Yet, only a decade earlier, the northern lights weren’t even a blip on most travelers’ radar.

“There was no one else doing northern lights tours in the world,” said Masa Ando, a 34-year veteran of the Japanese tourism industry in Alaska who today co-owns HAI Shirokuma Tours. In the 1980s and ’90s, he said, locals didn’t understand the fuss when Japanese tourists began arriving in Fairbanks. “They were questioning, ‘Why are they coming to see northern lights?’ ‘What’s special about this?’”

From those trailblazing Japanese groups, the northern lights as tourist attraction gained momentum around the globe.

“It’s become a must-do thing in life to see the northern lights,” said Arne Bergh, an owner and creative director of the Icehotel in Kiruna, Sweden, where every winter aurora hopefuls chase the phenomenon he called “nature’s own fireworks” before retiring to their subzero ice rooms.

In Alaska, the number of winter visitors last year surpassed 320,000, an increase of 33 percent from a decade earlier , according to the Alaska Travel Industry Association, which credits most of that tourism to the aurora. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, meanwhile, the remote capital of Yellowknife has marketed itself as a top northern lights destination, particularly to travelers in Asia. According to a report from the government of the N.W.T., the number of aurora tourists more than quadrupled over the last six years — a trend evident even in the food scene of Yellowknife, population around 20,000.