Foreign visitors to national parks in Japan up 15 percent in 2018

May 24, 2019

Tokyo--The estimated number of foreign visitors to Japan's 34 national parks in 2018 rose 15.7 pct from the year before to 6.94 million, up for the third consecutive year, the Environment Ministry said Friday.

Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, stretching from Tokyo to Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan, attracted the most visitors from abroad, with 2,991,000.

Shikotsu-Toya National Park in Hokkaido, northernmost Japan, ranked second with 1,068,000 visitors, followed by Aso-Kuju National Park, which straddles Kumamoto and Oita prefectures in southwestern Japan, with 1,034,000.

The ministry aims to raise the total annual number of foreign visitors to national parks in Japan to 10 million by 2020.

At a press conference, Environment Minister Yoshiaki Harada said the ministry "will improve multilingual guides and increase promotional activities." Jiji Press