‘Wonderful Customers’ : Japanese Tourists Go European

Just after dawn most weekdays, teams of elegantly coiffed, primly dressed saleswomen at the Louis Vuitton luggage store near the Arc de Triomphe assemble for their Japanese lessons.

“I don’t try to teach them to speak fluently,” teacher Kobayashi Kazue explained one recent morning. “But they should know colors, numbers and a few polite expressions. The most important word is sai fu --pocketbook.” Louis Vuitton, where a fancy footlocker can cost $10,000, sells a lot of pocketbooks to Japanese tourists.

Every night, just after dinner at the Lido nightclub on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, the orchestra breaks into a rousing version of the popular Japanese song “Bara ga Saita,” or “Blooming Rose.” The song usually gets an enthusiastic reaction. Some nights, nearly half of the 1,200 places at the Lido, where a front-row dinner seat costs $140, are occupied by Japanese.

Would Like Club Full

“I would like to have the whole club full of Japanese,” Lido manager Jose Jimenez said, smiling, just as a large Japanese crowd was being entertained one night by topless French chorus girls and a team of Filipino break dancers. “They are wonderful, wonderful customers.”

These days in Paris, but also in London, Rome, Munich and Madrid, the sun rises and sets for the Japanese visitor. For most of Europe, the Japanese tourists with their yen for travel have become the most sought-after human quantity since the “rich Americans” of the post-World War II era.

In tourist industry terms, one Japanese is worth nearly two Americans and three West Germans. In France, for example, the Japanese visitor spends an average of $280 a day, compared to an average of $150 for an American and only $100 for a German.

Many Leave Tour Groups

Also, although most Japanese still travel in group tours, the tours themselves tend to be less regimented. Increasingly, the Japanese tourist is demanding time to break away.

The cliche of Japanese traveling only in tightly packed groups with coupons to spend in selected tourist shops is fading fast, say the tourism experts. Japanese travelers are younger, richer and more adventurous than ever. Increasingly, women are playing a bigger role.

Nightclub manager Jimenez thinks he can tell the changes in the group travel system by the alertness of his customers during the shows.

“Ten years ago these trips were overmanaged,” he said. “They were so tired that we used to find 20% of them sleeping by the end of the show.”

“The Japanese have changed,” said Odile Racamier, a great-granddaughter of Louis Vuitton who oversees the pricey company boutiques, including 20 stores in Japan and three in Hawaii.

“They are no longer simply coupon travelers. I would not say they are relaxed about travel. They still feel there are certain places they must visit--in order, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe. But they travel now more independently and with greater sophistication. After all, there is nothing to stop them. They certainly have the money.”

A recent report on tourism trends by the Economist Intelligence Unit in London predicted that by 1990, or even earlier, Japan will jump from fourth place in the world as a generator of overseas travel expenditure to second, behind West Germany. And the report forecast that by 1995, Japanese tourist expenditures will be more than double that of Americans.

Wooed by Europeans

As a result, nearly every European country is busy playing their tune. The British Tourist Authority has even fretted about ways to make Britain’s generally overcooked food more palatable to Japanese tastes. The French tourist office, Maison de La France, is concerned by surveys showing that the Japanese love the food but find the French people inhospitable.

“We have to do a better job welcoming the Japanese,” said Christian Blanckaert, former director of the French tourist office who now heads an association of French luxury firms. “In five years’ time, we are going to have 1 million Japanese tourists here. We are not prepared.”

Blanckaert advocates an “urgent crash program” to make the Japanese feel more at home in France, ranging from welcome booths at Charles de Gaulle International Airport to squads of Japanese-speaking guides in the Loire Valley.

Meanwhile, the European tourist agencies are struggling to keep track of their younger, more independent guests.

Peak in ‘Golden Week’

Never has the changing profile of the Japanese tourist been more apparent than this spring in the days leading up to April 29-May 7, the peak “Golden Week” of Japanese travel--a period of national holidays that is one of the few times during the year that most Japanese offices close.

According to the Japan Travel Bureau in Tokyo, the number of Japanese traveling overseas during this period will hit an all-time high this year. Of the 365,000 Golden Week travelers, the greatest number outside Asia, 82,000, are expected in Western Europe (primarily France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and Britain). This compares to 73,000 in the continental United States and 60,000 in Hawaii.

In the 1960s, most Japanese overseas travelers were businessmen. By the end of the 1970s, organized leisure travel--often to nearby Asian countries, Guam and Hawaii--accounted for nearly 80% of Japanese overseas travel.

The U.S. islands, California and Asian countries remain the favored destination of Japanese travelers.

But spurred by a Japanese government plan--the Ten Million Program--aimed at achieving 10 million Japanese overseas travelers by 1992, the number of Japanese tourists has increased dramatically in recent years.

Britain Expects 500,000

Britain, for example, expects 500,000 Japanese visitors this year, compared to only 210,000 in 1984. Italy, Spain and Switzerland have shown similar growth.

According to recent independent studies on Japanese tourism by both the French and the British, several trends have emerged in recent years.

For one thing, many more students are traveling. At last count, for example, graduating classes at more than 140 Japanese schools have organized overseas trips, compared to only five schools 10 years ago.

Women, including single women traveling alone, pay a much greater role in tourism. According to the British report, more than 55% of Japanese under 30 years old who are traveling in Europe are women.

Travel for Seasoning

These include one highly prized category of Japanese known in the tourist trade as “office girls”--young women 20 to 27 years old who work in Japan and live with their families but who have few of the career restraints on travel faced by their male counterparts. For these young women, foreign travel is increasingly considered good seasoning.

“Travel, along with flower arranging, tea ceremony and possibly English language lessons, enhances their status and marriageability,” commented the report by the British Tourist Authority.

This year particularly, the Japanese tourist presence has come into flower, like the blooming rose at the Lido.

In the days before the big Golden Week rush, hundreds of young, stylishly dressed Japanese were in evidence along the famous luxury thoroughfares of Europe, such as Rue du Faubourg-St. Honore in Paris, Via Condotti in Rome, Calle Serano in Madrid and Knightsbridge in London.

One recent rainy afternoon in Paris, there were 28 customers in the Vuitton boutique on Avenue Marceau. Of these, 23 were Japanese.

On any given day they are five deep at the silk scarf counter at Hermes on the Faubourg-St. Honore and wall to wall in the Armani, Ferragamo, Laura Biagiotti and Gucci boutiques on the Via Condotti.

“The Japanese want goods with a designer name,” said Misaho Yoshida, director general of Nippon Express Tours in Rome, “and most of them who travel in tight-schedule groups will run away from a day’s monument tour to visit Condotti.”

“I think many Japanese were disappointed with the group format,” said a young Japanese woman interviewed while she shopped alone in Hermes. “They were taken places they did not want to go. They were taken to souvenir stands where they didn’t want to shop. They wanted more freedom.”

Band for ‘Kelly’ Watch

Speaking flawless English, she walked directly to the second-floor jewelry section of the store. She told the clerk that she wanted a black alligator watchband to go with her gold Hermes “Kelly” watch--a popular padlock watch first worn by actress Grace Kelly in 1949. It comes in gold and black and costs $900. With her self-assurance and decisive shopping manner, she seemed typical of the new breed of Japanese tourist.

Not far away, several young Japanese women, carrying Vuitton handbags and Chanel shopping sacks, relaxed over tea and toyamazakura cherry pastries at the Toraya Pastry shop.

Such Japanese shoppers represent what French Japanese tourist specialist Jean Silvestre terms the “new, young, individualistic fringe” of the Japanese tourist market. Innovative new tours have been created to attract this class: hiking tours of the Swiss Alps, apartment exchanges in Paris and London, a high-society grand waltz in Vienna, midsummer golf in Scandinavia and a luxury tour that offers Christmas in Paris and New Year’s in New York.

“Some of the Japanese youth are becoming more international and daring,” said the report from the Maison de la France. “There is a growing clientele of repeaters--making their second or third trip to Europe.”

One of the new-breed repeaters is Kuniko Sakamato, 34, a student at the French Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. Sakamato was interviewed at a Japanese video-song bar in the Latin Quarter.

The karaoke song bars, of which there are three in Paris, are generally havens for homesick Japanese. But Sakamato, who was accompanied by a French friend, is an enthusiastic Francophile.

“I’ve been in Paris three months this time,” she said, “but I often come to France. This time I came to study French cuisine. I love French food and French cooking, as well as the architecture and the museums. I love shopping in Paris. I have several good French friends. I only return to Japan to work and to make money, but for vacation I always come back to France.”

Times staff writer Dan Fisher in London and researchers Reane Oppl in Bonn, Janet Stobart in Rome and Sarah White in Paris contributed to this story.