According to statistics recently released by the Japan National Tourism Organization, the number of Chinese tourists as well as their expenditure ranked top among all foreign tourists visiting Japan.

Haunted by the data, the Japanese Government has already taken some measures to solve its strong reliance on Chinese tourists by adding seven more resident offices in countries like the Philippines and Italy.

Japan’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei, Japanese Business News) published an editorial on Jan. 22 noting there were 19.73 million foreign tourist visits to Japan in 2015, hitting a new historical record.

However, the number of tourists from Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea made up 72 percent of the total, tourists from Southeast Asia and India only 11 percent, and 13 percent are from Europe, America, and Australia.

The editorial pointed out that a shadow has risen on Chinese tourists' strong demand for shopping due to China’s economic slowdown. In addition to that, the trend of purchasing Japanese goods online has been increasing. Hence any tourism relying on Chinese tourists and their shopping needs faces a potential risk in the future.

The Nikkei claimed that Japan should be more actively attracting tourists from Southeast Asia, Europe and America since these tourists pay more attention to the unique experience Japan has to offer rather than purely shopping, so they are more likely to become return tourists.

Besides the additional resident offices in seven foreign countries, Japan is also planning to make satellite TV programs for these countries about traveling to Japanese. In the meantime, Japan is also considering how to keep encouraging and increasing the number of Chinese tourists coming to Japan.