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Japan
This Week in AsiaEconomics

Japan’s plan to beat labour woes? Vending machines for duty-free goods

  • The government is set to approve the plan as an influx of tourists coincides with a lack of personnel who can speak foreign languages
  • Japan is facing a worsening labour shortage, a legacy of its shrinking population and decreasing birth rate

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Popular duty-free items – such as high-end cosmetics and watches – will be among the first items to be sold from vending machines. Photo: Shutterstock
Julian Ryall
Facing a shortage of service-sector manpower, particularly people able to communicate in foreign languages, the Japanese government is finding it tricky to sell duty-free goods. The solution? Vending machines.
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Tokyo is expected to approve a plan to set up the devices at airports, major train stations and other locations with a high tourist footfall, as well as more remote parts of the country. According to officials of the Japan Tourism Agency, popular duty-free items – such as high-end cosmetics and watches – will be among the first items to be sold.
The vending machines will require anyone purchasing a duty-free item to provide data from their passport and will use facial recognition technology to verify a purchaser’s identity, the agency said. The machines will then automatically send the records for each sale to Japan’s customs clearance system so travellers will be able to smoothly depart the country at the end of their visit.

A tourism agency official said new technology such as facial recognition, as well as the rising popularity and availability of vending machines that use the internet of things, allowed such machines to carry out processes that human beings previously had to do.

“Therefore, if our requests are approved, we hope to use vending machines to expand tax-free sales to more rural areas where it is harder to employ speakers of languages other than Japanese,” he said.

The government will include the plan in the outline of its proposals for tax-reform measures for fiscal 2020. The tourism agency hopes the first duty-free vending machines will be operational a year later.

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An array of vending machines in Japan. Photo: Tim Noonan
An array of vending machines in Japan. Photo: Tim Noonan

“I cannot give you an exact number of how many machines may be introduced, but after our plan was announced there were approaches from multiple manufacturers who wanted to be considered for developing the equipment,” the agency official said.

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