With Disney characters offering greetings in Japanese and employees speaking only Japanese, many of the attractions at the Tokyo Disney Resort are lost, without translation, to non-Japanese speakers.
"The problem is the language," said Chanida Towithelertkul, a Thai tourist who said her tour group of Chinese, English and Thai speakers had been frustrated by the language barrier at the resort.
As it observed its 25th anniversary Tuesday and looked toward the next quarter century, attracting new markets like foreign tourists, seniors and men appeared crucial for the Disney resort in Japan.
By 2055, 40 percent of the Japanese population will be older than 65. Japan has the world's fastest-aging population.
"There is no way that the decrease of the population parameter is going to be a positive factor," said Naoshi Nema, an analyst in Tokyo with Morgan Stanley.
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The first Walt Disney theme park to open outside of the United States, the Tokyo Disney Resort includes Disneyland and DisneySea, a water theme park, two hotels and a shopping mall on the outskirts of Tokyo.
The parks, which generated $3.2 billion last year, have about 25.8 million annual visitors, more than 96 percent of them from Japan. About 84 percent of visitors are 39 and younger.
Unless the resort can persuade regulars to visit more often or win over a new customer base, the number of guests is bound to dwindle as Japan's population declines, Nema said.
But attracting tourists from abroad would be a sharp shift for a theme park that is so focused on the domestic market that it sometimes fails to address the needs of foreigners. Signs are in English and Japanese and maps are available in English, Chinese and Korean, but that is about the extent of meeting the communication needs of foreigners.
On one busy afternoon recently, foreign tourists complained that the park was not user friendly as they stood in two-hour lines for the roller coaster and other rides and waited 30 minutes for food. Few seemed to know about the "fastpass" service, with which they could reserve popular rides at specific times.
Oriental Land, the Japanese company that owns and operates the resort under a license from Walt Disney, says it wants to tap the potential abroad.
"This is still a small part of the total number of visitors, but I think it is an area that we can definitely grow in," Yoshiro Fukushima, president of Oriental Land, said in an interview.
Tokyo Disney promotes the resort to travel agencies in Asia, where an economic boom may provide fertile markets for the park. Yet it has not undertaken an aggressive campaign to attract tourists from abroad, as has Universal Studios Japan, a theme park that opened in 2001 in Osaka. The number of foreign tourists to Universal Studios' theme park rose to about 10 percent of the total of 8.6 million visitors in the 2006-2007 financial year, up from about 3 percent in 2004, after the company set up marketing offices in Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand.
Aside from the lure of traditional Japanese attractions among foreign tourists, perhaps the foremost hurdle for Tokyo Disney is the cost: A family of four can expect to spend around $1,400 on a two-day visit including hotel, food and souvenirs, while a single person is likely to spend about $160 for a day trip.
Hoping to attract older Japanese, Tokyo Disney introduced a less-expensive annual pass for seniors in March and has begun to offer horticulture exhibitions and a circus theater.
Men are another potential market. Female visitors make up 73 percent resort entries, possibly because of the popularity of Disney characters among Japanese women. Finding the right mix to attract new customers, like men, without making radical changes that might alienate its traditional female customer base will be a challenge for Tokyo Disney but one that may pay off as Japan ages.
Another looming challenge for Disney is managing competition with other Disney parks in Asia.
So far, Hong Kong Disneyland is hardly a threat. And though Disney is thinking about building a park near Shanghai, the plan is on hold because of concerns that it might undermine Hong Kong Disney. Yet most analysts agree that it is only a matter of time before Disney sets up a resort in mainland China.
Despite the challenges, Tokyo Disney is optimistic as it turns 25.
"There still are many people who have never visited the parks, so we plan to market the parks in a precise way for those people," said Fukushima, the Oriental Land president.
Source: IHT
