On September 16, 2026 the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) published its estimate of foreign arrivals for August 2026: 3,098,900 visitors came to Japan, down 9.6% year on year. The figure can look like the end of Japan's tourism boom, or like the "hangover" after EXPO 2025. But is that what really happened? Break the numbers down market by market and a different conclusion appears.
Japan outside China is still growing, even against the record August of 2025
The comparison base really is high. August 2025 was the first August in history in which Japan passed three million visitors in a single month. The World Expo 2025 in Osaka was running at full capacity at the time. It would be easy to assume this year's decline follows from that.
The main movement sits elsewhere. Arrivals from China fell 59.0% to 418,000. A year earlier the figure was roughly 1.02 million. China alone therefore removed about 600,000 people, while the total year-on-year loss is about 330,000. The rest of the world did not merely cover the gap, it added to it: excluding China, August 2026 brought around 11% more visitors than the same month last year.
The market-by-market data confirms it. Korea rose 28.7% to 850,500, Taiwan 7.3% to 666,000, Hong Kong 9.4% to 247,300. Of the twenty-three markets JNTO tracks, Italy and Spain recorded their strongest month ever, and twelve further markets their best August on record. European demand for Japan is at an all-time high. A weak yen helps: against the Czech koruna the yen is 14.4% weaker than it was two years ago, and the Czech National Bank rate of 17 September 2026 is CZK 0.136 to the yen.
The Chinese shortfall, though, has no economic cause. Beijing asked its citizens to postpone travel to Japan after Prime Minister Takaichi spoke in fairly sharp terms in November 2025 about a possible Taiwan contingency. Since then the Chinese market has all but disappeared: 2.06 million Chinese arrivals in the first half of 2026, against roughly 4.7 million a year earlier.
Kansai, the region where the "hangover" should have shown most
Osaka Prefecture was the obvious place to look for a post-Expo drop. In the first half of 2026 it received 8,183,000 foreign visitors, down 7.7% year on year. Its Chinese market, however, fell 63.3% to 987,000, a deeper cut than Tokyo's (down 52.7%) and deeper than the national average. Osaka was more dependent on China than the rest of the country and paid the most for it. Hiroshi Mizohata, head of the Osaka Convention and Tourism Bureau, told a press conference that the damage from the Chinese decline had turned out clearly larger than they first expected.
What came next is more interesting. In July 2026 Osaka Prefecture received 1,467,000 foreign visitors, up 0.1% year on year. That was the first positive month after four months of decline, and it came against an Expo July. It came even though arrivals from China remained 56.1% below last year's level. Taiwan delivered its strongest month on record in Osaka (180,000, up 26.4%), Korea added 31.9%, Hong Kong 54.8%, and the other markets 160.5%.
Put plainly: in a single month Kansai replaced both the Expo traffic and the missing Chinese visitors. That is a very different story from a hangover.
Korea and America instead of China. The airport is redrawing its route map
The place where the shift away from China shows most durably is the flight schedule. The summer 2026 season at the Kansai airports carries 17% fewer international passenger flights than the year before. Chinese services fell from 536.5 weekly flights to 33 cities down to 162.9 flights to 12 cities, a drop of seventy per cent. Korean capacity, by contrast, grew 26% to 468.6 weekly flights and South-East Asia 14%. Excluding China, the other regions added 14%. International cargo flights at Kansai International Airport rose 31%.
The airport has not lost its traffic, then. It is redrawing its route map. The clearest forward signal came from United Airlines, which from March 2027 restores a daily Los Angeles to Kansai service, the first in some twenty-seven years.
What does this do to the argument we made in May?
In our analysis of the economic impact of Expo 2025 we warned in May that Kansai risked repeating the pattern of 1970: a temporary stimulus, no structural strategy afterwards, and a long slow decline in the region's weight. We wrote that the next three years would decide it.
Nine months of data allow two conclusions. The risk that actually materialised is not a post-Expo hangover but concentration on a single market. And the region responded faster than expected, because demand from Korea, Taiwan, South-East Asia and Europe covered a shortfall nobody had planned for.
One question stays open, and it is the more important one. Visitor numbers were replaced; spending was not automatically replaced with them. The Chinese visitor was among the highest spending, and 2026 spending data for Kansai is not yet available. Until it is, it is too early to claim the region changed its visitor mix at no cost.
What follows from this for Czech companies?
First, do not read headlines about collapsing Japanese tourism as a signal about the Japanese market. European demand for Japan is at a record, and the Japanese side is actively looking for something to replace its dependence on China. That applies beyond tourism, because Japanese firms are running the same calculation about their supply chains.
Second, Kansai is more open than it was a year ago. The region has hotel and air capacity that the Expo absorbed twelve months earlier, and regional authorities are courting foreign partners more actively than they did when visitor numbers grew on their own.
Third, costs are rising. Fuel surcharges following the conflict in the Gulf region have pushed air fares up, and the Japanese side treats this as a risk to watch. Anyone planning travel or a trade fair appearance for 2027 should budget for more expensive transport than this year.
Fourth, Japan has just shown what dependence on a single buyer does to an established market once politics enters it: one speech by the prime minister in November, and six months later more than half of the Chinese visitors are gone. Czech export structure is concentrated in much the same way. In 2025, 77.5% of Czech exports went to the European Union, and Germany alone accounts for around thirty per cent. That is logical: proximity and integration into German supply chains are exceptionally efficient, and nobody should walk away from a market that pays. The bill for that dependence, however, does not arrive gradually. It can arrive all at once and without notice. And a second market cannot be built at the moment a company needs it. Czech firms do have something to offer in Japan, particularly now, when replacements are being sought for some Chinese suppliers: precision engineering, semiconductor components, energy, biotechnology, software development. The Japanese government is also actively supporting foreign market entry this year, from free JETRO services to tax incentives for larger investments.
How Czech-Japan Hub helps
Czech-Japan Hub is a non-profit platform that builds on the Czech participation in the World Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai. During that participation we built a strong network of direct contacts in Japanese business, in government and regional organisations, and in cultural and educational institutions. That network is available to members of the Hub.
We are not an agency and we do not replace CzechTrade or JETRO. We complement them where public instruments end, at the level of a specific relationship with a specific person. In Kansai today that means one thing above all: we know who in the region is currently looking for demand other than Chinese, and we can introduce your company directly rather than point it at a database.