Shopaholics heading to Japan will be happy to learn that the Japanese Government has decided to relax its “confusing” duty-free shopping laws.
Under the previous tax-free laws, visitors had to spend at least 5,000 yen (AU$60) on consumable products like food or cosmetics, or on general items like clothing to avoid paying the 8% consumption tax.
The specifications around these categories were regularly confusing visitors during their tax free shopping.
Now travellers can forget those categories altogether because as long as the combined amount purchased is 5,000 yen or moretax-free shopping is guaranteed
Yes! That makes way more sense, right?.
Duty-free shop owners in Japan are super pleased about the news, saying that simplifying the policy should boost spending among tourists.
The Japanese Government decided to change the policy because the “explosive buying” by Chinese tourists was “cooling down”.
Apparently the China market is starting to favour experiential holidays over shopping-based trips.
Japan doesn’t need to stress too much though because spending by foreign tourists reached a record breaking 4.42 trillion yen last year.
The Government wants more though, with ambitious plans to almost double this foreign spending figure to eight trillion yen in 2020.
There are also plans to increase the number of duty-free shops, particularly outside Japan’s major cities.
There are currently about 45,000 tax-free stores nationwide, with only 17,000 of these lcoated outside of the Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka metropolitan regions.
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