Japan to boost tourism to quake-hit region with subsidies as focus turns to repairing ‘lifelines’

The funds will be part of a US$1 billion recovery package and include programmes such as covering half the cost of a night’s stay in hotels in the affected prefectures
The government’s financial support for Noto’s tourism sector can help rebuild facilities to emphasise the region’s historic and cultural attractions, analyst says

Japan

Julian Ryall

Published: 8:52am, 25 Jan 2024

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The Japanese government will provide generous subsidies to the tourism industry across northern parts of the country that were devastated by the magnitude-7.6 earthquake on January 1, even while the region is still suffering from aftershocks and a lack of basic municipal services.

The funds will be part of a 150 billion yen (US$1 billion) recovery package for the region that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said would be confirmed this week. The tourism subsidies will include a number of programmes, such as one that would cover half of hotel charges of up to 20,000 yen per person, per night, in the prefectures of Niigata, Toyama, Ishikawa and Fukui.

While the tourism industry has welcomed the government’s support, it is widely accepted that the Noto Peninsula, which bore the brunt of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, will not be ready to welcome travellers for some time to come.

Prefectural authorities confirmed to This Week in Asia that they intended to prioritise the allocation of recovery funds towards basic reconstruction that would aid Noto residents, with the rebuilding of roads and the restoring water, sewage and electricity services being top concerns.

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According to local police, 233 people have been confirmed dead and another 20 are still listed as missing. The vast majority were killed when buildings collapsed.

Aftershocks from the initial quake continue to rattle the region, with two minor tremors reported on Wednesday following eight minor quakes the day before.

Experts have confirmed that the January 1 quake was triggered when one of three active faults northeast of the peninsula shifted, and warned that the two other faults have barely moved.

Kenji Satake, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute, cautioned in an interview with the Yomiuri newspaper that the two other active faults could slip and potentially unleash another magnitude-7 quake that would trigger a tsunami of up to 3 metres.

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Nevertheless, work to rebuild the worst-affected communities on the Noto Peninsula needed to commence immediately, said Takashi Nakamoto, a spokesman for the prefectural government of Ishikawa.

“We must focus on the roads, restoring electricity supplies and the water networks,” he said. “These are the lifelines for local residents, and it causes serious problems when any of those lifelines is severed. These will be repaired first, as they are the most important.”

The next step would be to construct resilient infrastructure to protect life and property from damage caused by future natural disasters, he said, adding that such infrastructure would benefit the region’s tourism industry in the long run.

The timing of the disaster is deeply unfortunate for the prefecture’s travel sector, which was beginning to recover from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Some 12.31 million domestic and foreign visitors visited in 2022, but that figure recovered to 18.25 million last year.

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Ashley Harvey, a travel marketing analyst who has worked in Japan’s travel sector for more than 15 years, said the government’s financial support for hotels, tour operators and others in the travel sector in the four prefectures that had been most badly affected was “just what is needed, under the circumstances”.

“But on the Noto Peninsula, the focus needs to be on helping the people and rebuilding their lives,” he said. “That needs to be the priority for the next 18 months or so, and there is no point in attempting to attract tourists there until the situation has improved.”

Given that, he said, the industry had a clean slate to rebuild tourist facilities that could be the envy of the rest of the country and really emphasise the region’s unique historic and cultural attractions, rather than “rebuilding ugly concrete hotels and towns”.

According to Harvey, the Noto area has a blueprint to work from, given that the Tohoku region of northeast Honshu island was able to bounce back from the larger and even more destructive earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, as well as travellers’ concerns about fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

“Inbound tourist numbers collapsed in 2011 and 2012 because of fears over the radiation, but Tohoku rebuilt quickly and demand kicked in again in 2013 because the government dropped most visa requirements for travellers from Southeast Asia and, eventually, China,” he said.

Noto Railway’s Anamizu Station in Anamizu, Ishikawa prefecture, has been closed since the earthquake on January 1. Photo: Kyodo

Japan’s cause was also helped when Tokyo was named as the host city of the 2020 Olympic Games, which gave the nation’s travel industry “a positive narrative to feed to the world’s media”, Harvey said.

“The Noto Peninsula has been hit hard, but I’ve not heard of any companies reporting cancellations among foreign travellers, mostly because Noto was not on their itineraries,” he said.

“But it’s nothing like Tohoku’s ‘triple-whammy’ of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis, so I’m very optimistic that travel firms in Noto will be able to put this behind them fairly quickly.”