Radio Brisvaani
When the Nagano Olympics were opened by Emperor Akihito in 1998, most Australians had little idea of where the historic alpine city was, nor did they really care.
Back then, the picturesque and high-quality slopes to the west of Tokyo were almost entirely populated by locals.
Now you can barely slip on the ice outside the central train station without bumping into an Aussie.
Back in 1998, at the height of our summer, Australian beaches were populated with Japanese tourists escaping the cold of the northern hemisphere winter.
Now, hundreds of thousands of Australians escape the humidity of the southern hemisphere summer in search of snowfields such as Hakuba, close to Nagano, or Niseko on the northern island Hokkaido, which has been described as the Bali of snowfields because of the influx of Australians.
At the end of last century, the tourism relationship between Japan and Australia was one-sided.
Plane trips between the two countries were populated almost entirely by Japanese on both legs.
The Japanese came here in droves seeking sunshine and surf in a country that appeared relatively cheap despite the necessary long-haul flight.
Australians, though, didn’t return the favour and looked to other locations for their holidays. In part, put off by Japan’s deserved reputation for being expensive.
But, in the last 20 years, that relationship has shifted dramatically, driven by a transformation of economic fundamentals.
Well before China’s economic growth drove its citizens to seek out Australian beaches and koala cuddling sessions, it was Japanese tourists filling the pockets of operators in the 1980s and ’90s.
The peak was in 1997 when more than 814,000 made the journey south.
Two decades later, in 2016, the number was basically half, with only 417,900 making the same trip.
By comparison, in 1997 some 101,460 Australians made the trek to Japan, of which just 41,520 were tourists.
By 2016 the number had sky rocketed to 445,237 — of which 398,193 were tourists. That’s a 959 per cent increase in the number of Australians taking a holiday in Japan over just two decades.
Many have blamed Lara Bingle and the lost in translation “Where the bloody hell are you?” Tourism Australia ad campaign for the drop-off in Japanese tourists.
