On 27 October 2019, SriLankan Airlines changed a schedule.
Until that day it flew a loop joining Colombo, Tokyo Narita and Malé. From that date it flew straight between Colombo and Tokyo in both directions. The route still runs. It no longer touches us.
Japanese travellers have never been short of ways to reach the Maldives. Singapore carried a great many of them over the years, and so did Bangkok, Dubai and Doha. What that loop had was one boarding. You got on at Narita and got off at Malé.
That is the part that stopped, and I cannot find any record of anyone here responding to it.
Japan was one visitor in ten to this country in the late 1990s. Last year it was one in sixty-five. I assumed the explanation would be the yen, or somewhere cheaper taking the divers.
They never left
The mistake is measuring Japan against the Maldives. Measure it against Japan.
Every year a certain number of Japanese people leave Japan. The question worth asking is what share of them picked us.
| Year | Japanese going abroad | Came here | Our share of them |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1995 | 15.3 million | 30,100 | 0.197% |
| 2000 | 17.8 million | 47,190 | 0.265% |
| 2010 | 16.6 million | 38,800 | 0.233% |
| 2019 | 20.1 million | 44,260 | 0.220% |
| 2025 | 14.7 million | 34,360 | 0.233% |
Thirty years, and the number barely moves. In 2000, one in every 377 Japanese travellers who left the country came here. In 2025, one in 429.
Our tourism grew around them. The Japanese market sat where it was.
China
Between 1995 and 2019 Chinese outbound travel went from 4.5 million people to 154.6 million. Thirty-four times larger. Japanese outbound over the same years went from 15.3 million to 20.1 million.
The Chinese market was built. Six Chinese carriers have flown into Malé over the years: China Eastern, China Southern, Beijing Capital, Chongqing, Sichuan and Xiamen. Behind the seats came years of promotion, agents and trade work. That is what a market looks like when somebody decides to go and get it.
Now set the two beside each other. In 2019 we took 299,000 of those 154.6 million Chinese travellers, a share of 0.193 per cent. We took 44,260 of the 20.1 million Japanese, a share of 0.220 per cent.
We hold a higher proportion of Japanese travellers than Chinese ones. We hold it with no Japanese carrier, no direct route, and nothing like the same effort behind it.
Which is the question this article is really about. If that is what Japan looks like when we leave it alone, what would it look like if we treated it the way we treated China?
Then Japan stopped travelling
Twenty point one million Japanese went abroad in 2019. Last year it was 14.7 million, still twenty-seven per cent below. Five million trips a year have gone.
Our Japanese arrivals are twenty-two per cent below 2019, against their outbound twenty-seven per cent below. Even in the collapse we held our share. And this is Japanese rather than Asian: South Korea and Taiwan are both back at ninety-nine per cent of their 2019 outbound.
Two explanations that fail
The yen is the one everybody offers. I ran it against the dollar for every year from 1995 to 2019 and set it beside Japanese arrivals here. A weak yen should show up with fewer of them. It shows up with more. The strongest the yen has ever been was 2011 and 2012, at around 79 to the dollar, and those were two of our worst years for share. The weakest, 1998 and 2002, were two of our best. Twenty-five annual points is a small sample, so I would not argue a weak yen helps us. But the thing everyone says with confidence is not in the evidence.
The second explanation is that Japanese divers and honeymooners found somewhere better, so I looked at where they would have gone. Palau is down sixty-six per cent on 2019. Guam, which was the Japanese beach holiday, has gone from 674,345 Japanese visitors to 253,629, down sixty-two per cent. Hawaii is down fifty-five, the Philippines about thirty-five.
We are down twenty-two, the best of that group.
What Japanese travel did instead was get shorter. Korea took 330,385 Japanese travellers in July of this year alone and is now their first destination. The weekend trip to Seoul survived. The long-haul holiday did not.
Further away
Which is where the schedule change stops being a technical detail.
A Japanese traveller on that loop boarded once. Today the fastest common routing runs about fifteen hours gate to gate, two flights and a connection, before anybody counts the wait in Bangkok or Colombo or Singapore.
Set that against the holiday a Japanese worker actually gets. A week is a good break, and the travelling now eats a serious part of it. Seoul is two and a half hours away.
The market moved towards shorter trips at the moment we became a longer one.
The same cut twenty years earlier would have cost us a little convenience. In 2019 it landed on travellers who had started choosing destinations by how long it took to reach them, which is the one thing we had just made worse. Nothing in our control changed to make that happen, and nothing in our control has changed it back.
The divers
Diving did not shrink. PADI issued a record 1,317,383 certifications in 2024, forty-three per cent above 2019, and Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing region for new divers. Japan has the second-largest population of certified divers in the world, behind the United States.
So: a country with the world's second body of divers, which has chosen us at a steady rate for thirty years, in a global diving market at a record, and we have been down twenty-two per cent for six years with no single-boarding route and no visible plan.
The test nobody ran
We have had six years, a tourism master plan, a ministry, a promotion agency and a national carrier. I can find no evidence that anyone treated the loss of that leg as a problem, or tested whether the market would carry a seasonal charter.
A charter trial in the high season is a few rotations, a load factor and an answer. If it fills, we have a market that stayed loyal through a tsunami, SARS, a financial crisis and a currency swing. If it does not fill, we spent very little to learn something worth knowing.
And we know the method works, because we have used it. China did not arrive on its own. Somebody went and built the routes, and the arrivals followed the seats.
We cannot say the Japanese market is too small to serve, because we have never put a seat in front of it and counted.
This article is built entirely on published data. I would like to hear the real reasons from the people who actually worked this market, and I will publish what they tell me.
Sources
World Bank, international tourism departures, Japan and China · Immigration Services Agency of Japan, via the Japan National Tourism Organization · JTB Tourism Research and Consulting · Ministry of Tourism and Environment, monthly arrivals by market · Maldives Monetary Authority Statistics Database · Guam Visitors Bureau · Palau Bureau of Budget and Planning · Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism · Philippine Department of Tourism · SriLankan Airlines published schedules · PADI certification figures