TokyoTomo Travel Guide

Looking at the photos, it is a shot taken in Fukushima on May 5 while I was traveling to Tohoku district from May 4 to 6 on my leave of absence. People in the world may have been imprinted by horrible scenes of Tohoku and Fukushima as news media reported gruesome spectacles of disaster- stricken sites and fears of nuclear power plant failure caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. However, I found people were leading normal daily life in Futamata Onsen (a hot spring resort), Aizu-Wakamatsu, and Fukushima city where I visited, all being inland towns in Fukushima prefecture.

The other photo was taken on May 6, shows a shopping arcade in front of the JR Sendai station. Except for some quake vestiges of commercial buildings’ crumbled walls, the cityscape remains intact around here. You see nothing extraordinary at the places where tsunami did not hit.

Generally speaking, mass media and our central government are liable to label vast areas under the term of Tohoku or affected area with spotlights on the most severely devastated zones. Of course, it is true that if you move a little further toward the coastline, misery of the tsunami- ravaged scenes comes into view.

It is worth knowing that, even just in Sendai and Fukushima, there are totally irreconcilable sights coexisting. During my trip, I encountered, in fact, no such inconveniences as associated with the atmosphere of affected areas’ wherever I go, in terms of transportation by railway or bus, accommodation at hotel or Japanese inn, and meal service at local restaurants.

However, it should be noted that the business circumstances surrounding travel agents in Tohoku district remain to be extremely difficult.

Travel “bound for” Tohoku is being shored up by central government’s prop-up measures as is exemplified by full bookings at lodging facilities during the Golden Week (spring holiday period). The inn in Fukushima where I stayed was busy and bustling. On the other hand, travel originating in Tohoku is extremely slow not only because there are so many disaster victims who lost their homes but because even those who fled the disaster do not venture to go on a trip to spare the victims’ feelings.

A proprietor of the smaller-sized travel agent whom I met on this trip in Fukushima prefecture confided that he had got some last-minute bookings for the Golden Week but they were almost nothing compared with the normal level. He takes the phenomenon not as the result of disaster’s physical damage but of people’s abated motivation and voluntary restraint against traveling.

There are a number of travel agents whose stores are still kept closed. In the tsunami-stricken areas, travel demand is extremely low. The problem is that, unlike the case of SARS, they are not in a position to offer alternative plans whatsoever. Regrettably, the indigenous agents are threatened to abandon business unless they find enough customers to sustain them.

Having said that, it would marvel our overseas readers to know that people in non-afflicted areas are beginning to entertain a desire to go on a trip. The aforementioned proprietor in Fukushima said that he had received a few inquiries about group tours scheduled for September or October. In the meantime, he could successfully organize one-day bus tours at the end of April, collecting 140 customers, or four bus-loads.

It was a story in Fukushima. From the viewpoint of total Japan, big momentum is expected to build up. To impress the ence of the Japanese travel market, it would be necessary to mobilize a great number of people.

The Golden Week movement is just over. Sources of the Japanese airlines and major travel agents said the bookings for the spring holiday period had swarmed in at the last stage. The passengers carried by the two Japanese airlines beat the forecast and recouped the year-on-year decline to minus 15 percent from the estimated minus 19 percent. Online travel operator Rakuten Travel, in particular, surpassed its own sales record of last year’s same period.

An executive officer of a leading travel agent asserts the depressed demand caused by the earthquake apparently hit bottom at the beginning of April. At his company, tour bookings of some destinations for departures from July to September are exceeding those of the same period a year earlier. He maintains that, since the share of Tohoku residents in the total outbound travelers is no more than 3 percent, recovery in demand at Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya will ignite a comeback of Japanese overseas travel market.

Details of business performance after the Golden Week are not to our hand, yet the abovementioned phenomenon and the executive’s positive comment are encouraging. Of course, the 3 percent contribution of Tohoku is never negligible, but the boost and manifestation of intrinsic demand all over the country is a matter to be prioritized along with Tohoku’s revival. All-out efforts for market revitalization industry-wide will be the way to shape our future and reciprocate the foreign relief and aid.

The above executive officer stated that his company would challenge, in the first half of this fiscal year, for an accomplishment of the 100 percent level in sales and 95 percent in customer handling against the previous year. It is unpredictable what assessment its overseas business partners will make of these figures but, at the end of the day, we must commit ourselves to sending as many customers as possible.

By YUICHI MATSUMOTO, Editor in chief

Source: Travel Vision

Travel Vision Inc. provides information on the travel industry in Japan via "Daily Travel Vision", a Japanese-language e-mail newsletter, and the "Travel Vision" website. There are nearly 110,000 people working in the Japanese travel industry, and Travel Vision is proud to be bringing travel news to more than 30,000 people through Daily Travel Vision.