The ongoing pandemic is accelerating the decline of the competitiveness of Japanese ports. In the long-term turbulence of maritime logistics, shipping companies are unwilling to dock at Japanese ports with less cargo volume.

In 2021, the number of container ships calling at major ports in Japan hit a new low since 2000, with the number of direct flights to major ports in the United States decreasing.

Shippers have to turn to international hub ports such as South Korea for transportation, and it is difficult to predict the number of days of transportation.

According to Japanese media, the number of ocean container ships in major ports in Japan, including Tokyo port, Yokohama port, Nagoya Port, Osaka port and Kobe port, decreased by 8% in 2021 compared with the previous year and 12% compared with 2019 before the epidemic.

In addition, the number from January to April 2022 decreased by 7% compared with the same period of the previous year. At this rate, it is expected that the whole year of 2022 will hit a new low for three consecutive years.

Against this background, major global ports such as China and South Korea still maintain a sense of presence. On the other hand, Japanese ports with a relatively low sense of presence can easily become candidate ports for cargo ships to cancel their berths.

Although the epidemic is still ongoing, container transportation itself is still active, especially the transportation volume from 10 major Asian countries and regions to the United States is growing.

According to the statistics of Descartes datamyne, a US survey company, in 2021, this transport volume reached 20.52 million, an increase of 25% compared with 2019 before the epidemic.

From January to July 2022, it also increased by 4% year-on-year. However, the number of containers sent from Japan in 2021 was significantly reduced by 16% compared with 2019, and its share in the total transportation volume dropped to about 1%.

For this reason, in the ranking of container shipping volume from Asian economies to the United States, Japan still ranked seventh in 2019, but just two years later, its ranking has slipped to ninth, and it has even been overtaken by Vietnam.

In 2017, Japan's postal shipping, merchant shipping Mitsui and Kawasaki steamship established a container ship business company "Ocean Network Express (ONE)" in Singapore. The company stopped the direct route from Japan to the east coast of the United States in 2021.

A relevant person of Japanese shipping said that "the possibility that direct routes cannot be restored after the epidemic is also high".

Previously, the adjustment of industrial structure, such as the transfer of production bases overseas, led to the decline of the status of Japanese ports, and the epidemic intensified the "departure" of shipping companies from Japan.