4.99 million Chinese tourists visited Japan during the Sakura festival

Huge numbers of visitors arrived in Japan this year for the traditional sakura (cherry blossom) viewing season. Both Japanese and Chinese tourism agencies are scrambling to offer package tours to cities like Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka that are most popular among Chinese tourists.

Chinese online tourism service companies anticipated over 500,000 Chinese tourists to visit Japan in late March and early April for the single purpose of viewing cherry blossoms- a 50 percent increase from last year, Guangzhou Daily reported.

The number of Chinese visitors to Japan totaled to about 400,000 in April 2015, more than doubling that of a year earlier, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.

Ctrip.com International, a major Chinese online tourism service company, projects that the number of Chinese tourists during this year’s cherry blossom season between March 15 and April 15 would further increase by 150 percent from last year.

The average cost of visiting Japan has exceeded RMB 20,000 (USD 3098), according to the data provided by tourism agencies in Guangzhou Daily’s report. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization, travelers from China topped the list for 2015, accounting for 4.99 million, more than twice as many from the year before. Of the nearly 3.5 trillion Japanese Yen (over 32.4 billion US Dollars) spent by foreign visitors in Japan during 2015, Chinese tourists accounted for 40.8 percent. In January and February this year, some 970,000 Chinese tourists visited Japan, seeing a 60 percent increase from a year before, according to another report from Japan National Tourism Organization.