中國掃貨團 爲日本港口城市注入活力
With his departure time looming and a guide fretting to get back to the ship, Liang Nan has been left in a corner of the Canal City shopping mall, in Japan’s southern port of Fukuoka, hunched over a mobile phone.
隨着離開的時間漸漸逼近，導遊開始催促遊客回到船上。樑楠（音）一直在福岡運河城購物中心的角落裏看着手機。福岡位於日本南部，是一座港口城市。
He has three tasks to perform: guard a huge, growing mountain of shopping, check with nagging relatives back home that everything they asked for has been bought, and discover online just how badly his wife’s A shares are doing.
樑楠肩負三項任務：守護一座堆得跟座山似的商品——而且越堆越高；跟老家那羣嘮叨的親戚一件一件覈對他們要帶的商品；以及上網看他老婆的A股到底跌了多少。
The rest of Mr Liang’s party — wife, toddler, mother and mother-in-law — are still roaring around the Fukuoka branch of Laox in a state of retail fervour. The store, once known throughout Japan as an electronics specialist, has broadened its offerings here to please its newest customers: Chinese, arriving on cruise ships that bring in as many as 4,900 at a time, with estimated average spending of Y90,000 ($750) each and with just a few hours to shop before they set sail back to Tianjin or Shanghai.
樑楠的妻子、孩子、母親和岳母還在Laox免稅店福岡分店裏興致勃勃地逛着，他們正沉浸在購物狂熱中。Laox是全日本知名電器商店，如今福岡分店增加了商品種類，以迎合新的消費者——中國人。他們乘遊船而來，一次最多達4900人，人均消費約爲9萬日元（約合750美元），而且購物僅幾個小時後就要乘船返回天津或上海。
In 2014, 91 cruise ships travelled from China to Fukuoka. This year the port is expecting nearly three times that number. Costa, Royal Caribbean and others are bolstering their Asian fleets to make all this happen.
2014年，中國到福岡的郵輪抵港次數達到91次。今年這個數字預計將增長近兩倍。“歌詩達”(Costa)，“皇家加勒比”(Royal Caribbean)及其他郵輪公司公司正在擴充亞洲地區船隻數量，以滿足這一增長。
The Chinese coming here used to be the rich, says Miwa Mochizuki, a spokeswoman for the Canal City mall. Now it is the middle class. Coming by sea makes sense for China’s quality-seeking shoppers, she adds, because the only limit on baggage is what you can cram into your cabin. The great benefit of the cruise ships, says Fukuoka’s mayor, Takashima Soichiro, is that they can deliver the lucrative “shopping bomb” exploding in his city.
運河城購物中心發言人望月美和(Miwa Mochizuki)表示，過去來這兒購物的中國人通常是有錢人，而今成了中產階層。她說，對於追求品質的中國購物者而言，坐船更明智些，因爲乘船對行李的唯一限制就是看你能往自己的船艙裏塞多少東西。福岡市長高島宗一郎(Takashima Soichiro)表示，這些郵輪的一大好處，就是可以運來大批“購物狂”，爲他的城市帶來鉅額利益。
“A third of these are for us, the rest is for family in Hebei,” says Mr Liang, sorting through a collection of bags that contain six rice cookers, four floor-cleaning robots, two air purifiers, an blood-pressure monitor, a stack of metallic vacuum flasks, a dozen electric toothbrushes and two face massagers (for men).
樑楠一邊整理一大堆購物袋一邊說：“這裏面有三分之一是我們家的，其他全是給河北親戚帶的。”他們買了6個電飯煲，4個掃地機器人，2個空氣淨化器，1個血壓計，一堆真空金屬保溫杯，十幾把電動牙刷和兩個男性臉部按摩器。
“I think she [my wife] has gone crazy,” he says. “But I don’t mind. If her shares keep falling, we may not come back to Japan for a while.”
樑楠說：“我覺得她（他妻子）已經買瘋了。但是我不介意。如果她的股票繼續下跌，我們可能有段時間不會來日本了。”
Electronics are still the main feature of Laox, say sales staff from China’s Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, but customers leave with endless bags of nappies, nail-clippers, health supplements, diet shakes, tights, thermometers, wrinkle-reducing face packs and silicone rice spoons — goods whose quality are thought guaranteed simply because they are made in Japan.
Laox有來自中國福建和浙江的銷售人員，據他們介紹該店仍主要銷售電器，但顧客們無止境地購買着尿布、指甲刀、保健品、減肥代餐奶昔、絲襪、溫度計、除皺霜以及硅膠飯勺。中國消費者認爲這些商品的質量是有保證的，因爲它們是“日本製造”。
On the floors below Laox, Chinese visitors blast through local clothes retailers and luxury goods outlets where loudspeakers bellow last-minute offers in Mandarin before the coaches leave for the ship. In the pharmacy Matsumoto Kiyoshi, where competing Japanese brands of rose-scented eyedrops are in hot demand, a Shanghai woman being tugged at the sleeve by her guide demands shop staff tell her which of three brands of Japanese condoms works best.
在Laox下面幾層，中國遊客大潮席捲着服裝店、奢侈品店。揚聲器裏傳來普通話的大聲呼喊，通知遊客們發往遊船的旅遊大巴馬上出發。在松本清(Matsumoto Kiyoshi)藥房，各個日本品牌的玫瑰味眼藥水大受歡迎。一名導遊拽着一個上海女人的衣袖，後者讓店員告訴她三種日本避孕套品牌中哪一種最好用。
The impact of all this on Fukuoka — a city whose 1.5m population will this year be passed by the total number of foreign visitors — has been transformational. Japan’s wider inbound tourism boom has provided Shinzo Abe’s economic growth story with a timely boost: Nomura just raised its forecasts for total visitor numbers to 17.44m for 2015.
這一切給福岡帶來了巨大的影響。這座城市有150萬居民，今年外國遊客總人數將會超過居民人數。日本整體的入境旅遊熱潮爲安倍晉三(Shinzo Abe)的經濟增長故事及時注入了一劑強心針，野村證券(Nomura)剛剛將2015年赴日遊總人數預測上調到1744萬人。
But in Fukuoka, whose tax revenues and population are the fastest-rising in Japan as a result of the tourists, the effect is more noticeable. The city authorities are rushing to find empty spots for coach parking before the city’s roads grind to a halt. The port last week opened a new cruise terminal that quadruples immigration processing capacity.
但是福岡受到的影響比一些城市明顯，由於遊客大量增加，這裏的稅收收入和人口是全日本增長最快的。福岡市政府正忙着爲旅遊大巴找到新的停車位，以免城市交通陷入停頓。上週福岡港口開放了一個新的郵輪碼頭，將入境處理能力提高了3倍。
Mr Takashima travelled last week to Tokyo to ask the government for a budget to extend the jetty by 100 metres to accommodate the largest cruise ships in the world. Fukuoka, he says, is the first city in Japan to undergo a change where Japanese feel like a minority.
高島宗一郎上週前往東京要求政府撥預算將該碼頭延長100米，以容納全世界最大的郵輪。他表示，在日本人民感到自己像少數民族的領域，福岡是日本第一座經歷改變的城市。
The Chinese cruise passengers in Canal City appear unbothered by unfolding events in the mainland markets — a holding of nerve that bullish analysts say will be true across China’s consumer economy. There is little evidence, says Julian Evans-Pritchard, China Economist at Capital Economics, that stock prices make a meaningful difference to consumption in China.
運河城商場裏的中國遊客似乎並沒受到近期中國內地市場波動的影響。樂觀的分析師表示，這種冷靜的態度可能真實地反映了中國整體消費經濟領域的狀況。凱投宏觀(Capital Economics)的中國經濟學家朱利安埃文斯-普里查德(Julian Evans-Pritchard)表示，沒有證據表明，股價對中國的消費狀況有切實的影響。
“Given that the stock market didn’t provide any noticeable boost to spending on the way up, there is no reason to expect it to be a drag on the way down,” he wrote in a note to clients yesterday.
他近日在一份給客戶的報告中寫到：“鑑於A股市場之前沒有爲消費提供任何明顯的提振，因此沒有理由認爲現在股市會拖累消費下降。”
But when Ms Liang finally emerges from Laox, the first question she asks her husband is about stocks. This was Monday — a session of relative calm amid the storm — and the problems seemed far away from Canal City. She asks for another two minutes, and heads back into the shop to buy a final box of deluxe Japanese stomach medicine.
但是當樑太太終於從Laox裏出來時，她向丈夫提出的第一個問題就是關於股票的。本週從週一走勢來看，A股進入了風暴中相對較平靜階段，而且股市的問題看來離運河城很遙遠。樑太太要求再給她兩分鐘，然後扭頭返回商店去買最後一箱高檔日本胃藥。
