Japan Again Receives Foreign Cruise Ships After Three Years Of COVID-19 Restrictions

Illustration of the cruise ship Amadea. (Wikimedia Commons/Tvabutzku1234)

JAKARTA - A foreign cruise ship docked at Shizuoka Prefecture port on Wednesday, becoming the first ship to arrive in Japan in about three years due to the recently relaxed COVID-19 border control measures.

The scheduled arrival came after the Land of the Rising Sun canceled the suspension of the cruise ship mandated by the government, seeking to expand the number of ports receiving foreign cruise ships to 100 by 2025, as well as increase the number of tourists to pre-pandemic peaks, more than 2 million people.

The deployment of the Amadea cruise ship at Shimizu Port, Shizuoka City, central Japan, is the first of 212 ships scheduled to arrive in the country by 2023, with several ships expected to make port visits, according to Kyodo News March 1.

The Amadea cruise ship, operated by German company Phoenix Reisen GmbH and carrying about 500 passengers and 300 crew members, docked around 8 am in sunny weather with views of Mount Fuji nearby.

Welcomed by the performance of taiko by musicians, including some from the local area, the passengers began to get off after 9 a.m. after the health check on board.

The ship weighing 29,000 tonnes, which departed from Saipan in the North Mariana Islands on February 25, is scheduled to leave Shizuoka for Tokyo on Wednesday evening.

In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, cruise ships made 1,932 port visits in Japan, carrying with them about 2.15 million tourists who spent about 80.5 billion yen. That same year, foreign cruise ships anchored at 67 ports.

The government is trying to increase that number to 100 by embedding the target in a national plan to increase tourism, which the Cabinet will pass at the end of March. It is also to return the number of visitors on foreign cruise ships which recorded a record of 2.53 million people in 2017.

"We want to increase the number of visitors by expanding their choice to dock at the port," said a government official.

To achieve this goal, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transportation and Tourism plans to provide greater support to local governments, to help them compete with foreign shipping companies and ports, as well as improve features in domestic locations to welcome passengers.

It is known that the Japanese government decided last November to reopen ports for cruise ships, fearing the country would lose its market share of profitable cruise ship tourists after countries in Europe and North America began reopening around June 2021.

Foreign cruise ship admissions were suspended in March 2020, following a mass coronavirus outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which left thousands of people quarantined in Yokohama in February 2020, with 13 of the more than 700 crew and infected passengers dead.