YURAGI launches — bringing Japan's high-value inbound experiences to the world's affluent travelers
The inbound business "YURAGI," launched by Willverse in August 2025 — its background and its market intent.
In August 2025, Willverse launched YURAGI, a high-value inbound business aimed at the world's affluent travelers. Rather than mere referral or experience sales, YURAGI designs experience, pricing, operations, and marketing as one, re-editing content from across Japan into experiences that hold up in international markets. This article lays out why Willverse takes on this business and where, as a market, we are aiming.
Why Willverse does YURAGI
Willverse holds the vision of "raising Japan's presence in the world." Japan concentrates world-class content within a single country — food culture, traditional crafts, spiritual culture, and nature — yet the mechanisms to deliver that value to the world's affluent and receive it as a fair price are not sufficiently in place. YURAGI is the business we launched to fill that gap.
While travel brands chosen by the affluent are well established overseas, Japan lacks a comparable brand chosen at a global standard. We enter this white space starting from the land operator — the party responsible for on-the-ground arrangements.
The travel industry is also a field into which top talent and technology have not sufficiently entered. Willverse's strength — operations run by a small, elite team leveraging AI — functions as a differentiator precisely here.
Conventional guide-led models have structural weaknesses: a "ceiling problem," where an individual guide's ability sets the upper limit of the service, and an "asset problem," where know-how stays personal and never becomes an asset. YURAGI resolves these by reconstituting knowledge into content assets, hospitality into trainable roles, and movement into a designed experience.
The essence of our differentiation is "Exclusive Access." The people you can meet only through YURAGI, the places you can enter only through YURAGI — contract-based exclusive access is, we believe, the source of value that is hard to imitate.
And what YURAGI offers is not the pleasure of consumption but time for stillness and self-transformation — experiencing Japan as a sanctuary. That is the experiential value we aim for.
Our market intent
Inbound travel spending in Japan reached a record JPY 9.4559 trillion in 2025 (up 16.4% year on year; Japan Tourism Agency). By category: lodging 36.6%, shopping 27.0%, dining 21.9%, and entertainment/services 14.5%.
The "entertainment/services (experiences)" category, YURAGI's main battleground, has the smallest share, yet its market size reaches roughly JPY 1.4 trillion — the area with the greatest headroom, where the value of experiences has not been adequately designed or translated.
Measured by per-visitor travel spend, Japan remains at roughly JPY 220,000–230,000, which is not high by international standards. As growth in visitor numbers nears its ceiling, raising per-visitor spend is a realistic and sustainable growth lever that increases economic impact while limiting the burden on local areas.
Inbound tourism has grown into Japan's second-largest service export, after automobiles (2024; Nikkei). YURAGI aims to grow this industry into part of a core national industry that does not depend on the exchange-rate environment.
Our target customers are affluent travelers from overseas, centered on the West. With VIP custom itineraries — delivered in partnership with overseas travel agencies — as our main axis, we also collaborate with local content operators to bundle experiences from across Japan, such as calligraphy, the tea ceremony, and crafts, in a high-value form.
What we aim for
A model dependent on a temporary boom or a weak yen is not sustainable. Building up, from the local front lines, experience value that keeps being chosen even after exchange rates return to normal — that is YURAGI's basic stance. By making the economic return brought to a region larger even with the same number of people, we create a state in which a region can rethink inbound tourism as something it welcomes with pride. Japan's value, delivered to the world the right way — YURAGI is advancing that implementation.