【Aging, safety net and fiscal crisis in Japan】No.274: The national park enjoyment project has disappeared due to COVID-19

Japan’s 34 national parks (Figure 1) cover a total area of 21,949km², which accounts for 5.8% of Japan’s total land area (377,975949km²,). The government formulated a national park enjoyment project in 2016 with the goal of increasing the number of foreign tourists that visit the national parks to 10 million by 2020. To this end, the government has been working hard to improve the infrastructure, such as installing western toilets and providing multilingual services. As a result, the number of foreign tourists visiting national parks increased from 4,900,000 in 2015 to 6,940,000 in 2018 (Figure2). However, it decreased by 270,000 in 2019 to 6,670,000. This is because the deterioration of Japan-Korea relations has reduced the number of Korean tourists visiting national parks by 434,000 in this same period. Since the number of foreign tourists has fallen to almost zero due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of foreign tourists visiting the national parks has also fallen as of August 2020.

The government has a responsibility to protect the jobs created in the development of this project and cannot afford
to waste the investment in infrastructure development. As such, the government held a project meeting on August 3^rd, and decided to attract domestic Japanese tourists for the time being, until they can shift their focus back to increasing foreign tourists (once the COVID-19 issue is resolved).

Figure 1 National parks in Japan

Source: Ministry of the Environment.

Figure 2 Number of foreign tourists who visited national parks in Japan

Source: Ministry of the Environment.