Bush Is Recruited to Lure Japanese Visitors : Tourism: The President will appear in a series of TV ads in hopes of reversing the slide, especially in post-riot Los Angeles.
Stung by a drop in the billions of tourists dollars from Japan, American cities, including Los Angeles, have recruited a new salesman to try to lure more Japanese visitors: George Bush.
The President, whom critics lambasted when he visited Japan in January with executives of Detroit’s Big Three automobile firms to promote “jobs, jobs, jobs,” will appear in a monthlong series of 60- and 30-second advertisements on the Tokyo Broadcasting System television network, telling Japanese that “America is yours to discover.”
The ads show the President walking through a garden as he narrates a kaleidoscope of American scenes. “Today there are more reasons than ever to visit America, and there’s never been a better time than now. So what are you waiting for? An invitation from the President?” Bush says.
George Kirkland, president of the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau, which is paying part of the campaign’s $1-million cost, said he hopes the President’s pitch will help the city boost its tourism income from Japan.
Since the Los Angeles riots in May, the numbers of visitors from Japan has fallen more drastically than from any other country, he said, noting that, although visits to Los Angeles by foreigners dropped by 12% overall, Japanese arrivals declined by 27% in May and by 25% in June.
“We project a 22% decline through the end of September,” he said, adding, that “Japan is the (tourist) market of our greatest concern. The predictions are for a slow recovery.”
No other travelers are as concerned about personal safety as the Japanese, Kirkland said. Bush’s commercial, he said, “won’t solve our problem, but it is a step in the right direction.”
Darryl Hartley-Leonard--president of Hyatt Hotels Corp. and chairman of the Commerce Department’s travel and tourism advisory board, which is supporting the ad campaign--asserted that the press in America “chose to exaggerate the enormity” of the riots in Los Angeles.
“As the father of two children, I have every confidence and am quite at peace at the thought of my children walking in any city in the United States alone,” he said. “While we do have elements of our cities that are, perhaps, unsavory . . . our cities are safe. They are controlled.”
The Bush ads, with Japanese subtitles, will begin airing Saturday, said John G. Keller Jr., an undersecretary of Commerce. He joined U.S. Ambassador Michael H. Armacost in announcing the campaign, which is similar to one that aired last year in Britain.
Tourism, Keller explained, is big business--$64 billion in 1991 from foreign visitors, 3.3 million of whom were Japanese. Bush has said that nearly 1 million Americans “owe their livelihood to international visitors.”
Last year, American tourists spent $2.9 billion on their trips to Japan, while Japanese tourists in the United States spent $12.6 billion with American companies on just transportation to the United States and travel within the states.
Japanese travelers have provided the fastest growth in foreign visitors to Los Angeles in the last five years and are expected to account for most of an expected 72% growth through the rest of the decade, Kirkland said. “Japanese also outspend domestic (American) travelers by a 6-to-1 ratio,” he added.
