Toserba And Shopping Centers In Japan Provide Prayer Rooms Along With Increased Muslim Visitors

JAKARTA - Stores are all around and shopping centers in Japan are increasingly setting up prayer rooms to meet the needs of Muslims, amid the increasing number of visitors from Muslim-majority countries.

The Matsuya Ginza Department Store in Tokyo's high-end shopping district, for example, a number of people lined up in front of a designated room as a prayer room at certain times in a day.

This room is equipped with an area to collect ablution water to clean up before worship and have prayer mats for some people who want to pray.

A Malaysian woman in her 30s said she had been looking for an online prayer room before arriving in Japan, and she was grateful that it was difficult to find a prayer room in the middle of a metropolitan area.

Muslims usually perform prayers five times a day, although some reduce their frequency to three times while on the way, according to the Japanese Tourism Agency. Their activities will be limited if they cannot find a prayer room and must return to the inn.

"The prayer room is a necessary infrastructure such as bathrooms and breastfeeding rooms," said a retail industry official, adding people in the industry need to work together to provide the room, quoted from Kyodo News Oct. 10.

Among other department stores in Tokyo, Shibuya Parco in the Shibuya shopping district has also opened a space for worship.

Meanwhile, Aeon Mall Co., which operates a large-scale shopping complex, has installed places of worship in seven outlets in Chiba Prefecture, Kanagawa, Aichi, Hiroshima, and Okinawa, with plans to expand the service to other outlets.

It is known that the number of foreign tourists from Indonesia, Malaysia and Turkey who came to Japan surpassed 870,000 people by 2023, an increase of 2.7 times from a decade ago, according to Japan's National Tourism Organization.