Would-Be Shoppers Daunted By Japan's Duty-Free Rules

Above, the former Ginza Matsuzakaya department store (center, background) being renovated. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Previously, I posted about Japan's efforts to re-tool and expand their duty-free shopping for foreign visitors. This includes stations at department stores where foreign tourists can arrange to shop duty-free and the expansion of kinds of merchandise that can be purchased duty-free.

However, in every new system a government implements, there always seem to be a few bugs that need to be ironed out.

Nikkei Asian Review reports that there are some problems with a new duty-free program Japan has implemented.

They report:

TOKYO -- Japan welcomed a record 1.23 million visitors in April, topping 1 million for the second straight month. But though the country is moving closer to its goal of attracting 20 million arrivals by 2020, the year Tokyo hosts the Summer Olympics, cumbersome duty-free procedures are putting a damper on foreign visitors' shop sprees.

The article goes on to list some of the problems and proposed remedies and why they only add to the problems and not worth the effort.

One other interesting part of the article is about the former site of the Ginza Matsuzakaya department store (that was trashed by Godzilla in 1954, by the way):

Construction is well under way at the former site of the Matsuzakaya Ginza department store in Tokyo's Ginza shopping district. The site is being redeveloped into a huge shopping complex scheduled to open in 2016.

To read the full article, go here.