Chinese travelers moved in opposite directions across the Korean and Japanese tourism markets in July, with arrivals in South Korea reaching 1.8 times the number who went to Japan. A year earlier the ratio ran the other way, with Japan drawing 1.6 times as many Chinese visitors as Korea, meaning the standings flipped entirely within 12 months.
Chinese arrivals in South Korea totaled 777,000 in July, up 29.0% from a year earlier and accounting for 37.1% of the 2.09 million foreign visitors to the country, according to the International Tourism Trends report released on the 14th by the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute. Chinese arrivals in Japan, by contrast, came to 428,200, down 56.1% from a year earlier. One market grew while the other was cut nearly in half, producing the 1.8-fold gap.
Working backward from the growth rates puts July of last year at roughly 600,000 Chinese visitors to Korea and about 980,000 to Japan. Over the past year Korea added 170,000 while Japan lost more than 550,000. That is how the gap between the two destinations narrowed and then reversed.
The institute attributed the plunge in Chinese arrivals in Japan to Beijing's advisory urging citizens to refrain from traveling there. The finding aligns with observations that reluctance to visit Japan has spread within China in recent months. Chinese travel to Korea, facing no such constraint, continued to rise and reached 149.6% of the level recorded in the same month of 2019, surpassing pre-pandemic volumes.
The gains were not limited to Chinese visitors. Arrivals from Taiwan recovered to 229.4% of the same month in 2019, a faster rebound than China's. On a year-on-year basis, all five of Korea's largest source markets posted double-digit growth: China 29.0%, Taiwan 30.7%, Hong Kong 18.7%, the United States 14.1% and Japan 10.2%. Total foreign arrivals in South Korea came to 2.09 million in July, up 20.8% from a year earlier and the highest monthly figure on record. For the first seven months of the year, 12.8 million people visited Korea, 29.5% more than in the same period of 2019.
Japan's market as a whole has not contracted. Foreign arrivals there totaled 3.44 million in July, still exceeding Korea's total by about 1.35 million. Korean and Taiwanese travelers filled the space left by Chinese visitors. Arrivals from Korea rose 31.9% to 894,700 and those from Taiwan gained 26.4% to 763,800, both July records.
What the data show is not an overall reversal in the standings of the two tourism markets. Japan remains the larger destination. The key point is that within those totals, travelers of a single nationality swelled on one side and drained from the other, a contrast now confirmed in a single month's numbers.
