Dancing fox, anime girl fuel ex-banker's dream of Tokyo broadway

Washington

TO FUEL Tokyo's flagging tourist boom, Japan is tackling visitors' long-held complaints. Better English signage. Broader credit card use. WiFi.

Now a veteran of Merrill Lynch & Co wants to keep the 20 million annual visitors to Japan amused. His vision: Tokyo's own pop-infused, multi-colour, anime-eyed Broadway. "The night-time entertainment market in this country is wide open," says Hidemi Fukuhara, who as the former deputy president of Merrill Lynch in Tokyo headed a painful cost-cutting and job-slashing drive before departing in 2003. His brainchild, Sakura - Japan in the Box, is a stage show that fuses Cirque de Soleil acrobatics with saucer-eyed anime, idol-group pop songs and a magical dancing fox, and is targeting a piece of the 3.48 trillion yen (S$44 billion) spent each year by tourists.