Travel agency H.I.S. to sell shares in Huis Ten Bosch resort

Chinese businesses and tourists are welcoming this news. When the latter come to Japan in the future, they'll be able to spend all their money and time at Chinese-owned facilities.

@JeffLee Don't be so sure the Chinese will be allowed out to play again, or that Japan will re-open to foreign tourism. Covid is the gift that keeps on giving for politicians. The most potent multi-purpose tool in their kit bag.

Too bad for HIS. I got a LOT of cheap / economy tickets all over the Pacific from them

“Back in the Day”.

I might be an outlier, but I have never seen the appeal of nor understood the staying power of Huis Ten Bosch.

It was one of those mega-investments undertaken at the end of the Bubble Era that didn't make a lot of sense to me.

In Kyushu alone there was Huis Ten Bosch, Sea Gaya (pay to surf, in Miyazaki, literally a hundred meters from the beach, SERIOUSLY?) and Fukuoka TWIN Dome (Yes, back in the day, it was going to be a PAIR of retractable roof 50k seat domes on either side of the Nakasu River.)

Twin Dome got paired back to the one Dome. Sea Gaya went bankrupt, but Huis Ten Bosch carries on for reasons that escape me. Favored not by location (It isn't even that easy to get there from Fukuoka at least it wasn't way back when.), nor a lot of repeat business - Just how many kids say "Can we PLEASE go back to the wooden shoe place and look at the Tulips again?" And yet, it carries on.

I remember back when it opened and the marketers paid Peter Otoole 500k USD for a 30 second spot in which he walked in a very dignified manner (and in a straight line no less. Wonder how many takes that took) and said "Huis Ten Bosch" into the camera.

It might amaze the reader to hear that this never served as sufficient motivation for me to spend my disposable income on a trip there.

fake gaikoku?

no way they will see my single yen...

Twin Dome got paired back to the one Dome. Sea Gaya went bankrupt, but Huis Ten Bosch carries on for reasons that escape me. 

Just to solve that mystery: Huis Ten Bosch also went bankrupt way back in 2003, with hundreds of billions of Yen in debt. That is actually how H.I.S. came to own it in the first place, it bought the park for almost nothing (relative to what it had originally cost to construct) back in 2010 in the aftermath of that.

Part of the reason the park wasn't abandoned completely is that local governments couldn't allow it to. I was living in Fukuoka at the time and knew someone involved in it who explained that a lot of the utilities (electric and water) for areas adjacent to it ran through the park, and they could not be easily unentangled. So shutting the park down would mean shutting down services to those areas, which gave local governments high incentive to find someone else to take the park over and run it (which is why H.I.S. was able to step in).

I enjoyed my trip to huis ten Bosch back in the day. If you like pleasant but boring then it's a hot spot. However if it becomes Chinese owned then I will never set foot there again.

Huis Ten Bosch has a really roller coaster of a history, huge ups and also very low downs. It can be an entertaining visit if you are in Nagasaki City, but It is understandable they are in trouble right now since a lot of the tourists there came from China and Korea.

Not sure a Casino would fit the place or make it popular again but the first time it was closed to bankruptcy not many people saw the point in the changes they made and they were successful in revitalizing the park so it may work again.

In an age of graying Japanese it is not an option that I would risk money on....

I'm sure Huis Ten Bosch is more valuable than HIS. HIS sucked back in the day. I remember buying air tickets from them, only to be told that I would have to pay an extra 10,000-30,000 yen after I bought the ticket for fuel surcharges. That was the last time I did business with them.

Reading the interesting comments on here, I would point out that governments are now intervening to block Chinese investors from buying all sorts of things. Even non-Chinese foreign investors are likely to be increasingly shut out. 'National security' etc.

Internalising investment will pose problems for companies seeking to flog stuff off, although the JPG has form for bailing favoured entities out via quasi-nationalisation. Once the Bank of Japan and the government own enough, the economy can flip to the Chinese model - owned by the state, run by the state and controlled by the state. Not just in Japan, but across the G7.

@GBR48 - Japan has already had long standing Foreign Investment rules in place.

As for the state ownership issue, I'd rather that, than being controlled by the CCP - HSBC has now had to endure having a CCP group installed internally to supervise operations...