Some of the products that Ken Kato sells though his funerary business come from China, while others have components that originate in China. But the Tokyo-based company owner has no intention of traveling there to meet his partners. It is, he said, simply too dangerous for a Japanese person.
"This is a small company, but when you are in business in Japan it is important to sometimes make the effort to meet partners face-to-face," Kato told DW. "I'm happy to do that if they can come to Japan, but I'm not going to China and I won't ask any of my staff to go either. It is not worth the risk."
Japanese have become increasingly reluctant to visit China after a series of incidents that have made the headlines here, paired with a gradual downward spiral in diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Beijing.
A Japanese employee of major drug manufacturer Astellas Pharma Inc. was detained in Beijing in March 2023 and only indicted on charges of espionage in August of this year. The man's company and the Japanese government have strongly protested his arrest, insisting he is not a spy.
On June 24, a Chinese man attacked a Japanese woman and her 3-year-old son with a knife as they waited to take a bus to the boy's Japanese school in the city of Suzhou, northwest of Shanghai. The woman and boy sustained minor injuries but the bus attendant, a Chinese woman named Hu Youping, was killed as she tried to intervene.
Less than three months later, a Japanese boy of 10 on his way to school was fatally attacked by a Chinese man with a knife in the city of Shenzhen, triggering........