Suzuko Meguro was torn between Australian beaches and wildlife, and Thai food and adventure when time came to plan her vacation. Thailand won.

"Australia looks really good but Asia seems closer and cheaper," said Meguro, 23, who graduated from Tokyo's Hitotsubashi University in March and headed for Bangkok.

Australia, a leading destination for Japanese tourists in the 1990s, now is losing out as travelers vacation nearer to home. The number of Japanese visitors fell 4 percent in the year to October and is down 17 percent from a 1996 peak of 813,000.

The trend threatens to cut profits and jobs in Australia's $14.7 billion annual tourism industry, the largest foreign-exchange earner after coal. The contribution by Japanese leisure visitors, the second-biggest spenders behind the British, is down by 25 percent since 2001, accounting for most of the $784 million drop in tourist receipts.

"We used to cater only to Japanese," said Peter Hooshmand, who runs a store specializing in Australian opals and a souvenir shop near Sydney's Harbour Bridge. "Now, you hardly see them."

Revenue at Hooshmand's jewelry store has fallen about 50 percent since the mid-1990s, he said.

The steady influx of Japanese caused Australians to become complacent about attracting them, said Koji Iwatsuki, managing director in Sydney of the Oceania unit of JTB Corp., Japan's biggest travel agency.

Australians also ignored Japan's generational and economic changes when marketing attractions, said Hiroshi Kurosu, a senior researcher at the Japan Travel Bureau Foundation in Tokyo.

Most of Japan's Australia-bound travelers had been young people, he said. Then the country's shrinking birthrate curbed those numbers, as did less job security due to regulatory changes allowing employers to hire more temporary workers on lower wages.

"Even if young people have the money, they aren't inspired to travel overseas" because they aren't confident about work, Kurosu said.

When they do go abroad, they choose destinations closer and cheaper than Australia. The number of Japanese traveling to China rose 1.7 percent to 3.4 million in 2005, Japan National Tourist Organization figures show. Tourism to Indonesia increased 8.2 percent, Malaysia 12.8 percent and Vietnam 20 percent.

An $8.63 million Australian government campaign to lure more Japanese this year hasn't reversed the trend.

Advertisements featuring a blonde, bikini clad-model extolling the attractions of Australia's uncrowded beaches flopped when the colloquial "Where the Bloody Hell Are You?" slogan got lost in translation.

The oath doesn't exist in Japanese, so Tourism Australia changed the slogan to: "Why Aren't You Coming to Australia?"

"The tagline doesn't really click with the Japanese market," said Kurosu at the Japan Travel Bureau Foundation.

"There are so many ways to enjoy Australia, whether it's through driving trips or wine-tasting. I don't think that's being transmitted."

The advertisement, aired first in March, is part of a $141 million, 30-month campaign in at least 10 countries, including China and the U.S. The ad stirred controversy in Britain, which initially banned "bloody hell" as offensive.

"It's too early to tell if the campaign is working," said Australian Tourism Minister Fran Bailey. "The Japanese market has been declining for some years, and it's going to take time to reverse that."

Japan's drift hasn't deterred other visitors. Australia hosted 5.48 million travelers in the year ended June 30, 1.4 percent more than in the previous year, government figures show.

The charge was led by more then 1 million New Zealanders, followed by British and Japanese. A decade ago, Japanese tourists outnumbered all other nationals.

Helping boost arrivals are China's new leisure-trippers, whose numbers have increased almost fivefold to 292,000 in a decade.

Visitors from Japan added $1.65 billion to Australia's economy in each of the past two years — down from the $2.2 billion peak in the year ended June 2001, government figures show. Total tourism spending that year was A$15.5 billion.

Still, tourism accounted for almost 10 percent of Australia's foreign-exchange income last fiscal year. Only the coal industry, with $19.1 billion of exports, brought more money into the country, according to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

Minister Bailey said she hopes the entry to Japan in April of Jetstar, a budget airline owned by Qantas Airways Ltd., Australia's largest carrier, will help boost arrivals.

Jetstar, which is taking over the Osaka-Sydney service, seats 100 fewer passengers a day than Japan Airlines.