Halal Tourism Takes off in Japan

Prayer rooms, hijabs (headscarves) made from local silk and halal-certified meat are appearing in Japan as tourism bosses wake up to the demand from Muslim travelers.

For a largely homogeneous country with only around 100,000 practicing Muslims, that means groping its way through unfamiliar customs as it looks to tap a growing market to help it double the number of overseas visitors by 2020, AFP reported.
"Muslim travelers still do not feel comfortable here," Ibrahim Haji Ahmad Badawi, head of Malaysian food company Brahim's, told AFP at a recent seminar on halal tourism in Tokyo. "The government seems to have understood this."
Last year, seminars like this one were held in 20 different regions in Japan, where hoteliers and restaurateurs were invited to learn how to cater to Muslims.