Photo/Illutration A foreign tourist does the paperwork to deliver her duty-free purchases to Hong Kong on March 15 in Tokyo’s Ota Ward. (Go Takahashi)

The Japan Tourism Agency is promoting a relatively obscure delivery system that allows foreign tourists to immediately lighten their loads by sending duty-free purchases to their home countries.

With tourism numbers recovering since COVID-19 restrictions were lifted last year, the government expects the delivery program to help raise annual tourist spending to 5 trillion yen ($37.76 billion) as early as possible.

“Visitors may be encouraged to buy multiple units of a product,” an agency official said. “Without this service, they would pick up only one due to the heavy weight.”

The agency introduced the duty-free item delivery mechanism in 2016 so that foreign tourists could travel lighter around Japan. The system is intended to increase spending per tourist and encourage them to travel to rural areas.

But few duty-free stores took advantage of it because the framework was not well-known.

Sumitomo Realty & Development Co. recently used the system at the Haneda Airport Garden commercial complex, which it fully opened in late January within the international airport in Tokyo’s Ota Ward.

For a week until March 19, short-stay visitors could use the fee-based delivery service by taking items purchased at the 48 duty-free shops in the complex to the tax-exemption counter. The items were then directly delivered to overseas destinations.

A Filipino woman on March 15 bought Japanese sake, sweets, chopsticks and other articles totaling 55,000 yen from souvenir stores at the airport.

Her cart of items cost 7,000 yen to ship to Hong Kong, where she works.

With a single suitcase, she said it would have been exhausting lugging around all of the items.

The agency will urge more tax-exempt shops to incorporate the service.

The government’s Visit Japan Web site was updated on April 1 to allow overseas tourists to use their smartphones to complete all necessary procedures to receive tax exemptions.

Their passports and visa status must be confirmed by store operators for duty-free purchases. If their data is entered into the website beforehand, store staff can scan QR codes to quickly and more efficiently confirm the information, government officials said.

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