One reason I got into the inbound travel business after the 3/11 earthquake was the desire to do something socially meaningful after having experienced how easily a disaster can disrupt our lives.

A Surrey University paper discusses the concept of "food memories" and how past experience with a food significantly affects a tourist's attitude towards trying it again.

The Nikkei newspaper started running articles about the peaking of the inbound tourism income bubble, pointing out that since the end of 2015 there has been a downwards shift in per-visitor tourist spending.

The local operation of Expedia is very Japanese. However, like other "Japanified" foreign-firm branches, they have lost their ability to recognize and respond to external trends.

According to the Japan Tourism Agency quarterly tourist survey, the number one thing that foreign tourists want to experience before coming to Japan is to try authentic Japanese food.

The Shoryudo project is a collaborative effort by the nine prefectures of Shizuoka, Aichi, Gifu, Nagano, Mie, Shiga, Fukui, Ishikawa, and Toyama, to develop their rural destinations for foreign tourists.

The Nikkei ran a number of articles expressing fear that the current rout in the Chinese stock market could impact Chinese tourism into Japan.

An enthusiastic travel article in the Daily Mail could be turned into a marketing lesson for Japanese tourism authorities, showing clearly the hot buttons an experienced opinion-leader presses to engage his audience.

Ever since we ran a story in June 2015 about Airbnb possibly becoming legal, we have had a steady stream of people both in Japan and abroad asking us for more information.

Last night, October 31, 2015, was Halloween here in Tokyo. By around 20:00 the streets on the west side of Shibuya were completely jammed with people, and the police had 800 officers in the area for crowd control.