JAPAN TIMES

Thanks to a favorable exchange rate, relaxed visa restrictions, more discount airlines flying into Kansai airport and an increase in the number of duty-free shops downtown, the number of foreign visitors to Osaka this year is expected to top 5 million for perhaps the first time.

From the luxury hotels and tony brand-name shops of the city’s northern Umeda district to bars and restaurants of the southern Shinsaibashi and Namba districts, as well as in Tsuruhashi’s Koreatown, the Osaka Castle area and the working-class Nishinari district, foreign visitors are arriving in droves. And they are spending money and injecting much-needed revenue into a city that until fairly recently was rarely if ever on the itinerary of most foreign tourists.

“We were in Tokyo, and did some shopping, but the prices in Osaka for things like pharmaceuticals and clothing are much cheaper. I especially liked the covered arcade that runs from central Osaka to Namba, because there are lots of interesting and very cheap stores,” said Meiying Song, a tourist from Shanghai who was in the city earlier this month with a tour group.



The Osaka Tourism and Convention Bureau announced on Aug. 17 that between April and June, almost 1.9 million foreign tourists visited the city and the prefecture. A total of nearly 3.2 million foreign visitors came to Osaka in the first half of this year, and the final tally for 2015 is likely to be over 5 million, the bureau predicts.

Tourists from mainland China formed the largest group of foreigners between January and June, as the total number topped 1.1 million. About 515,000 Taiwanese, 476,000 Koreans and 240,000 people from Hong Kong also came.



Osaka, and the Kansai region in general, has long had something of an “Asia First” policy when it comes to tourism and business, and this has often been at the expense of efforts to attract Western tourists. That appears to be changing, however. While Kyoto gets international accolades from American and European travel magazines, and remains, after Tokyo, the favorite spot in Japan for many Western tourists, Osaka has made gains over the past couple of years.

Over 110,000 Americans visited Osaka in the first six months of 2015, compared to about 80,000 during the same period last year. The number of British visitors between January and June was about 27,000, as opposed to fewer than 16,000 in the first half of 2014.

And though the numbers are smaller, almost 23,000 Germans visited Osaka in the first half of 2015, up from 12,000 during the same period in 2014. Hiroshi Mizohata, president of the Osaka Convention & Tourism Bureau, gave specific reasons for the rise in foreign tourists, particularly from China.




Source : japantimes.co.jp