AFP Tokyo :
Prayer rooms, hijabs made from local silk and even halal-certified whale meat are appearing in Japan as tourism bosses wake up to the demand from Muslim travellers.
For a largely homogeneous country with only around 100,000 practising Muslims, that means groping its way through unfamiliar customs as it looks to tap a growing market to help it double the number of overseas visitors by 2020.
“Muslim travellers still do not feel comfortable here,” Datuk Ibrahim Haji Ahmad Badawi, head of Malaysian food company Brahim’s told AFP at a recent seminar on halal tourism in Tokyo. “The government seems to have understood this.”
Last year, seminars like this one were held in 20 different regions in Japan, where hoteliers and restaurateurs were invited to learn how to cater to Muslims.
The Osaka Chamber of Commerce handed out 5,000 leaflets as a guide to what can and cannot be eaten — the idea of forbidding consumption of things like alcohol or pork is anathema to omnivorous and foodie Japan.
With the Islamic world currently observing the holy month of Ramadan, tourism to Japan is being heavily promoted in mainly-Muslim Southeast Asia, where visa requirements were relaxed in 2013 for Malaysia and Thailand.
Indonesia — the largest Muslim-majority country in the world — is slated to follow shortly.
