Offbeat | Tokyo Disney sees visitors boost

The operator of Tokyo Disneyland expects overseas visitors to more than double by 2020 to around 4 million as Walt Disney Co.’s first resort outside the U.S. rides on publicity generated by Shanghai’s new theme park and a government plan to draw more tourists to Japan.
Oriental Land Co. which is licensed to operate the Tokyo resort consisting of Disneyland, DisneySea, hotels and shopping malls, forecasts its annual investments of 50 billion yen (USD481 million) on park attractions and new hotel projects will help it capture about a tenth of the  40 million foreign visitors to Japan by 2020, said executive director Akiyoshi Yokota on Tuesday. The resort attracted 8.5 percent of the 21.4 million foreign visitors to the country in the year ended March 2016.
“Shanghai Disneyland is a plus for us as it is likely to boost the recognition of Disneyland in the region,” said Yokota, who’s in charge of finance and accounting at Oriental Land, in an interview in Tokyo. “There are wealthy Chinese people who may want to come to the one in Tokyo after experiencing it in Shanghai.”
The company, partly owned by Tokyo train operator Keisei Electric Railway Co., forecasts it can maintain the visitor ratio at around 10 percent of the country’s annual tourists despite a stronger yen, said Yokota. The world’s second-biggest theme park market grew 11 percent last year to hit 823 billion yen, according to Euromonitor International, even as Japanese consumers tighten spending over the country’s economic uncertainty. Bloomberg