Japan tourism recovery Travel to Hawaii from Japan is recovering faster than expected and as airlines begin to reactivate some canceled flights, Japanese tourism should be back to pre-Sept. 11 levels by this spring, Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau officials said yesterday.
topping forecasts
Hawaii officials say visitors
from the country should return
to pre-Sept. 11 levels by springBy Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.comAs recently as mid-November the bureau had predicted December traffic from Japan at 50 percent to 60 percent of year-earlier levels, rising to 73 percent in the first quarter of 2002, 90 percent in the second quarter, 95 percent in the second quarter and actually surpassing 2001 levels by 2 percent in the final quarter of this year.
"I was accused of being too optimistic" in that estimate, Kiyoshi Mukumoto, the bureau's vice president-Japan, said at a marketing outlook session at the Hawaii Convention Center yesterday.
But the Japan market is coming back sooner than expected, said Mukumoto, sporting a goatee beard. The formerly clean-shaven Mukumoto said he grew the facial hair because he could, because of changing attitudes in Japan.
There is one aspect of Japanese society that hasn't changed, however, the Japan-born Mukumoto said. It's a "peculiar" characteristic in which the Japanese people are "easy to heat up and easy to cool down."
The notion that it was not right to travel internationally after Sept. 11 became widespread because of that, he said. Then another Japanese characteristic kicked in, the fact the nobody wants to be the first to change. "They were looking at each other," not wanting to be the first to go.
Now some have started to travel and others are joining in fast, he said. By mid-February, arrivals from Japan were already at 80 percent of last year's levels, he said.
Hawaii's rapid response to the crisis helped, he said, in particular the early-October mission to Japan headed by Gov. Ben Cayetano and two former governors, John Waihee and George Ariyoshi, all spreading the message that Hawaii has not changed, is safe, and is waiting for the Japanese to come back.
It got huge press and broadcast publicity throughout Japan, Mukumoto said.
Also helping were full-page national newspaper advertisements with a circulation of 15 million or more that carried the same message, plus information about values in Hawaii that began running in October.
Japanese attitudes in general warmed up with the birth of Crown Princess Masako's daughter at the end of November, he said.
Japan Airlines, which drop-ped a number of Hawaii flights, will have many of them back in service in April and be fully back in the Hawaii trade by late 2002, Mukumoto said.
He said he believes year-earlier levels will be matched by May.
The session, just one part of a broad HVCB marketing presentation, included a videotaped report from Isao Matsuhashi, chairman of the board of the Japan Association of Travel Agents and also chairman of JTB, Japan's biggest travel agency, in which he supported the HVCB's findings.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 plunged the world's travel industry into "the worst crisis our industry has ever experienced," he said. "But travel to Hawaii is coming back sooner and quicker than I expected," Matsuhashi said. "I am basically optimistic that Japanese travel to Hawaii will be back to normal by spring."
Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau
