Japan Fact-Checks, July 10: Tourism Subsidies and Japanese Missiles

Notable Case

Inaccurate: Japanese government to subsidize half of travel expenses for foreign tourists (fact-checked by InFact on July 9, 2020)

News that the Japanese government will dip into its supplementary budget to launch a “Go To Travel Campaign” in the hope of attracting tourists back to the depressed tourism sector has spread overseas, where it has at times been construed to mean “half of the travel expenses of foreign nationals will be subsidized by the government.” This has been observed not only on the Chinese social network Weibo, but also in social networks in the United States, Australia, the Philippines, and many other countries.

The Japan Tourism Agency, which is in charge of the project, has had to explain that the Go To Travel Campaign is meant solely “to stimulate domestic travel demand within Japan” and only supports “a portion of domestic travel expenses.” Overseas tourists’ travel expenses to Japan are not eligible for this subsidy.

However, according to the Japan Tourism Agency, domestic lodging and domestic transportation costs of any overseas visitors in Japan are covered by the subsidies, unless prearranged by the individual (and not through the campaign). Because the cost of accommodation and transportation in Japan is also included as part of the cost of travel, this coverage was judged to be “inaccurate” rather than “false.”

This misinformation has been fact-checked overseas as well, but the note that some of these checks, like “travel expense subsidies are only available for residents of Japan and not visitors from abroad” (by Australia’s ABC News Fact Check), are also inaccurate.

The original fact-checking report in Japanese is on the InFact website.

Fact-Checks at a Glance

We picked up the following fact-checks relating to Japan from overseas media.

Misleading: Japan deployed missiles to counter Chinese threat after India-China conflict (India; fact-checked by Alt News on July 1, 2020)

Explanation: The headline of the Asia News article is “Japan deployed ballistic missiles at China border after its conflict with India.” However, the body of the report does not make this assertion. In fact, without references to the Indo-China dispute, it claimed that Japan, on its own territory, “will implement the Patriot Pac-3 MSE Air Defense Missile System deployment at four military bases by June this year.” Read the full article here (English).

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(Originally published in English by FactCheck Initiative Japan; edited by Nippon.com.)