Chinese visitors were the top spenders in Japan, spending an average of RMB16,000 per person in comparison to an average expenditure of RMB5,590 per person from visitors of other nationalities.

In 2015 visitors to Japan spent over three trillion yen in the country for the first time, up 70% compared with 2014, according to the Japan Tourism Agency (JTA). Among this Chinese visitors to Japan made up 40% of total visitor expenditure spending a total of 1.41 trillion yen in 2015.

The Japanese government has launched special policies to attract more Chinese visitors such as a wide scale expansion of duty free stores and broadening the range of duty free goods to include food items. Japan has also relaxed visa policies for a number of Asian countries.

The JTA has begun to collect data on the shopping habits of foreign visitors in 2016 and will lend its support to the “explosive shopping” Chinese shopping craze phenomenon.

Japan’s Asahi Shimbun reported last month that Japan will introduce a multi-million yen machine to offer shopping service and manage data for foreign shoppers. These machines will be installed in over half of the country’s 30,000 duty free stores to accelerate the digitization of shopping record keeping and supply data for analysis.

The report said chain appliance retailers and duty free outlets will also collect and analyze their own data to better satisfy the needs of tourists. The JTA thinks that retailers will be able make more targeted orders and sales receipts will increase if they can grasp product distribution information control.(Translation by David)