed.