In ICCA’s 2025 statistics, Japan hosted 491 international meetings and entered the global top six for the first time. That is a 15% increase from 428 meetings in 2024, and a fourth consecutive year at the top of Asia-Pacific. The interesting part is the breakdown: JNTO reports that meeting counts rose not only in the major metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama, but also in regional cities such as Matsue, Nara, Kagoshima, Kumamoto and Takamatsu. Academic conferences and international meetings peak in autumn. So in these cities that are now attracting meetings, are there enough rooms for the delegates to sleep in? We examined the question using MetroEngines Research data and public statistics.

491 meetings and a first-ever 6th place — the statistics show the regions grew too

According to the announcement JNTO released on 20 May 2026, 12,438 international meetings were held worldwide in 2025, up 12% on 2024. Of these, 491 were held in Japan, a 15% increase from the 428 recorded in the 2024 statistics. Since ICCA’s statistical criteria were adopted for counting international meetings, this is the first time Japan has reached 6th place in the world, a new best.

Lined up over time, the speed of the recovery is clear. In 2019 the figure was 527 meetings and 8th place; during the pandemic in 2022 it fell to 228 meetings and 12th. From there it built back up to 363 meetings and 7th in 2023, 428 and 7th in 2024, reaching 491 and 6th in 2025. The count is still 93% of the 2019 level, but the ranking has already surpassed it.

Source: Compiled by the HotelBank Editorial Team from ICCA international meeting statistics published by the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO). 2020–2021 not listed

Japan’s standing within Asia-Pacific is also unchanged. In 2025 it comfortably exceeded China’s 326, South Korea’s 286 and Australia’s 241, holding first place in the region for a fourth consecutive year since 2022. In the previous year’s 2024 statistics the figures were China 249, South Korea 243 and Australia 227 — so among the top four countries all growing together, Japan’s increase was the largest.

Source: Compiled by the HotelBank Editorial Team from ICCA international meeting statistics published by the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO)

The starting point for this article, however, is the city-level commentary. JNTO noted that 19 Japanese cities placed within the top 85 of the Asia-Pacific city ranking for cities hosting five or more meetings, and that the number of Japanese cities hosting at least one meeting exceeded 70, up on the previous year. On that basis it stated that, compared with 2024, “in addition to metropolitan areas such as Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama, the number of international meetings held is also increasing in regional cities such as Matsue, Nara, Kagoshima, Kumamoto and Takamatsu.” The 5th Basic Plan for the Promotion of a Tourism-Oriented Country, formulated in March 2026, sets a target of “top in Asia and within the world’s top five” — and the closer that goal comes, the more the capacity outside the metropolitan areas will be tested.

From here we narrow the focus to those five named cities and look at the reality on the room side.

Room stock in the five cities — Matsue and Nara in the 4,000s, Kagoshima in the 9,300s

First, the denominator. Within the scope MetroEngines Research tracks, we aggregated the properties and room counts whose operation can be confirmed on OTAs and other booking sites in each city (observation universe for check-in on 17 September 2026). Kumamoto is a government-designated major city, so aggregation is by ward, and we use Chuo Ward — where the bulk of the city’s hotel stock is concentrated — as the representative value.

Table 1: Property count, total rooms and new openings over the past three years in the five cities where meetings increased (room and property counts are the observation universe for check-in on 17 September 2026; new openings are prefecture-level, 50 rooms or more)

City	Properties	Total rooms	New openings of 50+ rooms 2024–2026, prefecture level
Matsue	68	4,122 rooms	3 properties, 491 rooms (Shimane)
Nara	84	4,513 rooms	2 properties, 368 rooms (Nara)
Kagoshima	94	9,328 rooms	15 properties, 1,973 rooms (Kagoshima)
Kumamoto, Chuo Ward	66	8,171 rooms	14 properties, 2,044 rooms (Kumamoto)
Takamatsu	112	6,484 rooms	10 properties, 1,293 rooms (Kagawa)

Source: MetroEngines Research & Consulting (based on confirmed OTA listings). New openings are properties of 50 rooms or more in each prefecture, opened between 2024 and 2026

The difference in scale is large. Against Kagoshima’s 9,328 rooms and Kumamoto Chuo Ward’s 8,171, Matsue has 4,122 and Nara 4,513 — roughly half the size. Takamatsu sits in between at 6,484.

Layer the past three years of new supply on top and the gap widens further. Kagoshima Prefecture has accumulated 15 openings of 50 rooms or more totalling 1,973 rooms, and Kumamoto Prefecture 14 openings totalling 2,044 rooms. In Kumamoto Prefecture alone, 8 properties and 1,079 rooms can be confirmed for 2026, with a run of 200-room-class properties including Via Inn Prime Kumamoto Hibari no Yu (ヴィアインプライム熊本〈雲雀の湯〉, 232 rooms), Tabino Hotel Aso Kumamoto Airport (たびのホテル阿蘇熊本空港, 213 rooms) and Workers Hotel Kumamoto Ozu (ワーカーズホテル熊本大津, 202 rooms). Kagawa Prefecture has also thickened since 2025, with 5 properties and 653 rooms in 2026 including JR Clement Inn Takamatsu Hyogomachi (JRクレメントイン高松兵庫町, 191 rooms).

By contrast, Shimane Prefecture has 3 properties and 491 rooms over three years (of which two properties and 397 rooms are within Matsue: Hotel Route Inn Higashi-Matsue (ホテルルートイン東松江, 189 rooms) and Daiwa Roynet Hotel Matsue Ekimae (ダイワロイネットホテル松江駅前, 208 rooms)), and Nara Prefecture stops at 2 properties and 368 rooms. No opening of 50 rooms or more can be confirmed in Nara Prefecture for 2026. Among the five cities where meeting counts grew, these are the two prefectures where the reinforcement on the supply side has been most limited.

Autumn is the annual peak in all five cities — but the swing ranges from 1.14x to 1.78x

Next, rates. Lining up the monthly estimated settled ADR for 2025 by city, one thing is common to all of them: October and November fall within the year’s high band. The size of the swing, however, is completely different.

Source: MetroEngines Research (estimated settled ADR; properties covered N = Matsue 54, Nara 61, Kagoshima 72, Kumamoto Chuo Ward 58, Takamatsu 72; all medians)

Matsue rises from ¥10,000 in June 2025 (the year’s low) to ¥17,800 in November, a factor of 1.78. Nara likewise goes from ¥10,000 in February to ¥17,200 in November, a factor of 1.71. Kagoshima, by contrast, moves only from ¥6,300 in June to ¥7,100 in November — 1.14x — and Kumamoto Chuo Ward from ¥7,900 in January to ¥9,500 in November, or 1.19x. Takamatsu is a summer-shaped market, hitting its annual high of ¥10,700 in August, with November at ¥8,800 (1.30x the year’s low).

This gap reflects a difference in the character of autumn demand. November in Matsue coincides with the tourism peak around the opening of the San’in snow crab season (6 November) — we examined how rates jump across port towns from that opening date in Crab Season Opens Nov 6: Echizen Room Rates Jump 3.2x in One Month. October and November in Nara are likewise a tourism peak, headlined by the Shosoin Exhibition, and we track weekday pricing and inventory during the run in Shosoin Exhibition 2026: Nara Weekday Rates +32% During 17-Day Run. In other words, in these two cities the period when meeting demand arrives overlaps with the period when rooms are already hardest to get. Kagoshima and Kumamoto Chuo Ward, by contrast, have business demand setting a year-round base, so the autumn uplift is limited.

Table 2: Estimated settled ADR in the five cities, 2025 — cheapest month of the year, November level, ratio to the low, and year-on-year change for autumn (September–November)

City	Cheapest month, 2025	November 2025	Ratio to the low	Autumn (Sep–Nov) YoY
Matsue	¥10,000 (June)	¥17,800	1.78x	+0.9%
Nara	¥10,000 (February)	¥17,200	1.71x	+13.8%
Takamatsu	¥6,700 (January)	¥8,800	1.30x	+16.4%
Kumamoto, Chuo Ward	¥7,900 (January)	¥9,500	1.19x	+0.9%
Kagoshima	¥6,300 (June)	¥7,100	1.14x	−1.8%

Source: MetroEngines Research (estimated settled ADR). Year-on-year change is calculated on a confirmed-month basis for both September–November 2024 and September–November 2025

On a year-on-year basis, autumn rates grew in Takamatsu (+16.4%) and Nara (+13.8%), were flat in Matsue and Kumamoto Chuo Ward (both +0.9%), and softened slightly in Kagoshima (−1.8%). Nara and Takamatsu can be read as markets where the depth of demand has already begun to feed through into rates.

One weekday night in September, how many rooms are left — 892 in Matsue, 834 in Nara, 3,302 in Kagoshima

Rates alone cannot answer the question of whether there are enough rooms. So for check-in on Thursday 17 September 2026 — the entrance to the autumn meetings season — we tracked the booking curve (how remaining rooms move toward the check-in date) city by city. Because meetings are held on weekdays, we took a single Thursday weeknight as the representative date. For the wider picture of weekday demand generated by academic conferences in Japan, 493 Medical Conferences in Japan: 75.7% of Nights Fall Wed-Fri organises the session calendar and booking pace by city.

Source: MetroEngines Research (check-in 17 September 2026; occupancy is an estimate based on OTA-listed inventory)

Lining up the remaining rooms at the most recent observation point (LT25 = 25 days before check-in), the cities separate by character.

Table 3: Occupancy and remaining rooms by lead time for check-in on Thursday 17 September 2026 (occupancy is an estimate based on OTA-listed inventory)

City	Total rooms	Occupancy at LT90	Occupancy at LT25	Rooms left at LT25
Kumamoto, Chuo Ward*	8,171 rooms	50.9%	85.1%	1,218 rooms
Nara	4,513 rooms	67.7%	81.5%	834 rooms
Matsue	4,122 rooms	59.6%	78.4%	892 rooms
Takamatsu	6,484 rooms	60.1%	72.0%	1,813 rooms
Kagoshima	9,328 rooms	59.5%	64.6%	3,302 rooms

Source: MetroEngines Research (check-in 17 September 2026; N = Matsue 68 properties, Nara 84, Kagoshima 94, Kumamoto Chuo Ward 66, Takamatsu 112)

Matsue has 892 rooms left against a total of 4,122, and Nara 834 against 4,513. In both, roughly 80% of the city’s inventory is already moving. ICCA’s criterion is 50 or more participants, but real international meetings often run to several hundred. It is fair to say that a single meeting of a few hundred delegates would absorb a substantial share of these remaining rooms. And as we saw above, in these two cities the tourism peak also builds toward November.

Kagoshima, on the other hand, has 3,302 rooms left against 9,328 — more than a third of inventory still open. Takamatsu has 1,813 against 6,484. These two cities still have absorption capacity even if a large meeting lands on an autumn weekday.

One caution on how to read this. Rooms blocked in advance by meeting organisers through travel agencies and the like have already been removed from OTA inventory. So this remaining-room count is closer to the volume of “rooms a delegate who missed the organiser’s block can still go and book themselves.” Considering overseas delegates who arrange their own accommodation individually, the depth of that self-booking pool carries practical significance.

We ran the same aggregation for check-in on Thursday 15 October and Thursday 12 November, but both are more than 30 days beyond the survey date, at a stage where hotels are still releasing inventory in phases. As an interim picture, for 15 October at LT53 we observe Matsue 80.0%, Nara 73.8%, Takamatsu 73.8% and Kagoshima 70.5%; for 12 November at LT81, Matsue 80.2%, Takamatsu 71.3%, Nara 69.2% and Kagoshima 67.6%. Tightness in supply and demand cannot be concluded from figures at this stage, but the fact that Matsue is already in the 80s more than two and a half months out is worth noting in relation to the size of its supply.

Prefecture-wide occupancy looks comfortable — how to read the gap with the city centre

It is worth corroborating this with public statistics. Below are the monthly room occupancy rates for 2025 (all accommodation types) from the Japan Tourism Agency’s “Overnight Travel Statistics Survey,” for the prefectures the five cities belong to.

Table 4: Room occupancy for September–November 2025 in the five prefectures the cities belong to (all accommodation types, compared with the national figure)

Area	September 2025	October 2025	November 2025
National	62.8%	66.6%	65.4%
Kumamoto Prefecture	59.3%	64.7%	67.9%
Kagawa Prefecture	58.0%	64.1%	66.4%
Shimane Prefecture	56.2%	66.3%	65.1%
Kagoshima Prefecture	49.6%	54.5%	59.4%
Nara Prefecture	50.6%	57.7%	57.7%

Source: Compiled by the HotelBank Editorial Team from the Japan Tourism Agency’s “Overnight Travel Statistics Survey” (room occupancy by prefecture, all accommodation types)

At prefecture level, all five peak in October–November within the year, and all sit at or below the national average (66.6% in October, 65.4% in November). Follow the numbers alone and it reads as “there is room to spare.”

But this statistic is an average across the whole prefecture, including hot-spring resorts, remote islands and suburbs. Nara Prefecture contains Yoshino and Totsukawa, Shimane contains Izumo and Iwami, and Kagoshima contains its island groups. International meetings are held in the city centres where the conference facilities are, and the take-up of the rooms located there is, as the previous section showed, quite different from the prefecture average. Nara Prefecture at 57.7% in November and Nara city’s inventory running about 80% sold are not contradictory. Judging the capacity available during a meetings season from prefecture-level occupancy means misreading the situation on the ground.

Capacity for international meetings — the headroom visible in the foreign guest share

Since these are “international” meetings, capacity is not only about the number of rooms but also about how much that room stock has hosted overseas guests to date. Using the full-year 2025 figures from the Japan Tourism Agency’s “Overnight Travel Statistics Survey,” we calculated the share of foreign visitors within total guest nights.

Source: Compiled by the HotelBank Editorial Team from the Japan Tourism Agency’s “Overnight Travel Statistics Survey” (full-year 2025, total guest nights)

For full-year 2025, of Japan’s 661.10 million total guest nights, 179.92 million were by foreign visitors — a share of 27.2%. Among the five prefectures, Kagawa is at 22.9% and Kumamoto at 20.9%, close to the national average. Nara follows at 16.4%, Kagoshima at 8.4% and Shimane at 3.3%.

Shimane’s 3.3% is, in itself, a measure of how much headroom exists. Matsue is a city where international meeting counts have grown, yet the foreign share of the prefecture’s guests is still only about an eighth of the national average. If meetings mean more contact with overseas guests going forward, then investment in the reception side — multilingual guidance, breakfast-service timing, payment methods — translates directly into scope for winning a new guest segment. Kagoshima’s 8.4% is similar: physical room capacity (the 3,302 rooms noted above) and room to build out reception capability overlap, making it a market with substantial headroom.

Summary — separate the cities that have room from the cities where autumn collides

Pulling the data together, the five named cities split clearly into two groups.

The first is the group with absorption capacity left in its rooms. Kagoshima (9,328 rooms, 3,302 left at LT25) and Takamatsu (6,484 rooms, 1,813 left) belong here. Both prefectures have accumulated openings of 50 rooms or more on the order of 1,200–2,000 rooms over the past three years, and the autumn rate uplift is limited (1.14x in Kagoshima, 1.30x in Takamatsu). The physical capacity to take a large international meeting on a weekday remains. From the hotel’s perspective, a meetings period brings high-quality demand — weekday, multi-night, confirmed early — and there is real value in deliberately reserving meeting and group allocations precisely in a season when leisure rates do not fully climb. Takamatsu in particular, with autumn rates up 16.4% year on year, the strongest of the five, is well placed to capture a market where depth of demand is beginning to show in price.

The second is the group where the meetings period collides with the tourism peak. Matsue (4,122 rooms, 892 left at LT25) and Nara (4,513 rooms, 834 left) have the smallest supply of the five cities, and on top of that carry a tourism peak that lifts rates 1.7–1.8x toward November. New supply over the past three years is also limited, at 491 rooms in Shimane Prefecture and 368 in Nara Prefecture. In these two cities, building capacity for meetings is not a question of “selling empty rooms” but a design question of how to allocate between tourism demand and meeting demand. This is the type of city where advance blocks carry the greatest value, and early coordination with organisers and tourism associations pays off both in reducing disruption on the day and in protecting rates.

As for Kumamoto, because recent inventory take-up and rates include factors specific to the 2026 Kumamoto Earthquake (28 July 2026), it is reasonable to hold any assessment from a meetings-demand perspective until the market has normalised and can be observed again. That said, Kumamoto Prefecture’s new supply of 2,044 rooms over three years is the largest of the five prefectures, and its foreign guest share of 20.9% is close to the national average — signs that the foundations for medium-term capacity are falling into place.

Japan’s 491 international meetings and 6th place in the world were not built on the metropolitan areas alone. The closer the country comes to the 5th Basic Plan for the Promotion of a Tourism-Oriented Country’s goal of “top in Asia and within the world’s top five,” the further host cities will spread into the regions. What will be tested then is not only the capacity of conference facilities, but a far more concrete number: how many rooms a town has, and how many of them are left in that season.

Methodology and sources

International meeting counts are based on the announcement regarding ICCA (International Congress and Convention Association) 2025 statistics released by the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) on 20 May 2026. ICCA’s selection criteria are a total of 50 or more participants, regular occurrence, and rotation among three or more countries; bilateral meetings, government-affiliated meetings and meetings hosted by the United Nations are excluded.
Room counts, property counts, estimated settled ADR and booking curves are aggregated by MetroEngines Research. MetroEngines Research tracks approximately 168,000 properties in Japan, of which approximately 27,000 properties and around 1.26 million rooms whose operation can be confirmed on OTAs and other booking sites form the analysis set. Ryokan, minshuku and simple lodging houses not listed on OTAs are not included.
Room occupancy by prefecture, total guest nights and foreign guest nights come from the trend tables (monthly) of the Japan Tourism Agency’s “Overnight Travel Statistics Survey.” Note that from the January 2026 survey onward the same survey changed its stratification basis from “number of employees” to “number of rooms,” so care is needed when comparing figures from 2026 onward with earlier ones. The occupancy and guest-night figures used in this article are all through 2025 and are unaffected by that change.
Kumamoto is a government-designated major city, so we used Chuo Ward — where the bulk of the city’s hotel stock is concentrated — as the representative value. New-opening data is based on the opening year of properties whose listing on OTAs and similar sites could be confirmed, so counts for the most recent period may increase as further listings are confirmed.

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