Invasion of the property snatchers

These Chinese come not as single spies, but in battalions;

Realty agencies in Beijing are organizing twice-monthly tours to Tokyo and Osaka, where 40 Chinese at a time come for three-day property-shopping trips, seeking safe places to invest their cash abroad. They’re being prompted by the yen’s decline to 22-year lows and excitement over the 2020 Tokyo Olympics driving up prices, as they did in Beijing in 2008. Property tours will soon start from Shanghai too.

Payback for the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937? Nope, this is just business, but prices for apartments in Tokyo are shooting up.

“The demand is like water exploding up from a well,” said Zhou Yinan, an Osaka-based agent at Chinese brokerage SouFun Holdings Ltd., who said his mainland buyers are about 20 percent more numerous than at this time last year. “The Chinese buyers had mainly been from Taiwan until last year, but that trend reversed since October as the yen weakened against the yuan.”

Which was a deliberate policy of the Japanese central bank to encourage economic growth by exiting two decades of deflation. Always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.