Thousand-dollar rice cookers and toilet seats that know when you enter the room.
That’s what visitors to Japan from China have been buying at Laox Co., sending the Tokyo-based duty-free store chain to its first profit in 14 years and its shares up 1,400 percent through yesterday from a low in 2012. The stock gained 1.5 percent today to close at the highest since July 2009.
The Chinese-owned company has had an unlikely ally: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. While the Abe administration has sparred with its communist counterpart over ownership of the Senkaku Islands, Japan has also been courting its neighbor's citizens by relaxing visa rules.