Japanese business leaders launched a campaign to woo tourists back to Japan after the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that sent foreigners fleeing the country.

“I would like to say: Japan is safe,” said Atsutoshi Nishida, the chairman of Toshiba, told a high-powered gathering of travel and tourism executives and officials from around the world.

Accepting the group’s invitation to host the next Global Travel and Tourism Summit in Tokyo in next April, Mr Nishida said he hoped to welcome participants to a Japan at “full strength” by then.

International travel to and from Japan plunged after the nine magnitude quake on March 11 off Sendai, Japan that sent a tsunami surging through nuclear power complexes along the coast, magnifying a disaster that killed 15,000 people.

While tourism represents only a small part of economy impacted, it is an important bellwether of confidence in Japan. In the immediate aftermath of the quake, the number of tourists arriving in the country dropped by more than 50 per cent, and leisure travel collapsed by 90 per cent, according to the Japanese Tourism Agency.

Japanese departures from the country were estimated to have fallen by 18 per cent in March from the same month in 2010.

There were tentative signs of recovery in May, and Japanese officials said that travel during the Golden Week holiday in late April and early May when Japanese celebrate their famed cherry blossoms, were better than expected.

But Oxford Economics, in a study, said the experience after other major disasters shows it can take as long as two years to get back to normal.

“Recovery rates depend not only on the extent of the damage caused but political support to rebuild infrastructure and promote travel and tourism, and crucially on the perception left on the travelling public by the disaster,” it said.

It said it took four years for New Orleans to return to baseline levels of tourism after Hurricane Katrina. Japanese officials said their campaign to bring back tourism will begin with education campaigns to dispel what they say are public misperceptions about the effects of the nuclear disaster.

Only later will they proceed to ad campaigns and the like to get tourists to come back, they said.

Naoyoshi Yamada, of the Japan Tourism Agency, said the government has budgeted seven billion yen, or about $75 million, this year for the effort.

It was clear from their presentations here that the Japanese representatives see fears over the lingering effects of the nuclear crisis as the biggest hurdle to overcome.

Mr Nishida contended it was misleading to put the crisis at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear complex on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, telling reporters the release of radiation in that meltdown “dwarfed” the amounts released in Japan.

He said Japan’s top rating of seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale, equal to that of Chernobyl disaster, “has made many people nervous about visiting Japan”.