The Osaka Corona Hotel in western Japan has been eerily quiet and empty the past...
OSAKA - The Osaka Corona Hotel in western Japan has been eerily quiet and empty the past few weeks.
But with the coronavirus curtailing travel and disrupting businesses across Japan, room bookings are down to a third of what they were last year, Fujii said. The postponement of the Tokyo Olympic Games, originally scheduled to take place this summer, is also likely to devastate smaller businesses in Japan reliant on tourism and disrupt the economy at large.
After he came to power more than seven years ago, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe rolled out an ambitious economic plan for the country with tourism as a key component. To that end, Abe’s government vowed to attract 40 million inbound visitors to Japan by 2020 and 60 million visitors by 2030. “We had predicted 34 million foreign tourists to visit Japan in 2020, but that’s just not happening anymore,” said Takayuki Miyajima, a senior economist at Mizuho Research Institute.
Hisao Ikawa opened the 121-room hotel last month on the same day Japan encouraged schools to shutter across the country. Sitting in front of a giant mural of a golden tiger in the lobby of his empty hotel, Ikawa said there was “no point” trying to woo overseas travelers right now. Japan’s tourism agency said in 2017 that consumption by international and domestic travelers supported 4.7 million jobs in the country and accounted for 5% of the economy. A recent report by a Japanese corporate research firm said 12 hospitality companies, including a cruise operator, had already gone bankrupt since the outbreak of the virus, with many of these closures focused in western Japan.
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