Tokyo — Chinese tourism to Japan has plunged to its lowest level in years over the Lunar New Year holiday, with the country dropping out of the top ten overseas destinations for Chinese travellers for the first time since pre-pandemic normalisation — a stark economic signal of how quickly a diplomatic rupture can ripple through the retail tills of Osaka and Tokyo's Ginza shopping district.
Japan's transport ministry confirmed that Chinese visitor numbers almost halved in December compared with the same month in 2025, the sharpest single-month decline since the COVID-19 border closures. During the 40-day Lunar New Year travel period — the world's largest annual human migration — the number of Chinese tourists visiting Japan is expected to fall by up to 60 percent year-on-year, according to Japanese media reports. The Guardian reported the figures on Tuesday, citing transport ministry data and regional travel industry sources.
The collapse in arrivals is all the more striking because it runs counter to the broader trajectory of inbound tourism, which has reached record highs fuelled by a persistently weak yen. Visitors from the United States, Australia, and Southeast Asia have flooded department stores and ryokan. The Chinese market — historically Japan's largest source of inbound tourists — is moving in the opposite direction.
The diplomatic trigger
The precipitating event was a remark by Japan's prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, in November, when she told parliament that Japan's Self-Defence Forces could be deployed if a crisis in the Taiwan Strait posed an "existential" threat to the country. Beijing responded with unusual ferocity. State media framed the comments as proof of resurgent Japanese militarism. Officials urged tourists and students not to travel to Japan.
Wang Yi, China's foreign minister, escalated the rhetoric at the Munich Security Conference on Monday, telling delegates: "Japanese people should no longer allow themselves to be manipulated or deceived by those far-right forces, or by those who seek to revive militarism. All peace-loving countries should send a clear warning to Japan: if it chooses to walk back on this path, it will only be heading toward self-destruction."
Japan's foreign ministry in Tokyo condemned the remarks as "factually incorrect and ungrounded," noting that Japan's defence posture was "in response to an increasingly severe security environment and not directed against any specific third country" — careful language that declines to name China while making its concern unmistakable.
Liu Xiaoming, China's special representative on Korean peninsula affairs, went further still, invoking Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in a post on X to argue that Takaichi's comments betrayed an "unextinguished ambition to invade and colonise Taiwan once again."
Who benefits — and who loses
The reorientation of Chinese Lunar New Year tourism away from Japan is being absorbed, at least partly, by South Korea, which is expected to receive approximately 250,000 Chinese visitors during the holiday period — up 1.5 times from a year earlier, according to industry estimates. Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and even Russia are all projected to welcome more Chinese tourists than Japan, a ranking that would have been unthinkable eighteen months ago.
For duty-free retailers, hotel operators, and the broader hospitality sector in cities like Osaka — which built significant commercial infrastructure catering specifically to Chinese spending patterns during the pre-2020 inbound boom — the numbers represent a structural challenge, not a seasonal blip.
On the ground, the picture is more nuanced. A Chinese man interviewed by Kyodo News said he had chosen to visit anyway, arguing it was important to "promote goodwill between ordinary people." A woman from Shanghai told the agency she still planned to bring her parents to Japan. "The travel alert is aimed at promoting criticism of Japan," she said. "But my family has not been brainwashed."
The Chinese consulate general in Osaka issued a renewed warning on Sunday, urging nationals to avoid travel to Japan following a fatal stabbing in a tourist district — even though the incident did not involve Chinese nationals.
A pattern with precedent
China has used tourism as a lever of economic statecraft before. The pattern — state media framing shifts from neutral to hostile, official travel advisories follow, private-sector behaviour adjusts accordingly — is well established in Beijing's toolkit. South Korea experienced a near-total freeze in Chinese tourism between 2017 and 2019 following its decision to deploy the THAAD missile defence system, a period that cost the Korean tourism industry an estimated $7 billion.
The current cooling differs in one important respect: the Japanese government has not signalled any intent to walk back the remarks that triggered it. Takaichi has repeatedly declined to retract or soften her Taiwan comments, and her party's strong performance in recent internal LDP elections gives her little political incentive to do so.
Watch what they do, not what they say. In East Asian diplomacy, the subtext is the text. The question for Japan's tourism industry — and for the broader bilateral relationship — is whether this is a seasonal freeze or the beginning of a structural decoupling of the two countries' people-to-people ties.
