Japan Tourism Agency in collaboration with “GURUNAVI” will host “JAPANESE RESTAURANT WEEK” , an event to promote foreign visitors to Japan in Bangkok, Thailand and Singapore in September 2013. The event is part of “Visit Japan project”, the ongoing campaign by the Japanese government aimed at raising the number of foreign visitors to Japan to 30,000,000 in the future. Having the concept of “Experience Japanese cuisine and foster the ‘wish to visit Japan’ ” the campaign will take place in Japanese restaurants with prizes such as trip to Japan.
Gurunavi opened “Gurunavi Singapore” a restaurant search site in Singapore in October 2012 and also opened “Japan Trend Ranking” a site introducing Japanese food culture in English in April 2013. By focusing on “food”, which is a popular theme among foreign visitors to Japan, it has developed measures targeted at inbound tourism.
According to Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), the number of foreign visitors to Japan marked a record high in the first half (January to June) of 2013, and the number of visitors from ASEAN countries such as Thailand and Singapore are notably increasing. For this reason, Gurunavi will try to capture new fans of Japan featuring “food” as the catalyst and promote inbound tourism in Thailand (Bangkok) and Singapore by running this campaign in Japanese eateries, including Japanese style pubs and ramen noodle shops in these areas.
