Earlier this week I traveled to Kochi city to participate in a seminar designed to help Kochi Prefectural tourism-related officials understand what might bring more foreign travelers there.

In this age of the Internet, there is still nothing more powerful in our grab bag of popular culture and entertainment media than movies with inspired plots that can actually move the hearts of audiences.

Having been there, I can safely say that as of September 2015, there is NO access allowed by the Great Firewall to Google services like search, Gmail, maps, etc.

Towns and cities all over Japan, funded either directly by the Japanese government or indirectly through private investment programs are now wondering how to attract their share of visitors.

Why doesn't the Tokyo Olympics committee follow the same good sense of its predecessors and hold the Olympics in, say, September-October? No one is saying, not in public anyway.

For the first time in 44 years, in the first half of 2015 there were more inbound tourists than Japanese going overseas. The forecast for inbound tourists for 2015 is now around 18m.

The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in South Korea has knocked the stuffing out of the tourism industry there. Apparently the number of Chinese tourists fell by 54% in June.

The gist of a meanwhile deleted article on Yahoo Japan News was that it was highly likely that short-term hosting of private rooms to travelers would become legal, under the framework of the Special Zones law.

It almost seems like there is a group controlling the Narita Airport governing body that has gone to significant lengths to build an abomination called Terminal 3, as a means of undermining the LCCs.

Over the last three years we have been bringing mostly young people in their 20's to Japan for 4-6 weeks, and assigning them to write stories on their experiences all over the country.