Welcome back to Japan Visualizer

This week I’ve gathered data about the tourism industry in Japan, but this time focusing on the wonderful town of Beppu. I’ve gathered the total visitor amount, foreign and domestic ratios, where foreign visitors are from, as well as comparing totals to past years. All data comes from the City of Beppu’s official reports. This report may seem outdated, but Beppu’s most recent data is from 2022 and the Japanese Government doesn’t break down tourism by city, so this is the best data to work with. I will revisit Beppu when the 2023 data is released.

Some Basic Tourism Data

Beppu’s total tourist amount is 5,379,303, a rather impressive amount for a city of 113,000. Beppu tends to have more tourists in the second half of the year, but on average they had around 5,000 people stay overnight and 9,500 visit for the day each day of 2022. This means that nearly 13% of the city’s population is visiting every day, a rather impressive statistic.

How Many Foreign Tourists?

Whenever we split the tourists into domestic and foreigners then we get a worrying split. There were nearly no foreigners visiting Beppu for the 2022 year. Actually around 0.007% of all tourists were foreigners. Only 110 of the 15,000 daily visitors were foreign. So how did Beppu go from welcoming 780,000 foreign tourists in previous years to only having 40,000. The main reason is simple, Japan officially reopened in October 2022, meaning for three quarters of the year, tourists could rarely even get into the country. This also aligns with Japan’s overall tourism trends.

In order to give it a fair analysis, I put the total amount of tourists entering Japan next to foreign tourists in Beppu. Japan’s total tourist count in 2022 was 3,832,110 and Beppu’s was 40,266, which means that right around 1% of Japan’s tourists visited Beppu. In 2020, 1.63% visited Beppu, and in 2019, 1.95% visited Beppu. So Beppu did not reach the same highs as previous years in 2022, but it’s likely to return to its prime much like Japan has, perhaps just at a slightly slower pace.

Where The Tourists Were From

This chart looks pretty similar to previous years too. South Korea always has a huge majority. Despite the U.S.A being around 15% of Japan’s tourists, very few go to Beppu compared to other more popular areas. This is why pages like Beppu Girl Yuki on Instagram are great since it raises awareness to an English audience.

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