Until 1985, the number of foreign arrivals to Japan rose gradually. Among the factors contributing to this growth were the stability of Japanese consumer prices, despite a worldwide inflationary trend; favorable currency exchange rates, which made travel costs for foreign visitors in Japan relatively low; Taiwan's liberalization of overseas pleasure travel; and the increase in business travel from the People's Republic of China and Korea.
However, because of the sharp rise in the yen, beginning September 1985, and the subsequent slack after the close of Tsukuba's EXPO '85, visitor arrivals in 1986 decreased by 11.4% compared with 1985, when a record total of 2,327,047 foreign visitors came to Japan. By 1988, visitor arrivals had surpassed 1985's record totaling
2,355,4l2.
The number of foreign visitors increased in 1992 to 3,581,540, the largest in Japan's inbound history. From the latter half of 1992 to August 1994, however, the growth rate of foreign arrivals in Japan remained on a basically downward trend, due to the diversification of destinations besides Japan of travelers from Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and to the strong yen, which, in July 1994, broke the 100-yen mark.
The visitor arrivals recovered its upward trend again in September 1994 due to the inauguration of and increases of international flights in pace with the opening of Kansai International Airport (September), the Asian Games in Hiroshima (October), the OSAKA World Tourism Forum '94 (November), ending the year 1994 with a slight increase of 1.7%
While the number of visitors from Korea increased by 8.6% compared to the previous year, visitors from the rest of the five largest generating countries (Taiwan U.S.A. China and Hong Kong) showed respective decreases.
