To encourage travel, tourism professionals propose making passports free for young adults

Between the first half of 2019 and the first half of 2024, the number of international trips in Japan has plunged by 40%.

How can we better prepare the younger generation for globalization and international careers? This is the question that Japanese authorities are asking themselves, who are concerned about the decline in foreign travel. The country’s inhabitants seem less and less ready to go on an adventure. To encourage them to pack their bags again, tourism professionals are now offering free passports for young people. This is an idea proposed in mid-September by Hiroyuki Takahashi, the head of the country’s Association of Travel Agencies. He makes a very simple observation: the Japanese in general, and young people in particular, are traveling less and less outside their borders.

The latest statistics are quite striking. They show a collapse in the number of trips abroad since the Covid pandemic. Between the first half of 2019 and the first half of 2024, the number of international trips plunged by 40% in Japan. This is paradoxical because at the same time the number of foreign tourists arriving in Japan is exploding. The country now welcomes three million tourists per month. This is three times more than ten years ago. This double phenomenon, fewer Japanese abroad and more foreigners in Japan, is largely due to the collapse in the value of the Japanese currency, the yen. The Japanese have seen their purchasing power reduced by a third when they travel to Europe, the United States or Thailand and have to pay in euros, dollars or baht.

For Japanese tourism professionals, this is an economic problem that could be solved with free passports. They know that traveling abroad is very expensive, but they believe that even a symbolic boost from the government could encourage departures.
These professionals are therefore asking the government to offer a free passport to all young people in the country as soon as they reach 18, that is, the majority. They explain that this could help young people to make their first trips and perhaps to have a slightly more open mindset.
Currently, an adult passport here costs 16,000 yen, or 100 euros. This is a little more expensive than in France, where a passport for an adult currently costs 86 euros.

The Japanese government has not yet responded to tourism professionals to say whether it is ready to make this gift, but Tokyo is a little worried about this withdrawal of its population, which could represent a real handicap for its companies that must increasingly internationalize in order to compensate for the decline in the population and the contraction of the national market. There is a rather striking statistic. Currently, only 17% of Japanese citizens hold a passport. In France, it is almost one citizen in two.