Many Japanese enjoy Taipei because it’s cheap and exciting and vibrant, and they know they will go home very soon.
It’s just cheap flights. Cheapest I’ve flown to Japan was $1.3K NTD single trip, roughly $3K NTD round trip. Equivalent to the cost of the Taiwan High Speed Rail to go from tip to tip. It goes the other way around for people coming from Japan to Taiwan. There maybe some spread of word thing going around as with the Koreans.
@abovik i just booked a ticket from TW to Japan for 16,000 roundtrip. Economy class. So no not that cheap if you go on weekends during this season.
Could be Sakura season coming up plus bunch of holidays.
@HHII yes that is the reason. Just wanted to illustrate that flights are not cheap all year round. Sure flights can be cheap if you go during non holiday/nonsakura season on a weekday with shit flight times. But most people have to work and don’t want to take 2am flights.
@paperjohn 
I guess it does depend on the dates. Just searched on Tiger for roundtrip TPE-NRT. Prior to 4/5 it would rack up to $10,000+ but after that, I see a one week roundtrip return is less than $5,000 
But $16,000 is just
[quote=“paperjohn”]@gavmasterflash
I bet the hordes of mainlanders spend more than all the tourists from Japan…[/quote]
Yeah, but fuck 'em. Perhaps as the entire locust horde together they spend more total money but on a pro rata basis, the Japanese are spending more than the mainlanders. Plus Japanese tourists are not coming as part of a package tour and therefore and contributing more to the overall economy than the mainland mouth-breathers.
I welcome the Japanese tourists here, most polite tourists I’ve ever encountered.
does taiwan have some sort of retirement visa that only the japanese get access to?
Hellz yeah.
Not helpful that a majority of them can’t speak a word of English or Mandarin, so you can’t even help them except using sign language.
I work in the Zhongshan area in Taipei and there’s a lot of tourists, majority of them Japanese. You can tell because they’re super old school and are still using a book to figure out how to get to places. I sometimes wonder if I could do that. Go on vacation and just use a book to get around.
1.89 million Japanese visitors in Taiwan in 2016? Well, there were 4.17 million Taiwanese tourists in Japan last year. So Taiwan’s tourism still has a long way to go.
So basically, it’s cheaper than home and there are Taiwanese prostitutes for the guys.
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It seems like the women outnumber the men, but then again I don’t spend that much time on Linsen North Rd. And it seems like there are even more Koreans these days.
i went to japan a month ago. while at the taoyuan aiport i noticed a group of japanese girls, one of them was sat totally spread eagle. it was not how i ever imagined japanese girls to sit. my gf informed me that they cannot act this relaxed back home so they do this in taiwan.