Chinese Tourists Cancel Visits to Japan in Fallout from Takaichi Remark on Taiwan

The Yomiuri Shimbun

13:28 JST, November 19, 2025

China’s advisory against traveling to Japan is starting to hit the tourism industry. Chinese tourists who had planned to visit have canceled hotel stays and airline tickets, and some tours to Japan have been halted.

China accounts for the largest share of foreign visitors to Japan. With the Lunar New Year holiday approaching, the tourism industry is concerned that travel could be constrained for an extended period.

“Some hotels have seen over 1,000 cancellations from Chinese guests up to the end of the year,” a representative of a Japanese hotel chain told The Yomiuri Shimbun on Tuesday. “We haven’t been able to get a hold on the total number of cancellations.” Spring Japan Co., a budget airline associated with Japan Airlines Co. that operates routes to China, is also seeing more cancellations by Chinese travelers than usual.

In China’s Guangdong Province, a travel agency canceled a tour to Japan after it failed to attract the requisite number of participants. The agency reported that 20% of customers for the tour had canceled. Another travel agency in the province has stopped offering tours to Japan departing on or after Nov. 24.

From January to October, Chinese visitors to Japan surged 40% year on year to 8.2 million, accounting for 23% of total foreign visitors, the Japan National Tourism Organization announced on Tuesday. In August 2023, China lifted restrictions on group tours to Japan, which spurred the upward trend. Chinese tourists also spent ¥1.64 trillion from January to September, more than tourists from any other country or region and accounting for over 20% of all travel spending. If the slowdown persists, the tourism industry will suffer significant damage.

In 2012, as relations between Japan and China deteriorated, large-scale anti-Japan demonstrations erupted over the nationalization of the Senkaku Islands in Okinawa Prefecture, leading many Chinese operators of group tours to cancel trips.

“Visitors from China are overwhelmingly the largest group, but there is also an increasing number of visitors from other countries,” said Yasushi Kaneko, the land, infrastructure, transport and tourism minister, at a press conference after a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “We want to closely monitor the situation while advancing policies that stimulate demand for visits to Japan.”