WITH Chinese tourists spending the most of all international visitors, Japan has created a new five-year visa for high-income Chinese tourists and relaxed existing requirements.
Fumio Kishida, Japan’s minister of foreign affairs, announced earlier this week that the income requirement for tourists who have visited Japan in the last three years will be lowered from January 19, aimed at promoting exchanges between the two countries, reported Xinhua.
However, Chinese tourists with these three-year multiple-entry visas must still spend one night in one of four designated prefectures – Iwate, Miyagi or Fukushima prefectures that were the hardest hit in 2011’s earthquake-tsunami disaster, or Okinawa, according to Japan’s NHK.
Each stay must not exceed 90 days.
A new five-year multiple-entry visa has simultaneously been rolled out for Chinese tourists with an even higher income, and the one-night stay requirement in the designated prefectures has also been waived, said the same Xinhua report.
According to the statistics provided by the Japan National Tourism Organization, the number of Chinese arrivals in Japan from January to November 2014 was 2.2 million, an 82.2 per cent increase from 2013 over the same period.
A study done in Tokyo also showed that the per capita expenditure of Chinese tourists ranked first among all nationalities visiting Japan, with an average of 191,741 yen (US$1,602).
