A friend is planning to tour Kyoto, Osaka and other places in the following two weeks. To her surprise, there are no rooms available in Kyoto.
She had no idea what a large number of rivals she would have for a room when touring around Japan.
Travelers from China alone contributed 24 percent of the 1.82 million foreign travelers visiting Japan in October, a 99.6 percent rise over the same month the previous year. The cruise ships shuttling from China's mainland to Japan have increased from 12 in 2014 to 46 now.
The tourism industry is one of the few bright spots in Japan's economy. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's growth strategy, dubbed Abenomics, has been made up of the Bank of Japan's massive quantitative easing programs, along with easier fiscal policy. It has weakened the Japanese yen, which in turn has made it cheaper for tourists.
With foreign visitors pouring in, Japan is within reach of its ambitious tourism goal well ahead of its five-year target, which is to lift the number of foreign tourists to 20 million by 2020.
Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga has said the country needs to set a new goal for tourism, which is seen as an important new area for Japan's growth.
But while tourism is booming, the country's economic situation is not getting closer to another goal - raising the inflation rate to 2 percent.
Japan's gross domestic product declined 0.8 percent in the third quarter of this year, following a 0.7 percent drop in the previous quarter. Two consecutive quarters of contraction meets one of the criteria for a recession.
While household spending increased 0.5 percent in July to September, Japan's companies held back spending. Business investment declined 1.3 percent in the third quarter from the previous quarter, worse than the 0.5 percent fall forecast by economists.
The Japanese prime minister has been urging the country's corporations to give their employees wage rises and invest more, hoping to start the virtuous cycle that his economic agenda is supposed to engender. He envisions private sector-driven growth, in which higher corporate earnings boost people's wages and spending, thereby encouraging more business investments.
The October data highlight the underlying weakness of consumer spending and capital investment, which together account for more than 70 percent of Japan's GDP.
Corporate executives asked the government for less red tape and lower taxes.
By encouraging companies to invest, the Japanese government aims to lower the effective corporate tax rate from the current 32.11 percent to the 20 percent range over several years.
When unveiling the second round of his Abenomics in June, Abe sought to lift Japan's GDP by 20 percent to 600 trillion yen ($4.89 trillion) by 2020. But as Japan's financial daily The Nihon Keizai Shimbun points out, achieving this goal will require annual wage growth of 3 percent and more than 10 trillion yen a year in capital spending.
Japanese corporations were sitting on a record-high 354 trillion yen in retained earnings in 2014.
Japan is in recession for the fifth time in seven years, and the second time since Abe returned to office three years ago. Its economic growth has jilted into positive and negative territory.
And the weak yen, which represents one of the effects of inflationist policies, has turned once prohibitively expensive Japanese cities into affordable destinations for many middle-class Chinese tourists among others.
To accommodate the flood of foreign travelers, some love hotels in Tokyo have been converted into hostels.
Overseas tourists are offering a fresh boost to Japan's economy. But the success of Abe's plans ultimately relies on structural reform.
The author, Cai Hong, is China Daily's Tokyo bureau chief.
