Why doesn't the Tokyo Olympics committee follow the same good sense of its predecessors and hold the Olympics in, say, September-October? No one is saying, not in public anyway.

For the first time in 44 years, in the first half of 2015 there were more inbound tourists than Japanese going overseas. The forecast for inbound tourists for 2015 is now around 18m.

The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in South Korea has knocked the stuffing out of the tourism industry there. Apparently the number of Chinese tourists fell by 54% in June.

The gist of a meanwhile deleted article on Yahoo Japan News was that it was highly likely that short-term hosting of private rooms to travelers would become legal, under the framework of the Special Zones law.