At about 10 pm at a drugstore in Tokyo's wealthy Akihabara district, two Japanese cashiers surnamed Nakayama and Mori were busy closing out their cash registers along with their Chinese colleague, a woman surnamed Xie.

 

Drugstores selling Japanese-made medicines and cosmetics are employing more Chinese at a time when the number of visits to Japan by Chinese travellers and shoppers has almost doubled compared with last year.

 

Xie was surrounded by a group of travellers from Shanghai seeking advice. They decided quickly to buy medicines to combat fever, pain and high blood pressure.

 

One of the visiting shoppers said, "This medicine will last me for quite a long time," adding that the shoppers had just bought five Japanese-made blood pressure monitors at a nearby electronics mall.

 

Despite relations between China and Japan being strained by historical and territorial issues, the Japan National Tourism Organization says there were more than 1.32 million arrivals from the Chinese mainland in the first four months of this year. This is a year-on-year increase of 98.9 percent, and the Chinese mainland was the largest source of visitors.

 

South Korea and China's Taiwan took second and third places in the same period with more than 1.2 million and 1.1 million arrivals - year-on-year growth of 43.5 percent and 29.6 percent, according to the figures released on May 20.

 

In the recent cherry blossom season in Japan, foreign visitors flocked to the country. Reports said more than 90 percent of hotel rooms in downtown Tokyo were booked, and there was a shortage of visa stickers at some Japanese diplomatic missions in China. 

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