Japan’s latest mental agility puzzle involves looking around this most glittering and delicious of consumer societies, fumbling with the anaemic yen in your pocket and calculating how ludicrously cheap the whole place will feel to a foreign visitor.Morning television show hosts, seasoned economists, TikTok influencers; limited-edition Puma trainers, Samurai Mac burgers, iPhone 14s. Anyone can play, and everything looks (to a holder of dollars buying yen at a 24-year low) like an absolute bargain.

Everything, it seems, but the ever-cheap Japanese stock market.

Later this week, after two-and-a-half years with almost no tourists, the game will switch from theory to practice. Japan is restoring the long-suspended visa waiver for tourists and business visitors and lifting the restrictions on airport arrivals. What it hopes will be free-spending hordes will be allowed back into a country that had built a hospitality industry scaled for 40mn annual guests (and a one-off slew of Olympic spectators) whom Covid ensured never showed.