Data brief

Where people actually go

The map changes with the unit counted. Japan records guest-nights at lodging facilities, separating Japanese and foreign guests. Korea reports overnight trips by residents, while China publishes national holiday travel totals. Those statistics describe different activities. They cannot be combined into a single ranking of the people who travel.

• EAJ Editorial
• Published 2026-08-02
• 3 national statistical agencies
• 6 min read

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Correction, 18 October 2026. Kyoto and Shizuoka comparisons now use Japanese and foreign accommodation guest-nights rather than traveler counts; the unsupported description of Kyoto as culturally less Japanese was removed, and a reproducible 2025 Kyoto guest-night calculation was added.

Japan: the domestic map

The Japan Tourism Agency publishes annual guest-nights by prefecture for Japanese and foreign guests. Ranking the Japanese guest-night column produces the comparison below. An overnight guest counts once for each night stayed; the survey does not count unique travelers.

Travel data / Change the lens

Japan: two destination rankings

Foreign guest-nights Japanese guest-nights

Source-supplied rank

#1

Tokyo 東京都

Domestic guest-nights: 47.78mforeign share of guest-nights: 55.7%

#2

Osaka 大阪府

Domestic guest-nights: 34.26mforeign share of guest-nights: 41.7%

#3

Kyoto 京都府

Domestic guest-nights: 14.87mforeign share of guest-nights: 55.2%

#4

Hokkaidō 北海道

Domestic guest-nights: 33.20mforeign share of guest-nights: 28.6%

#5

Okinawa 沖縄県

Domestic guest-nights: 24.65mforeign share of guest-nights: 27.2%

#6

Fukuoka 福岡県

Domestic guest-nights: 17.06mforeign share of guest-nights: 33%

#7

Kanagawa 神奈川県

Domestic guest-nights: 21.87mforeign share of guest-nights: 18.4%

#8

Aichi 愛知県

Domestic guest-nights: 17.89mforeign share of guest-nights: 21.4%

#9

Chiba 千葉県

Domestic guest-nights: 23.87mforeign share of guest-nights: 15.5%

#11

Nagano 長野県

Domestic guest-nights: 16.54mforeign share of guest-nights: 13.2%

#12

Shizuoka 静岡県

Domestic guest-nights: 20.18mforeign share of guest-nights: 9.9%

#14

Hiroshima 広島県

Domestic guest-nights: 9.52mforeign share of guest-nights: 18.2%

#16

Hyōgo 兵庫県

Domestic guest-nights: 14.40mforeign share of guest-nights: 12.1%

14 prefectures appear in the published domestic table, of which 13 have source-supplied foreign ranks. The domestic order is a rank within that 14-row table; foreign ranks are supplied from the source’s top-16 listing. No missing destinations are inferred.

Japan Tourism Agency, 2025 confirmed Accommodation Survey ↗Read the complete analysis ↗

Top 14 of 47 prefectures by Japanese guest-nights, 2025 confirmed figures. Bars show Japanese guest-nights; the figure beside each is the foreign share of all guest-nights in that prefecture.

Worked example: Kyoto. The 2025 table records 18,291,230 foreign guest-nights out of 33,157,290 total. Dividing gives 55.2% after rounding. The other 14,866,060 guest-nights were Japanese. One guest staying four nights contributes four guest-nights. This calculation measures the composition of recorded accommodation nights, not the percentage of unique visitors. See the Japan Tourism Agency's confirmed 2025 table.

Shizuoka records more Japanese guest-nights than Kyoto, with Japanese guest-nights accounting for 90.1% of its total. In Fukui, Shimane, Fukushima and Mie, foreign shares are approximately 2.8%, 3.3%, 3.7% and 4.1%, respectively. These are differences in recorded lodging nights, not evidence about the cultural character or visibility of the prefectures.

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.

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.

Travel data / Change the lens

Korea: a different trip changes the order

All domestic trips Domestic overnight trips

Rank within this table

#1

Gyeonggi 경기

All trips / overnight trips: 58,800 / 9,522

#2

Gangwon 강원

All trips / overnight trips: 32,738 / 20,696

#3

South Gyeongsang 경남

All trips / overnight trips: 28,100 / 12,398

#4

South Jeolla 전남

All trips / overnight trips: 25,782 / 11,860

#5

North Gyeongsang 경북

All trips / overnight trips: 25,642 / 10,585

#6

South Chungcheong 충남

All trips / overnight trips: 24,751 / 10,449

#7

North Jeolla 전북

All trips / overnight trips: 17,320 / 7,488

#8

Seoul 서울

All trips / overnight trips: 15,016 / 3,365

#9

Busan 부산

All trips / overnight trips: 13,747 / 7,549

#10

North Chungcheong 충북

All trips / overnight trips: 12,945 / 5,582

#11

Jeju 제주

All trips / overnight trips: 11,658 / 10,771

#12

Incheon 인천

All trips / overnight trips: 11,382 / 2,865

The table lists 12 of 17 Korean regions. All-trip positions are ranks within this 12-region table, not national ranks. Overnight ranks are source-supplied. Both series describe domestic travel, not foreign visitor rankings.

Korea Culture and Tourism Institute, 2024 National Travel Survey ↗Read the complete analysis ↗

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.

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.

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.