Hints and tips:
...The average age in the country was 37.2, and Japan was in a boom of karaoke parlours, bowling alleys, racecourses and resort hotels. The best golf courses were charging $2.6mn for membership....
...(Wall Street Journal) Former Orpea boss in spotlight over share sale as care scandal deepens (FT) Santander pledges to raise shareholder payouts as profits recover (FT) Tokyo prosecutors probe SMBC Nikko...
...the private equity and hedge fund business has grown to about $9bn under management, boasting ties with blue-chip advisers and based at one of London’s swankiest addresses, just yards from The Dorchester hotel...
...John Vail, chief global strategist at Nikko Asset Management, said the index pointed to a robust outlook....
...Japanese companies were less exuberant than their US counterparts and more in line with European peers, said John Vail, chief global strategist at Nikko Asset Management....
...“When I look around hotels, a lot of space is available....
...In Palau, parliamentary speaker Sabino Anastacio, who is involved in a hotel project with Chinese partners, has become an advocate of switching diplomatic ties from Taiwan to China....
...At 29, he took over the kitchen of Paris’s Concorde Lafayette hotel before moving to run the restaurant at Hotel Nikko, where he gained his first two Michelin stars....
...Assume the same rate of growth in the last two months of the year, says Jonathan Allum of SMBC Nikko, and Japan will have welcomed 19.8m money spending foreigners this year alone....
...Lotte has opened shops in Jakarta, Singapore, Guam and Osaka....
...Anbang Insurance Group, the Chinese group that acquired New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, has been buying Dutch and Belgian insurance and banking assets....
...Meanwhile, broad expectations of rising prices are beginning to take hold, he says, noting some signs of excess – gold flakes on ice-cream at one Tokyo hotel restaurant and tubs of expensive face cream flying...
...There are also great places to visit nearby, such as Mount Takao and the three wise monkeys at the Toshogu shrine in Nikko....
...In the Seibu case, however, Cerberus has been a significant investor since early 2006 after leading a $1.4bn bailout of the company with Nikko Principal Investments, and it plans to remain a large investor...
...The hotels each night range from the warm and homely to the downright luxurious....
...Lee Myung-bak, South Korea’s president, has called on his people to boost the domestic economy by taking their holidays at home rather than jetting off to traditional favourites like Cebu, Guam and Hawaii...
...On its eastern reaches, well beyond the strip of five-star hotels, two frigates are docked at a new naval base....
...As of last March it operated 58 hotels under the Nikko and JAL City brands, including 17 outside Japan....
...Tokyo – where Mr Vail, chief global strategist at Nikko Asset Management, has spent eight years – is a place of wanton cultural mixing and near-infinite choice....
...Like an increasing number of hotels and tourist attractions throughout Japan, Kinugawa Grand Hotel Yumenotoki, in the historic Nikko national park, is a happy beneficiary of a surge in tourism....
...Unlike in Guam, he has time to enjoy the trappings of wealth even as he runs a number of businesses in Angeles and nearby towns. “I like it here....
...The Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, GIC, recently acquired the Westin Hotel in Tokyo and Dubai International Capital has a stated goal to invest in Japan....
...Samsung Engineering fell 3.9 per cent to Won90,000 and Hotel Shilla fell 7.4 per cent to Won26,850....
...He stayed at the four-star Rusutsu Resort Hotel and three hotels in Niseko: the Niseko Alpen, the Prince Hotel Higashiyama and the Nikko An’nupuri....
...Not doing so could mean a lot of looking like bemused hotel guests doing their best to ignore the two naked Kazakhs who just got in the lift. shawn.donnan@ft.com...
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