Gas stations in tourist areas in Japan are having a tough time in the summer holiday season, including the “Bon” period, when sales of gasoline are particularly high in normal years, as the continuing spread of the novel coronavirus is sapping demand for the use of long-distance travel vehicles. 

The average retail price of regular gasoline across the country stood at 134.5 yen per liter as of August 3, a decrease in about 10 yen from the levels prior to the Bon period in mid-August last year, according to the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.

Gasoline demand tumbled more than 20 percent year on year in April and May this year, when the government’s state of emergency over the pandemic was in place, but is believed to have risen back close to the year-before level.

Still, demand is unlikely to increase dramatically from now, with many Japanese people seen refraining from making trips, including those visiting parents’ homes, amid the coronavirus crisis.

Normally, dozens of tourist buses would visit a gas station near Lake Yamanaka in Yamanashi Prefecture, west of Tokyo, for refueling on each day of August.

“We haven’t seen even a single tourist bus coming to the store this summer,” a worker at a gas station said, adding that the number of individual customers, including those visiting their holiday homes around the lake, which is a two-hour drive from Tokyo, has nearly halved.

The gas station had expected that the government’s Go To Travel campaign would boost the demand for tourism, since the campaign was aimed at supporting the travel industry struggling amid the epidemic. However, such hopes have slowly plunged as trips departing from Tokyo, as well as those to the Japanese capital, were excluded from the travel discount campaign, which started on July 22.

Wakamatsu Sekiyu, a gas station in the city of Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture, eastern Japan, is also taking a hit from the coronavirus fallout, seeing the number of customers this summer fall to about percent pct of the year-before level.

“This year could be the worst year for us” since the gas station was opened about 40 years ago, its manager said. Nikko is a famous tourist destination, having, among other things, a UNESCO World Heritage site comprising Toshogu and Futarasan Jinja, both Shinto shrines, and Rinnoji, a Buddhist temple.

An official of a national association of gas station operators said, “We’ll keep a close watch on the situation because sales performances in summer would have major management impacts.”

JIJI Press