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For more than 18 years, Sugako Johnson was one of the few Hawaii-based wedding planners who catered specifically to Japanese couples seeking an American-style wedding.

Her independent business on Oahu, which she refers to as “a one-man show,” didn’t fit the model for how most of the industry operates. 

“More than 90% of Japanese couples getting married in Hawaii go through Japanese companies selling cookie cutter-style wedding packages,” Johnson said. “They’re not local businesses. They’re Japanese businesses selling Hawaiian weddings to Japanese people.”

But all changed in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. With travel restrictions stalling the arrival of Japanese visitors, who made up to 90% of her client base, Johnson had no choice but to move out of her office and begin considering making a change in her business model. 

The effects of the lockdown were brutal to the Japanese wedding industry in Hawaii. Watabe Wedding Corp., an industry pioneer known to be one of the largest wedding planners for Japanese clients, was on the verge of collapse until a trading and pharmaceutical company acquired it in 2021.

But for small local businesses like Johnson’s Bliss Bridal, a total revamp was the only alternative to shutting down. 

She started a new job as a venue coordinator on the North Shore and expanded her network with other local wedding professionals, scoring a few commissions from American couples.

As the pandemic wound down, she had completely pivoted away from an exclusively Japanese-targeted service. Today, merely 20% of her clients are from Japan. 

“Now I try to market myself differently,” Johnson said. “My strength has been Japanese planning, for sure. But I don’t want my clients to see me specializing only in that. I want them to see that I can do both — planning for locals and the Japanese.”

Before the pandemic, around 1.5 million tourists from Japan visited Hawaii each year. But with the Japanese yen plummeting to a 38-year low against the U.S. dollar, they are yet to return in pre-pandemic numbers.

Independent businesses catering to this major market are pivotal to Hawaii’s tourism industry. Tourists who do not use Japanese travel agencies prefer to use services that offer information in Japanese, Akiko Oshima, economic consul of the consulate general of Japan in Honolulu, said in an email.

These small businesses, mostly run by Japanese-speaking locals, make their travel experience much smoother.

But to mitigate the risk of a possible long-term recession of their key customer base, many of these operations are forging new business models.

A Decades-Low Yen And Inflation

Often referring to Hawaii as their dream destination, Japanese tourists made up around 15% of total visitors in 2019. This year, their presence in the Hawaiian Islands has dropped to around 7% of the entire visitor count, according to the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. The number of visitors from Japan during the first three months this year was less than half of what it was during the same period before the pandemic.

Eugene Tian, DBEDT’s chief economist, said that the main reason behind this slow recovery lies in an exchange rate that discourages Japanese people from planning a costly trip to the U.S. 

Moreover, the historically low yen is leading those who do come to spend less.

“The most important measure for tourism is actually visitor spending,” Tian said. “We see that it is only the Japanese that decreased their spending compared to 2019.”

During the first five months of 2019, Japanese visitors spent an average of $239 every day, including lodging, food and retail expenditures. This year, they spent almost the exact same amount, around $238. 

But taking into account inflation, daily spending for Japanese visitors has decreased, Tian said. 

Hotel prices, for example, have increased around 34% compared to 2019, according to the Hawaii Tourism Authority’s May . After allocating a large share of their budget to inflated travel costs, Japanese tourists are left with a much lower budget for optional spending like shopping.

Compared to 2019, shopping expenditure among Japanese tourists decreased by 28% this year while spending on lodging, transportation and food all saw double-digit increases, according to DBEDT.

All of this has led East Asian tourists to take a dimmer view of their Hawaii experience.

This year, nearly 40% of Japanese tourists said their visit to Oahu was a poor value, according to a DBEDT survey. Among mainland visitors unaffected by the exchange rate, only 4% rated their trip to the islands as a bad deal.

This economic trends have prompted Japanese vacationers to turn to cheaper destinations within Asia, according to Dan Spencer, director of the School of Travel Industry Management at the University of Hawaii Manoa. 

He said that Japanese tourists may be more inclined to consider similar destinations closer to home.

“We now have a great deal more competition across Asia, especially in countries like South Korea, Singapore and the Hainan province of China,” Spencer said. “Asia in general — and Southeast Asia in particular — has been one of the fastest growing tourism regions in the world, and now it is affecting us here in Hawaii. We just have a much more competitive landscape than in the past.”

Both Tian and Spencer said that it may take a couple more years, maybe sometime in 2026, for the number of Japanese tourists to return to pre-pandemic levels.

Shifting Business Models

As a result, small businesses are developing strategies to reach new demographic groups.

Shingo Sawada, owner of Lomino Hawaii Massage School, used to offer two services: outcall massage sessions, his main business, and workshop courses for tourists who wanted to learn massage techniques during their trips to Hawaii. 

During the pandemic, on top of completely losing his Japanese tourist customers — who had made up over 95% of his outcall massage client base — he had to deal with social gathering restrictions that prohibited indoor meetings like his class sessions.

Unable to hold classes in the school, Sawada took his sessions outdoors by renting a garden chapel that was once a popular wedding venue. Setting canopies and massage tables in the open air, his team was able to continue operating with a handful of local students they found through a newly-built English website, social media ads and two appearances on local television programs.

Today, with his outcall massage business still struggling, Sawada plans to pivot further. He’s focusing more on his class and plans to reinforce his “event massage” service, a new venture that provides massage sessions during corporate events such as wellness days and company retreats. 

As for his classes, Sawada is seeking more students from the mainland by offering training sessions in English.  

“We’ll keep changing our target to more locals and people from the mainland,” Sawada said. “They’re increasing step by step.”

Byongyun Lee’s Hana Taxi, a taxi tour service that used to rely heavily on Japanese visitors, began running ads on Yelp to penetrate the American market. He found success in attracting customers from the mainland and South Korea during the pandemic.

This year, he says, the company has not seen a rebound in Japanese customers because of the yen’s sharp decline. To adjust, Lee plans to launch an app service to facilitate communication and reservation with a more diverse client base from around the world.

The historically low yen has also transformed how the Japanese perceive weddings in Hawaii. 

Before the pandemic, “photo weddings,” a simplified version of a normal wedding ceremony, were a major trend in the Japanese wedding industry on Oahu, Johnson said. For less than $1,000, Japanese couples could rent a dress, get hair and makeup done, get taken to popular photo spots like Magic Island or Waimanalo Beach and hire a photographer for an hour to capture their brisk ceremony. It was highly sought-after and cheaper alternative to wedding ceremonies in Japan.

Most of these photo weddings, along with the businesses that offered them, went under during the pandemic. 

For today’s Japanese tourists, a Hawaii wedding has become a near-luxury.

“Now when I see Japanese people getting married in Waikiki, I think to myself, ‘Oh, they must be pretty well-off,’” Johnson said.

Nami Arai, store manager of jewelry shop Maxi in Waikiki, has lately noticed a change in the purchasing patterns of her predominantly Japanese customer base. 

Visitors before the pandemic would purchase her store’s luxury goods as small souvenirs to commemorate a wide variety of occasions, including birthdays, family vacations and even company trips. Now, most of her customers are there to treat themselves as part of once-in-a-lifetime celebrations, such as weddings and honeymoons.  

Like many other independent businesses catering specifically to Japanese visitors, Maxi had to deal with the dire effects of the pandemic. To find an alternative for Japanese tourists, who used to make up 90% the customer base, Arai and her team sought many ways to diversify. While they had advertised only in Japanese magazines and travel guides for tourists before Covid, they began targeting English-speaking visitors as well. They increased the number of English posts on social media and trained their staff to provide customer service in English.

What truly saved the business from going under was starting an online shop, which allowed Japanese residents on lockdown to purchase its products from home. 

“Before the pandemic, we kept our website just as a catalogue of our products,” Arai said. “But changing it to an online shop during Covid really saved our business.”

Their web presence boosted sales, far exceeding pre-pandemic levels. 

Today, the majority of Maxi’s shoppers are still Japanese, many of whom purchase their jewelry online. Arai and her team plans to maintain, if not further develop, their online shop to serve those staying in Japan.

For Johnson, an expansion into the local market was a blessing in disguise. She is relieved that she managed to find a way to keep her business running and strongly believes that stepping into the local wedding planning scene is benefitting her business in the long run.

“When Covid first hit, it was so hard to pivot because there was no formula for these situations,” Johnson said. “I didn’t really bounce back yet, but I survived.”