Data brief
Where people actually go
English-language travel writing about East Asia is written for foreign visitors, so it describes the places foreign visitors go. Japan and Korea both publish a domestic destination map that looks nothing like it. China publishes something different — national holiday totals — and that difference is itself worth understanding.
The short answer
Kyoto ranks eleventh among Japanese travellers and third among foreign ones — 55.2% of its guest-nights are foreign, making it statistically among the least Japanese places in Japan. Seoul ranks eleventh for Korean overnight trips, behind Gangwon by a factor of six. And among Japanese people in their twenties, travelling to see family and friends slightly outweighs travelling for leisure.
Japan: the domestic map
The Japan Tourism Agency publishes guest-nights by prefecture, split by nationality. Subtracting foreign guest-nights leaves the domestic ranking — which almost no English-language source reproduces.
Top 14 of 47 prefectures by Japanese guest-nights, 2025 confirmed figures. Bars show domestic volume; the figure beside each is the foreign share of all guest-nights in that prefecture.
Shizuoka outranks Kyoto for Japanese travellers and is 90.1% domestic. It barely appears in English-language coverage. The most domestic prefectures with real volume — Fukui at 2.8% foreign, Shimane 3.3%, Fukushima 3.7%, Mie 4.1% — are the onsen and pilgrimage prefectures, and they are effectively invisible in English.
Who travels for what
The consumption survey separates travel by purpose. Across all domestic travel-nights, leisure is the largest category at 47.7%, ahead of business at 15.9%. What is easy to miss is the size of the third: 36.4% 帰省・知人訪問等 — homecoming, visiting friends and relatives, and other private travel — and how sharply that share varies by age.
| Age | Leisure | 帰省・知人訪問等Homecoming and visiting | Business |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10 | 41% | 58.6% | 0.4% |
| 20s | 42.5% | 43.2% | 14.3% |
| 30s | 40.4% | 38.2% | 21.4% |
| 50s | 44.7% | 27.6% | 27.7% |
| 70s | 60.8% | 31.5% | 7.7% |
Among Japanese people in their twenties, the homecoming and visiting category slightly exceeds leisure — 43.2% against 42.5%. For children under ten it is a clear majority, which is a fact about who they travel with rather than about their own choices. Nationally leisure remains the largest category; the point is that a substantial share of Japanese travel is not tourism at all, and English coverage of "Japanese travel" describes the leisure slice almost exclusively.
Korea: Seoul is eleventh
Korea's national travel survey counts trips by destination region. On overnight trips — the measure that captures actual holidays rather than day excursions — the ranking inverts everything an English-language reader would expect.
Top 12 of 17 regions by domestic overnight trips, 2024. Millions.
Gangwon takes 20.7 million domestic overnight trips against Seoul's 3.4 million — six times as many, and 67% more than the second-placed region. Two structural details are worth knowing before using these figures: Jeju's overnight ratio is 92%, because an island cannot be day-tripped; and Gyeonggi's is 16%, because it is the ring around Seoul and absorbs enormous day-trip volume that never reaches accommodation statistics at all.
China: the holiday is the unit, not the destination
China does not publish a comparable destination ranking. What its Ministry of Culture and Tourism publishes instead is a national total per holiday — which makes the holiday, rather than the place, the unit of measurement. That is a real difference in how the three states see their own domestic travel, and it is the reason this section is shaped differently rather than forced into a false parallel. Every figure is a ministry estimate, 测算, not an enumeration.
| Holiday | Days | Trips | Spending |
|---|---|---|---|
| 春节 Spring Festival 2026 | 9 | 596m | ¥803.5bn |
| 国庆·中秋 National Day and Mid-Autumn 2025 | 8 | 888m | ¥809bn |
| 五一 Labour Day 2026 | 5 | 325m | ¥185.5bn |
| 元旦 New Year 2026 | 3 | 142m | ¥84.8bn |
| 清明 Qingming 2026 | 3 | 135m | ¥61.4bn |
| 端午 Dragon Boat 2026 | 3 | 124m | ¥44.5bn |
春节 2026. The State Council schedule gave this Spring Festival nine public-holiday days. The ministry reports both trips and spending as record highs, and 95 million more trips than the eight-day 2025 holiday.
国庆·中秋 2025. The ministry names 红色旅游 — revolutionary-site tourism — as a category in its own release, alongside named destinations. English coverage of Chinese domestic travel almost never mentions it.
元旦 2026. The release describes short-haul travel as having become mainstream, naming county-level and rural destinations and 微度假 — "micro-vacation" — as a product category.
The vocabulary English does not have
Each of these movements has a name in the language it happens in, and the name carries a distinction English loses.
kisei Returning to the family home
Specifically the journey back to where one’s family is from, rather than "going home" in the sense of returning to where one lives. Note that the travel survey’s 36.4% figure belongs to a BROADER category — 帰省・知人訪問等 — which also covers visits to friends, weddings, funerals and care visits. 帰省 is part of that share, not the whole of it.
tōji A therapeutic hot-spring stay
Historically weeks long and tied to the agricultural calendar, and distinct from 温泉旅行, a weekend onsen trip. English "hot spring holiday" collapses the two.
micro-tourism Travel close to home — roughly one to two hours
A concept proposed by the hotel group Hoshino Resorts during the pandemic, defined by travel time from home rather than by any administrative boundary. It is a company’s coinage, not a statistical category. The accommodation survey’s 県内 column — overnight stays inside one’s own prefecture, 15.9% nationally, 31.7% in Hokkaidō and 5.4% in Kyoto — is a usable PROXY for it, not a definition of it.
gwiseong / gwigyeong The journey home, and the journey back
Korean separates the outbound holiday migration from the return leg, and measures them separately. English has one word for the round trip and no concept of the two flows.
fǎnxiàng lǚyóu Reverse tourism
Deliberately choosing unfashionable, low-traffic destinations. The ministry’s own holiday releases now describe county-level and rural destinations as favoured, which makes this a documented shift rather than a trend piece.
wēi dùjià Micro-vacation
Short-radius packaged leisure. A named product category in Ministry of Culture and Tourism copy, not a journalist’s coinage.
Sources
- Japan Tourism Agency, 宿泊旅行統計調査 (Accommodation Survey), 2025 annual confirmed figures. mlit.go.jp
- Japan Tourism Agency, 旅行・観光消費動向調査 (Travel and Tourism Consumption Trend Survey), 2025 confirmed. mlit.go.jp
- Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism / Korea Culture and Tourism Institute, 2024년 국민여행조사 (National Travel Survey). index.go.kr
- Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People's Republic of China, per-holiday releases from the Data Centre. mct.gov.cn
What these instruments cannot tell you. Japan's accommodation survey counts guest-nights at facilities, so it excludes day trips, private lodging and staying with relatives — meaning the real homecoming flow is larger than it appears there, which is why the purpose split above comes from the consumption survey instead. Korea's survey changed method in 2018, so figures before and after are not comparable. Chinese holiday figures are ministry estimates. And we could not retrieve Korean foreign-visitor regional distribution, so no claim is made here about where foreign visitors to Korea concentrate.
Funding and competing interests
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