Japan’s ministries are bickering with each other over an NJ issue (tourism), demonstrating how MOJ and MLITT are stepping on MOIA’s toes and goals. (Not to worry, alphabet soup defined below.)
Also exposed is how Japan’s hotels aren’t keeping their legal promises. They’re snaffling tax breaks for registering with the GOJ to offer international service – without actually offering any.
Two articles (AP and Mainichi) follow. Comment from me afterwards:
Ministry seeks faster entry procedures for foreigners at airports
March 2, 2009, Associated Press
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D96M81NG1&show_article=1
Ministry says Japan needs to become more tourist-friendly
Mainichi Shinbun March 3, 2009
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/news/20090303p2a00m0na012000c.html?inb=rs
COMMENT: First, love those last paragraphs in both the AP and Mainichi articles, about how hotels aren’t enforcing international standards they’ve agreed to.
Let’s do the math: 40% of 1560 member hotels is 624 hotels with no foreign-language service, whatever that means. Moreover, according to the AP, 41% of those 624 hotels couldn’t be bothered to put up even a foreign-language sign (how hard could that be?). That means 256 hotels are accepting the international registry advertising, along with concomitant breaks on property taxes, but not doing their job.
Weak excuse time: Some accommodations have claimed they turn away NJ simply because they don’t feel they can provide NJ with professional service, as in service commensurate with their own standards (sources here and here). As if that’s the customer’s problem? Oh, but this time there’s no excuse for those shy and self-effacing hoteliers. They’re clearly beckoning NJ to come stay through the International Sightseeing Hotel Law.
But the rot runs deep. As Debito.org reported last year, we’ve even had a local government tourism board (Fukushima Prefecture) as recently as 2007 (that is, until Debito.org contacted them) advertising hotels that won’t even ACCEPT foreigners. (Yes, the tourism board knew what they were doing: they even offered the option of refusal to those shy hotels!) You know something is really screwy when even the government acquiesces in and encourages illegal activity . (You can’t turn away guests just because they’re foreign, under the Hotel Management Law.)
And that’s even before we get to the MOJ’s ludicrous and discriminatory fingerprinting system (targeting “terrorists”, “criminals”, and carriers “infectious diseases”, which of course means targeting not only foreign tourists, but also NJ residents). It has made “Yokoso Japan” visits or returns home worse than cumbersome. The ministries are tramping on each other’s toes.
Do-nothing bureaucratic default mode time: Honpo Yoshiaki, chief of the Japan Tourism Agency, in an Autumn 2008 interview with the Japan Times and a Q&A with Nagano hotelier Tyler Lynch, diffidently said that those hotels that don’t want NJ (and an October 2008 poll indicated 27% of hotels nationwide didn’t) will just be “ignored” by the ministry.
Yeah, that’ll fix ‘em. No wonder MOIA is miffed. Sic ‘em.
Arudou Debito in Sapporo
