The sound of Mandarin-speaking tourists and cash tills ringing have become rare in Tokyo’s upmarket Ginza District since a flare-up in a territorial row between China and Japan, Japanese retailers say.
“Until September, we had many Chinese customers and you could hear Chinese spoken in our shop,” said Mika Nakatsugawa, who trains clerks at cosmetic firm Shiseido’s flagship outlet in Ginza, the Japanese capital’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue in New York.
“Then they suddenly stopped coming. This month, some customers are coming back, but it’s very slow and nothing like before,” Nakatsugawa said.
The number of Chinese tourists — one of Japan’s biggest visitor groups behind South Koreans and Taiwanese — plunged 33 percent in October from a year ago to 71,000 visitors, the Japan National Tourism Organization said.
The figure from last year was already weak, with tourism still reeling from the quake-tsunami disaster in March last year and the subsequent atomic crisis, which sparked a dive in overall visitor numbers.
As airlines canceled thousands of flights between Japan and China when the long-standing diplomatic row was reignited in September, Ginza’s upscale retailers soon found that the once-jammed Chinese tour buses were nowhere to be seen.
To make matters worse, Chinese tourists spend more than US$2,100 on average during their visits to Japan, among the highest of any nationality, Japan Tourism Agency data show.
The flare-up in the decades-long row over the Diaoyutais (釣魚台) — an East China Sea island chain also contested by Taiwan and called the Senkakus in Japan — sparked a consumer boycott of Japanese products in China and huge demonstrations, prompting Japanese firms operating there to temporarily close stores and factories, fearing mob violence.
Tokyo’s nationalization in September of three of the islands came at a particularly bad time.
Ginza retailers were hoping for hordes of shoppers during a week-long Chinese holiday in October, but the spat kept them away.
“Shops in Ginza have been hugely damaged by the diplomatic fight, as everyone had been preparing for shopping sprees,” Nakatsugawa said. “I want the politicians to know the economic impact of this has been big.”
The damage has rippled across Japan’s economy and damaged its more than US$340 billion annual trade relationship with Beijing.
Japan’s automakers and electronics firms have seen their China sales take a huge hit, with the country’s two biggest airlines — Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways — reporting a steep dive in sales.
Japan’s goal to boost tourist numbers to a record 9 million this year has suddenly become a “very hard” target, Japan Tourism Agency head Norifumi Ide said.
Not far from the Shiseido outlet, luggage store manager Koichi Miwa echoed the grim statistics, saying a big part of his customer base just “disappeared.”
“The number of Chinese customers literally turned to zero at one point,” Miwa said.
However, the hollowing out of Ginza may not just be a matter of Chinese consumers taking out their anger on Japan by staying at home.
Miwa suspects many Chinese feared tit-for-tat violence after Japanese in China were attacked and their businesses vandalized.
“Once Chinese people start coming here again, they will be relieved to find out they are not treated as badly as Japanese people in China have been,” Miwa said.
END OF AN ERA: The vote brings the curtain down on 20 years of socialist rule, which began in 2005 when Evo Morales, an indigenous coca farmer, was elected president A center-right senator and a right-wing former president are to advance to a run-off for Bolivia’s presidency after the first round of elections on Sunday, marking the end of two decades of leftist rule, preliminary official results showed. Bolivian Senator Rodrigo Paz was the surprise front-runner, with 32.15 percent of the vote cast in an election dominated by a deep economic crisis, results published by the electoral commission showed. He was followed by former Bolivian president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga in second with 26.87 percent, according to results based on 92 percent of votes cast. Millionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina, who had been tipped
ELECTION DISTRACTION? When attention shifted away from the fight against the militants to politics, losses and setbacks in the battlefield increased, an analyst said Recent clashes in Somalia’s semi-autonomous Jubaland region are alarming experts, exposing cracks in the country’s federal system and creating an opening for militant group al-Shabaab to gain ground. Following years of conflict, Somalia is a loose federation of five semi-autonomous member states — Puntland, Jubaland, Galmudug, Hirshabelle and South West — that maintain often fractious relations with the central government in the capital, Mogadishu. However, ahead of elections next year, Somalia has sought to assert control over its member states, which security analysts said has created gaps for al-Shabaab infiltration. Last week, two Somalian soldiers were killed in clashes between pro-government forces and
Ten cheetah cubs held in captivity since birth and destined for international wildlife trade markets have been rescued in Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia. They were all in stable condition despite all of them having been undernourished and limping due to being tied in captivity for months, said Laurie Marker, founder of the Cheetah Conservation Fund, which is caring for the cubs. One eight-month-old cub was unable to walk after been tied up for six months, while a five-month-old was “very malnourished [a bag of bones], with sores all over her body and full of botfly maggots which are under the
BRUSHED OFF: An ambassador to Australia previously said that Beijing does not see a reason to apologize for its naval exercises and military maneuvers in international areas China set off alarm bells in New Zealand when it dispatched powerful warships on unprecedented missions in the South Pacific without explanation, military documents showed. Beijing has spent years expanding its reach in the southern Pacific Ocean, courting island nations with new hospitals, freshly paved roads and generous offers of climate aid. However, these diplomatic efforts have increasingly been accompanied by more overt displays of military power. Three Chinese warships sailed the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand in February, the first time such a task group had been sighted in those waters. “We have never seen vessels with this capability