Surinjana Tiwari

Hi there.

This week is the Chinese Lunar New Year holidays and obviously Japan and China are major trading partners, even though they often have frosty relations diplomatically.

But these numbers come from January and it shows that Japan's exports were boosted by the strong demand all around Asia for its products.

And this is really interesting because it actually follows separate data this week that showed that the Japanese economy has only just limped back to growth in the fourth quarter of last year, significantly missing market forecasts because of weaker exports and capital expenditure as well.

Now, in these figures, exports to China actually jumped 32%, which is why experts and economists are saying that this is because of the demand ahead of the Lunar New Year.

But exports bound for the European Union were also up by 30%, so a real front-loading.

That's right.

And that's why it's so interesting that the exports are actually up because Japan and China are in the middle of one of those tensions between the two countries.

And that's largely over comments that the Japanese prime minister had made about Taiwan.

And China, of course, was upset by that.

And so what we're seeing is a lot of group tours being stopped worldwide.

from China into Japan.

And as you mentioned, Japan's tourist body has said that in January, they're seeing a slump of 60.7% of Chinese visitors going to Japan.

Now, there are many areas where China and Japan trade on.

But of course, tourism is a huge area for both countries, both Chinese tourists going into Japan

Japanese tourists also going into China.

But this just shows, you know, even though those exports are good, there are other areas of the trading relationship that there are still quite a lot of trade tensions going on where exporters push out those products before a certain period of time.

That's interesting because Japan's exports were hit by the US tariffs before the two countries did agree on that trade deal.

And that trade deal included a colossal $550 billion pledge by Japan to invest in the US.

The problem was we weren't sure of the details and I don't think they knew either.