Until the coronavirus ground aerospace to a near halt, the travel and tourism industry had previously been experiencing an unprecedented boom, with more and more of us wanting to travel overseas. In 2018, the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) reported that in 2018 there were over 1.4 billion international tourist arrivals, an annual increase of 6%.

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Yet, what has happened to visitor numbers coming to Japan has been nothing short of extraordinary, with its visitor increase far steeper than the global trend. The UNWTO estimated in 2018 that 31.2 million people visited Japan in that year, representing an increase of 263% compared to 2010. These numbers especially gathered pace towards the middle of the decade. In 2017, 28.7 million visitors visited the country, compared to 10.4 million in 2013.

The number of tourists visiting Japan was stagnating in the first decade of the 21st century.

This then declined sharply in 2011, following the earthquake and subsequent meltdown of the Fukushima power plant.

 

Yet, following this, visitors to Japan did not only return to prior levels but exceeded anything that the Japan National Tourism Organisation could dream of. The 2008 target by the organisation of obtaining 20 million visitors by 2020 was reached by 2015. Thus, this perceived interest of people in Japan and the statistics pose a question as to why has there been such a remarkable rise in the number of tourists visiting Japan?

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Traditional explanations focus on the decreasing value of the yen, making a country that has long been seen as too expensive, affordable to many for the first time. This explanation is often coupled with the rise of budget airlines, increasingly flying to numerous Japanese destinations. Others point to the relaxation in the visa process, particularly for other Asian countries, which has simplified a bureaucratic and time-consuming process. These, along with other factors such as government advertising, Japan’s variety of attractions, and a burgeoning middle class in the region, all contribute to the rise in tourism in Japan.

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While these explanations are not incorrect, they are failing to consider the bigger picture regarding the changing nature in how we travel and, as a result, are all missing the most important cause behind Japan’s rise in visitors; social media.

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The emergence of Web 2.0

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In understanding Japan’s growth in tourism, we have to begin a decade before numbers even start to rise. The story starts with the birth of social media in the first decade of the 21st century. By 2006, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube had all entered the market, swiftly changing the composition of the Internet and sparking a change in how much of the world communicates and processes information. By the end of the decade, both Facebook and YouTube are some of the most visited websites on the planet.

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Yet, it is around this time that the way social media looks starts to change. In 2010, Instagram was founded, and a year later Snapchat was developed. The same year, WeChat was formed, effectively merging all these various social media templates for the Chinese market. Instagram and Snapchat both emphasise the visual, with their primary function sharing pictures. Existing text-heavy platforms like Facebook and Twitter adapted their layout to ensure that visual content appears more prominently on our home feeds. YouTube, meanwhile, continued to thrive in this changing environment.

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From the start of the 2010s, visual content online started to undergo a huge increase. According to an article by MIT’s Management Review, until 2011, 3.8 trillion photos were taken in all of human history. However, in 2015 alone, 1 billion were taken. Visual content is also likely to increase engagement, with the same article stating that posts with visuals receive 94% more page visits than those without. Accounting for the power and influence of social media in 2020 requires little explanation. The organisation Our World in Data found in September 2019 that one-in-three people in the world use social media, with Facebook, YouTube, and Whatsapp all possessing over a billion users.

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Social media has fundamentally changed the face of the travel industry. For a long time, the key theories of understanding where people choose to go on holiday boiled down to two theories: Destination Image and Word of Mouth.

 

As implied, central to Destination Image theory is the concept of the image and how this influences visitor intentions. In a seminal 1999 article on the subject now cited over 4000 times, Baloglu and McCleary write how the most important time in developing an image of a destination is at the time of selecting where we travel to. In another prominent article, Chon describes how this image is more influential than facts and statistics in determining our destination selection.

 

In updating this theory to the social media age, Irem Neuhofer, Associate Professor of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Massachusetts, tells us how social media corresponds with Destination Image as it exposes “the users to images that show the destination as an attraction.”

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A beautiful lake surrounded by cherry blossoms, ancient temples depicting historic architecture and a museum in Yakushima, these were some of the pictures Sophie found when she drifted from one social media account to another to get information on Japan. “In order to make my decision about the trip, social media played an important role because of all the pictures and images I could see online. One of my colleagues posted a picture of a museum in Japan. I visited the place with my family during the trip.” Sophie commented.

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Word of Mouth theory, meanwhile, was a concept introduced by psychologist George Silvermann in 1970. The central tenet of this theory is that people's perception of a product or place is influenced by other people’s opinions, especially those in their peer group. In today’s age, this has emerged into the electronic word of mouth (eWOM) where information from people online, especially social media, influence people’s perception about a product or place.

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The growth of social network advertising

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Japan’s national tourism bodies started to place more emphasis on advertising not just on the Internet but on social media. A study published in 2013, just as visitors to Japan started to gather pace, showed that the main Japanese tourism bodies, namely, the JNTO, and the Japan Tourism Agency (JTA), started using Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook to showcase the country, while moving away from more domestically popular platforms such as Mixi.

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“Japanese National Tourism Organisation offers financial support to promote Japanese tourism. Attractive slogans, interesting stories and creative advertising make people overseas start to consider Japan a nice place to visit,” said Franny Lin, formerly in charge of marketing at Japanese airline Vanilla Air.

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One change that Japan has adapted to is using promotional campaigns which encourage engagement. In 2015, the JNTO started collaborating with popular travel sites such as Lonely Planet to develop video content. The same year, it launched the “Welcome Japan” campaign, in collaboration with popular travel bloggers. Two years later, it launched the hashtag #UnknownJapan which has since been used hundreds of thousands of times on Instagram. Although we have to treat the numbers with caution, Neuhofer notes that “the number of people who follow the accounts can be an indication of the popularity of the account” and therefore, people who are considering visiting the destination. As of April 2020, the official Facebook and Instagram accounts of the JNTO have 500,000 and 400,000 likes and followers respectively.

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Simon Hudson, an internationally recognised tourism expert based at the University of South Carolina, believes social media is a critical component of any integrated marketing campaign for destinations. “A large percentage of consumers read reviews of destinations, hotels, attractions and restaurants prior to vacation, and whilst on vacation a very large percentage post reviews or vacation photos on a social network or update their social media status” he said.

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Yet, while official social media campaigns are effective in promoting Japan, the fact is that social media’s influence on tourism Japan expands well beyond official channels. The first of these is friends and family sharing travel experiences on social media. An example of Word of Mouth theory in action, a 2019 report by marketing firm Stackla found that 86% of people believe they became interested in a destination after seeing user generated content online and

52% of people said that they plan to visit somewhere after getting information from the posts of their family and friends on social media.

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“People care about what other people say regarding certain destinations, and I heard from my friend in Australia that one of the reasons why Nagano has become such a popular destinations for Australians to go skiing and snowboarding is because it spread through online platforms and social media,” Kayo Mimizuka, a journalist working for Japanese news agency Kyodo News commented.

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For Sophie it was useful to see what other people think about the place before she visits it herself. “Social media provided me an opportunity to find people who have been to Japan in order to interact with them and get more knowledge,” she said.

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The Age of the Influencer

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Another important phenomenon that emerged in the age of globalisation and social media is of “influencers.” From beauty blogs to travel vlogs, thousands of posts are shared each day on different social media platforms affecting people’s opinions and thus, their consuming behaviour. Tourism industry has been one of the several others affected by it.

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Describing travel influencers as professional and semi professional travel writers who prepare blogs and vlogs, Distinguished Professor of tourism Alastair M. Morrison writes in his book Marketing and Managing Tourism Destinations that influencers play a significant role as source of information and inspiration.

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“Simply posting once a day on various platforms is not enough, it is all about the content. Influencers are becoming increasingly important – and for the most part, they are influencing via social media,” Hudson commented.

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YouTube has been one of the platforms frequently used by travel influencers who post videos during their visits to different countries around the world. A 2016 study which examined YouTube as a marketing tool suggested that online content by YouTubers and genuine tourists is potentially more influential than content from official tourist organisations. Perhaps no country has benefitted from this more than Japan.

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In 2018, the BBC reported that the hours of content uploaded from YouTube channels in Japan more than doubled between 2016 and 2017 with channels such as “Rachel and Jun” subscribed to by over 2.5 million people. Most videos produced are by westerners who have moved to Japan, documenting their everyday life, and focusing on the advantages, challenges and oddities of adapting to life in a different culture.

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Whether it be people playing with foxes in a fox village in Japan’s Zao town, having coffee with cats roaming around Tokyo’s cat cafe or simply dining at a famous restaurant, these all help to capture people’s attention and rack up the views.

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PhD student Dorothy Finan researching contemporary Japanese culture at the University of Sheffield, commented that there seems to be a big market for this type of content. According to an article in Nikkei Asian Review, the YouTube celebrity management company made agreements with 250 prominent vloggers in Japan. The article also states that the YouTuber market in Japan was worth 21.9 billion Yen in the year 2017, 2.2 times greater than the previous year and is predicted to be worth 57.9 billion yen by 2022.

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Taken together, official campaigns by organisations, influencers’s content, and information shared by friends and family all represent a source of information for the potential traveller. These sources of content are ever-expanding, as we increasingly use social media as a source of travel information. These information sources help make up a substantial proportion of the traffic related to Japan on the Internet and social media.

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Haven’t we been here before?

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Few countries have been able to benefit from the shift to visual online content more so than Japan. While depending on the individual, Neuhofer states that food and attraction-related information (in this sense, something like the Eiffel Tower) are the most influential types of images. This is to the benefit of Japan, with the world developing an appetite for Japanese cuisine in the past 15 years (Forbes reports that the number of Japanese restaurants globally has increased from 24,000 in 2006 to 89,000 by 2016). With the enormous spread of the Camera Eats First phenomenon on social media, this has only been to the benefit of raising the profile of Japan.

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Yet, Japan is not the first, and won’t be the last country to ride the wave of social media. Almost concurrent with Japan’s rise in visitors, Iceland’s tourism industry has skyrocketed in the past decade, before numbers stagnating in the past couple of years. Between 2013 and 2017, the island nation experienced a 20% annual growth in the number of visitors, meaning that by 2018, there were over 2.3 million overnight visitors in a country of little over 300,000. In the case of Chinese tourists, there has been a staggering 660% increase within the same timeframe.

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Social media has been largely to thank for this. Over the past decade, it has been almost impossible to avoid pictures of Iceland’s admittedly beautiful scenery. If you haven’t visited the country, then you almost definitely know someone who has, even if that person is Justin Bieber. On Instagram, the hashtag #Iceland has been shared over 12 million times, and YouTube videos which showcase the landscape routinely accumulate millions of viewers. In a 2018 report, the Icelandic Capital Management firm Gamma described how social media is one of the key factors behind Iceland’s increase in tourism as it “boosted awareness” of the country.

 

The cases of Japan and Iceland share numerous similarities. They are both expensive countries that were previously deemed too inaccessible and pricey to visit until recently. Yet, it is the visual and cultural aspect where Japan and Iceland are most in common. While their geographies undoubtedly vary hugely, it is not unreasonable to suggest that both countries are picturesque, photogenic countries that portray an “otherworldly” “unique” image, whether this is the bustling neon lights of a Japanese megacity or the perceived serenity and tranquillity of Iceland. As we have mentioned with Japan, part of this popularity on social media can be accounted for by an increased cultural interest. While in Japan’s case this is everyday life being documented by YouTubers, for Iceland this is the result of being a primary filming location for Game of Thrones as well as other features of popular culture such as Star Wars and Interstellar.

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Japan’s perceived “uniqueness” has flourished thanks to social media. The idea that Japan is a unique nation, with an incomparable culture and way of life dates back to the nineteenth century, when instead of being colonised like much of the non-Western world, became the coloniser. As Japan rapidly modernised following World War II, the idea of “alternative modernity” developed, effectively meaning that a country can become industrialised and modern without becoming more western. In the present era, Japan’s uniqueness is viewed in a more light-hearted manner, focusing on a perceived “weird and wackiness” such as matcha-flavoured Kit Kats and maid cafes.

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Social media has thrived off this mindset. YouTube channels such as Only in Japan play up this image, with great success. Sites such as Buzzfeed and the Culture Trip are awash with articles which list experiences that are apparently only available in the country, and use social media to circulate their content. Finan tells us that from her own personal experience, her family members regularly share with her the latest content they have found about the country.

How does this then relate to social media leading to increased tourist numbers? Put simply, in this age of visual content where we are constantly bombarded with the same images, videos, GIFs, and memes, content which is deemed “unique” and “original” leads us to believe that this will get us more likes.

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In terms of tourism, this all relates back to the fundamentals of Destination Image and Word of Mouth Theory. The more attractive an image, the more likely someone is going to want to travel there. The more they see this image, whether it is from influencers, friends and family, or official tourism campaigns, the more likely they are to consider it as a destination. The sources we spoke to were quick to claim that social media, whether by official accounts or user generated content, is key in influencing where people travel to. For instance, Neuhofer described how while not familiar with Japanese marketing, “Instagram, if used correctly, can help to increase the numbers.”

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Neuhofer, however, like the other experts we spoke to, believed that social media was just one of several contributory factors to Japan’s rise in tourism, rather than the sole principal cause.

However, with Business Insider reporting in 2016 that Japan is the second most photographed country in the world on Instagram, just as it was experiencing record numbers of visitors, it is not unreasonable to suggest that, like the case of Iceland, social media is driving visitors to the country.

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Overall, this implies that Japan becoming more prevalent on social media can be related to the increasing use of social media by Japanese tourism agencies, the rise of Japanese travel influencers and the growth of visual content, especially in the last five years, coupled with the

uniqueness of Japanese culture. Hence, the increasing prevalence of Japan on social media in the last five years corresponding with the rise in the number of tourists in Japan around the same time does say something about the link between the two.