Visas issued under the “medical stay” category in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) visa issuance statistics totaled 1,603 in 2024. That is down about 30% from 2,295 in 2023, and Chinese (846) and Vietnamese (595) nationals accounted for roughly 90% of the total. The interim report of a Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) study group, released in June 2025, put the number of medical travelers to Japan at an estimated 20,000–30,000, so the visa statistics capture only part of the flow. In volume terms, lodging demand from medical tourism (medical inbound) is nowhere near even 1% of the 164.46 million foreign guest nights recorded nationwide in 2024 (Japan Tourism Agency). But it has a distinctive profile: it concentrates around the hospitals that receive patients, stays are long, and patients usually travel with companions. This article first sizes the demand side using public statistics, then uses our own data to measure how many guest rooms sit within a 2km radius of each of the 36 Japan International Hospitals (JIH) recommended by Medical Excellence JAPAN, which hospitals are surrounded by a lodging gap, and whether rooms suited to long stays are available. Investment feasibility modeling is outside the scope of this piece, which focuses on the size of the demand and where it lands.

Medical Stay Visas Totaled 1,603 in 2024 — Down 30% from the 2023 Peak, 90% from China and Vietnam

We start by outlining demand with public statistics. MOFA publishes its “Visa Issuance Statistics” every year, showing the number of “medical stay” visas, a subset of short-term stay visas, by nationality and region. Issuance held in the 1,600 range, at 1,650 in 2018 and 1,653 in 2019, fell to 622 in 2020 and 653 in 2021, recovered to 1,804 in 2022, and reached 2,295 in 2023, nearly 40% above the pre-pandemic level. In 2024, however, it fell to 1,603, slightly below the 2019 level. Lodging operators projecting this demand should keep in mind that the recovery has not been a straight line.

The nationality mix is nearly fixed. In 2023, China (1,499) and Vietnam (682) together made up 95%; in 2024, China (846) and Vietnam (595) made up 89.9%. Of the 692 decline in 2024, most came from China (−653), while Vietnam dipped only slightly, from 682 to 595. The METI interim report likewise identifies China and Vietnam as the main source countries, so when lodging operators consider languages, meals and payment methods to support, these two countries are the clear priorities.

The design of the system also shapes lodging demand. According to the Japan Tourism Agency, the medical stay visa was created in January 2011 and covers foreign patients receiving treatment, health checkups and similar care on the instruction of a medical institution, as well as their companions. Companions need not be relatives; the period of stay can be up to one year as needed, and multiple-entry visas are issued with validity of up to three years. Applications require a guarantee from a travel agency registered with the Japan Tourism Agency or an international medical coordinator registered with METI, and both agencies’ registration lists are published on the MOFA website. The Japan Tourism Agency page does not state the total number of registered organizations, and its registration criteria and handling overview were partially revised effective August 1, 2026. Lodging operators should understand that the entry point to this demand is not the patients themselves but these guarantor organizations and the international patient departments of receiving hospitals.

Medical Travel the Visa Statistics Miss — What the Gap with METI’s 20,000–30,000 Estimate Shows

Reading medical stay visa counts directly as the size of medical tourism, however, understates demand. The interim report (June 2025) of METI’s “Study Group on the Appropriate Promotion of Medical Inbound” states that “there is no way to accurately count medical travelers, but estimating from medical stay visa issuance, a Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare survey and other private surveys, the number of medical travelers is about 20,000–30,000.” Set against visa counts of 1,600–2,300, the natural reading is that most visitors coming for medical purposes enter on ordinary short-term stay visas or under visa exemptions (the same report notes that the long lead time to obtain a visa leads travelers to “choose a different visa”).

The same material also provides international context. The global medical inbound market is estimated at about ¥10 trillion, and Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea each receive more than 500,000 medical travelers. At an industry seminar in June 2025 (iTT International Tourism Trade Show), an official from METI’s Healthcare Industries Division cited 3.6 million for Thailand and 490,000 for South Korea, versus 20,000–30,000 for Japan in 2019. For lodging operators, the small absolute volume means this is not “demand to fill newly built dedicated capacity” but “demand captured by adapting part of existing inventory to long stays and multilingual service.” This framing underpins how we read the supply side below.

The Range of Guest Nights — Estimates Based on Length-of-Stay and Companion Assumptions

So how many guest nights does this demand translate into? Public statistics do not tabulate the length of stay or number of companions of medical travelers, so we state our assumptions and present a range. The first base is the medical stay visa count. Because companions also obtain the medical stay visa, we treat the 1,603 visas as the combined number of patients and companions (if companions enter on other visas or visa-free, the headcount would be higher). Given that a METI survey found “comprehensive health checkups (ningen dock)” to be the top travel need in all three countries surveyed, and assuming 3 nights for checkup/short treatment, 14 nights for outpatient treatment and 30 nights for long-term recuperation, total guest nights on a 2024 basis range from about 4,800 to about 48,100.

The second base is METI’s estimate of 20,000–30,000 medical travelers. Because short-stay visitors such as health checkup patients likely dominate this group, assuming 0–1 companions and 3–7 nights gives a range of about 60,000 to 420,000 guest nights. Even the upper bound of 420,000 is less than 0.3% of the 164.46 million foreign guest nights in 2024 (Japan Tourism Agency “Overnight Travel Statistics Survey,” final figures). Converted to a daily figure, that is about 160–1,150 people nationwide; even allowing for concentration at specific hospitals, the scale is a few to a few dozen people per hospital per day.

Breaking the METI-based range (about 60,000–420,000 guest nights) down into combinations of traveler count, companions and length of stay gives the table below. The biggest drivers of the range are whether there is a companion (2x) and length of stay (about 2.3x from 3 to 7 nights), both larger than the range in the traveler estimate itself (1.5x from 20,000 to 30,000). When lodging operators estimate demand, understanding length of stay and whether patients bring companions, based on the treatments the receiving hospital offers, improves accuracy more than refining the traveler estimate.

These figures carry two implications for lodging operators. First, medical tourism lodging demand is not large enough to move occupancy across an entire area; it lands on specific properties and specific room types. Second, nights per person are longer than for typical leisure guests, parties include companions and number two or more, and the demand arises on weekdays, so it pays off through rate and length of stay. Our analysis of 468 designated cancer hospitals confirmed that, among properties within 2km of those hospitals, Saturday listed prices were 25–57% higher than weekday prices, meaning weekday medical stay demand runs counter-cyclical to leisure demand (468 Cancer Hospitals Mapped: 97 Have Zero Guest Rooms Within 2 km).

Where Is the Capacity? — The 36 JIH Recommended Hospitals by Prefecture and Rooms Within 2km

If demand lands around hospitals, the question becomes which hospitals. This article uses the “Japan International Hospitals (JIH),” which Medical Excellence JAPAN (MEJ), a general incorporated association, recommends after evaluating their systems for receiving international patients and their clinical track records, as a proxy for the receiving side. The recommendations are renewed every three years, and as of November 2026, 36 hospitals were listed on MEJ’s official search site (JAPAN Hospital Search). MEJ’s January 2021 announcement listed 52 hospitals in 19 prefectures, so the list has narrowed through renewals.

We geocoded the 36 hospitals from their addresses and tallied the guest rooms of lodging properties within a 2km radius of each hospital, using data on the approx. 27,000 confirmed-operating properties among the approx. 168,000 properties in Japan tracked by MetroEngines Research. “Operating” means properties whose selling prices were confirmed on major booking sites in the most recent 3 months (September–November 2026). By prefecture, Tokyo has the most with 11 hospitals, followed by Fukuoka with 4, Osaka with 3, Hiroshima, Hyogo, Chiba, Okayama and Aichi with 2 each, and 8 other prefectures with 1 each. The median number of operating rooms within 2km is 1,259, but the distribution is extreme: the 10 city-center hospitals each exceed 10,000 rooms, while 7 hospitals have zero.

Ranking the 36 Hospitals by Rooms Within 2km — 10 City-Center Hospitals Exceed 10,000 Rooms, 7 Have Zero

Ranked hospital by hospital, lodging capacity falls into three tiers. The deepest is Saiseikai Fukuoka General Hospital (Chuo-ku, Fukuoka City), with 446 operating properties and 34,496 rooms within 2km. Its catchment is the Tenjin entertainment district itself, a location that can absorb every kind of stay demand, not just medical stays. Next come Toranomon Hospital (31,235 rooms), National Cancer Center Hospital (30,202), St. Luke’s International Hospital (28,288), Osaka International Cancer Institute (27,545) and Juntendo University Hospital (22,441), all large city-center hospitals surrounded by plenty of business and city hotels. In this tier, “nowhere to stay” is unlikely; the issue shifts to room types for long stays and companions.

The middle tier includes Hiroshima University Hospital (8,586 rooms), Kobe University Hospital (5,355), Aizawa Hospital (Matsumoto City, 3,568), Chiba University Hospital (2,043), Fukuoka Kinen Hospital (2,006) and Shin-Koga Hospital (Kurume City, 1,733) — cases where the hospital sits close to the station area or downtown of a regional core city. The thinnest tier is the 7 hospitals with zero operating rooms within 2km and the 8 with fewer than 300, 15 hospitals in all, or 42% of the total.

The 15 Hospitals with Zero or Fewer Than 300 Rooms Within 2km — Location Mismatch vs. Catchment Gap

We split the hospitals with thin 2km catchments into two groups by room count within 5km. If there are 500 or more rooms within 5km, lodging exists but is far from the hospital — a “location mismatch” type, where the issue is designing transfers and access routes. If even the 5km radius has fewer than 500 rooms, the catchment itself lacks lodging supply — a “catchment gap” type, where the issue is new supply or hospital-side accommodation facilities. This follows the typology used in our analysis of 468 designated cancer hospitals (location mismatch = 500+ rooms within 5km); whereas that analysis defined the catchment gap type as fewer than 100 rooms within 5km, this article classifies everything below 500 as a catchment gap (for our tally of 88 advanced treatment hospitals, see 20 of Japan’s 88 Top Hospitals Have No Hotel Within 2km).

Of the 7 hospitals with zero rooms within 2km, Okayama Kyokuto Hospital (Naka-ku, Okayama City) has 6,620 rooms within 5km, Koga Hospital 21 (Kurume City) 2,567, Nagoya Kyoritsu Hospital (Nakagawa-ku, Nagoya City) 1,666, and Osaka University Hospital and Suita Tokushukai Hospital (both in Suita City) 656 each, making them location mismatch types. This pattern is typical of suburban university hospitals and core hospitals in residential areas, where lodging clusters around stations or downtown districts more than 2km away. Fujita Health University Hospital (Toyoake City, 106 rooms within 5km) and Saitama Medical University International Medical Center (Hidaka City, 58 rooms within 5km), on the other hand, are catchment gap types: large university hospitals with almost no lodging supply around them. Among the 8 hospitals with fewer than 300 rooms, Southern Tohoku General Hospital (Koriyama City) shows a wide gap between 8 rooms within 2km and 3,501 within 5km, indicating the hospital sits away from the cluster in front of Koriyama Station. Kanazawa Medical University Hospital (Uchinada Town) and Chubu International Medical Center (Minokamo City) have fewer than 500 rooms even within 5km, close to the catchment gap type.

From an investment and operations standpoint, the right move differs even among hospitals with “thin 2km catchments.” For location mismatch types, existing lodging clusters have room to capture demand through hospital transfers and multi-night plans, with no new supply required. For catchment gap types, the issue is whether the hospital builds accommodation for patients’ families or whether a small long-stay lodging facility can be viable; but as this article’s estimates show, medical travelers alone cannot fill such a facility, so it must be assessed together with demand from domestic patients and families traveling from afar.

Are There Rooms Suited to Long Stays? — Checking Kitchens, Connecting Rooms and Accessible Rooms Within 2km

Beyond the quantity of capacity, quality matters too. Medical stays typically involve two or more people — a patient and companion — staying multiple nights. Patients with dietary restrictions need rooms where they can cook, families who want to stay side by side need connecting rooms, and patients recovering from surgery or with limited mobility need accessible rooms. For operating properties within 2km, we therefore counted properties whose facility listings on major booking sites include “kitchen / mini kitchen / kitchenette / shared kitchen,” “connecting rooms,” “barrier-free rooms / accessible rooms / wheelchair accessible,” or “coin laundry / washing machine / laundry service.” Facility listings are free-text fields supplied by booking sites, so vocabulary is inconsistent and we cannot tell how many rooms meet each specification. The table covers the 20 catchments with operating properties among the 27 hospital catchments with 200 or fewer listed properties (the 9 city-center catchments with more than 200 listings already offer ample choice).

Across the 20 catchments, of 550 operating properties, 166 (30%) list a kitchen, 37 (7%) connecting rooms, 219 (40%) accessible rooms and 394 (72%) laundry. The Keio University Hospital catchment (Shinjuku-ku) offers wide choice, with 42 of 105 operating properties listing a kitchen and 48 accessible rooms, and the Aizawa Hospital catchment (Matsumoto City) also has some depth for a regional core city, with 21 of 58 listing a kitchen and 21 accessible rooms. On the other hand, 4 catchments have no property listing a kitchen (Nippon Medical School Chiba Hokusoh Hospital, Tsuyama Chuo Hospital, Kanazawa Medical University Hospital, Southern Tohoku General Hospital), 10 have no connecting rooms, and 3 have no property listing accessible rooms (Nippon Medical School Chiba Hokusoh Hospital, Sakakibara Heart Institute, Southern Tohoku General Hospital). Even where lodging exists within 2km, rooms designed for long stays or assisted care are limited. The structure in which 75.7% of long-stay hotel supply itself is concentrated in three prefectures is covered in Japan Long-Stay Hotels: 4 Types, 8.8x Price Gap, 75.7% in 3 Cities.

For operators of existing properties, the table also points to room to “fix the listing without adding facilities.” A property with a mini kitchen, microwave or washer-dryer that does not reflect them in its booking-site facility fields will not catch the eye of companions or guarantor organizations searching for long stays. Conversions to medium- and long-stay use are advancing in cities; a case of an existing hotel renovated into medium- and long-stay rooms for 1–5 guests is covered in unito Shinsaibashi West: 64 Long-Stay Rooms vs Nishi-ku ¥9,562 ADR.

Operational Practice — Think in Order: Hospital Partnerships, Long-Stay Plans, Multilingual Support

Finally, we outline, in general terms, how operators can connect to this demand. First, rather than patients searching booking sites themselves, medical travelers’ lodging is often arranged by medical travel support companies (guarantor organizations) or hospitals’ international patient departments. The METI interim report describes medical travel support companies as handling “travel arrangements (visas, flights, etc.), arrangements needed during the stay (lodging, transport, etc.) and identity guarantees, taking care of everything until the patient returns home safely.” Lodging operators’ sales target is therefore not individuals but these arranging entities.

Second, because stays are long and dates shift with treatment schedules, receiving parties tend to value not just multi-night discounts but “long-stay plans that are flexible on date changes.” Bundling luggage storage before check-in and after check-out, transfers or route guidance to the hospital, and companions’ meal and laundry needs into a single plan makes comparison easier for the arranging side. Third, for multilingual support, it is realistic to prioritize Chinese and Vietnamese while setting up communication channels with the hospital’s international patient department and interpretation services in advance. Lodging properties do not need to provide medical interpretation; the practical key is agreeing with the hospital on whom to contact in an emergency. None of these measures are yet at a stage where their effect can be quantified, so this article presents them only as general directions.

Summary — Demand to Read by Location and Room Type, Not Volume

Medical tourism lodging demand amounts to 1,603–2,295 medical stay visas a year in MOFA statistics, and 20,000–30,000 medical travelers in METI’s estimate. Converted to total guest nights, the upper bound is around 400,000, less than 0.3% of foreign guest nights nationwide. Areas where lodging supply built primarily for this demand can be viable are therefore limited, and the sensible investment criterion is not “the volume of demand” but “whether there are rooms that can handle long stays within 2km of a receiving hospital.”

Our measurement of the 36 JIH recommended hospitals found more than 10,000 operating rooms within 2km of each of the 10 city-center hospitals, so capacity is ample there. The issues shift to room types such as kitchens and accessible rooms, and to connections with guarantor organizations and international patient departments. In contrast, 7 hospitals have no operating rooms within 2km: 5 of them are location mismatch types with lodging clusters within 5km, and 2 sit in catchments that are themselves empty. The former are opportunities that existing properties can capture with transfers and multi-night plans; the latter are areas where the viability of small accommodation facilities should be examined together with demand from domestic patients and families traveling from afar. Read alongside our 2km analyses of designated cancer hospitals and advanced treatment hospitals — among designated cancer hospitals alone, 97 have no rooms within 2km — medical tourism is realistically positioned as one part of the demand that could fill those gaps.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How many people come to Japan for medical tourism?
Visas issued under the “medical stay” category in MOFA’s visa issuance statistics numbered 1,603 in 2024 (2,295 in 2023). A METI study group, drawing on visa statistics, a Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare survey and other sources, estimates the number of medical travelers at about 20,000–30,000, so the visa statistics capture only part of the demand.

Q. How long can medical stay visa holders stay, and how are companions treated?
According to the Japan Tourism Agency, the medical stay visa covers foreign patients receiving treatment, health checkups and similar care on the instruction of a medical institution, as well as their companions, who need not be relatives. The period of stay is up to one year as needed, and multiple-entry visas are valid for up to three years. Applications require a guarantee from a guarantor organization registered with the Japan Tourism Agency or METI.

Q. Which areas does medical tourism lodging demand land in?
Around the receiving hospitals. Of the 36 JIH hospitals recommended by MEJ, 11 are in Tokyo, and the 10 city-center hospitals each have more than 10,000 operating rooms within 2km. Meanwhile, 7 hospitals have zero operating rooms within 2km, and 8 have fewer than 300 (as of November 8, 2026; MetroEngines Research).

Q. Would a newly built hotel for medical stays fill up on this demand?
By this article’s estimates, total guest nights from medical travelers are about 400,000 a year even at the upper bound, a scale of a few to a few dozen people per hospital per day. That is not enough for medical travelers alone to fill a dedicated facility; viability must be assessed together with demand from domestic patients and families traveling from afar and general long-stay demand, based on a separate feasibility analysis.