If you’re thinking of coming to Japan for a spring break, you’d better book fast. Occupancy rates for Tokyo and Osaka hotels are at 22-year highs as big-spending Asian tourists flood into the country. The impact is felt not just at the high end. Asakusa, a downtown area fast becoming Tokyo’s new hipster central, is now a destination for foreign backpackers.

Shinzo Abe, Japan’s UPDATEnewly re-elected prime minister, is sometimes criticised for exacerbating tensions with China. In reality Abenomics, his reflationary policy package, is responsible for supercharged growth in the most personal form of interaction between the two countries. In the past year alone, visitor arrivals from mainland China rose 80 per cent.

A dozen years ago, total visitor arrivals to Japan were running at around 4m a year. This year they will top 13m and the government’s target of 20m by 2020 looks easily attainable. The key driver is the yen, which has depreciated from Y78 to Y120 against the dollar in just two years. In real trade-weighted terms the yen is at its cheapest since the advent of floating currencies in the early 1970s.