When Jingyan Hou made her first trip to Japan in 1997, the office worker from Beijing spent 200,000 yen ($1,700) during a week-long stay on accommodation, meals, transport and souvenirs.

On her second visit this year, she spent that much on just one Louis Vuitton handbag in Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district.

The increasing wealth of travelers like Hou, 45, underscores the opportunity for Japan to expand its tourism industry as China’s burgeoning middle class holidays abroad. The yen’s slump to a seven-year low against the dollar is also broadening the country’s appeal globally and bolstering the Abe administration’s effort to double visitors by the 2020 Olympics.

“There’s a lot of room to boost the number of foreign tourists coming to Japan with these growing economies in our neighborhood,” said Daiki Takahashi, an economist at Dai-ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. “They’ll have a big impact if the current trend continues.”

While Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s growth strategy faces opposition on many fronts ― from farmers fighting tariff cuts to corporations against outsiders on their boards ― fostering tourism has few detractors. It’s a bright spot in an economy that dropped into recession last quarter as Japanese consumers cut spending after the government increased the sales tax in April to help rein in the world’s biggest debt burden.

Foreign visitors spent 1.5 trillion yen in Japan in the nine months through September, more than all of 2013, according to the Japan Tourism Agency. Money from inbound tourists is on course to surpass spending by Japanese travelers overseas next year for the first time in at least three decades, said Takahashi.

Hou is doing her part, spending about 1 million yen over a week in October, half of it on shopping.

“I can get more stylish products in Japan than what I can find back in China,” she said, with shopping bags in each hand at the Mitsukoshi department store in Ginza.

Her purchases ranged from clothes and accessories to cosmetics and Pokemon figures.

Chinese tourists are now the world’s top spenders, forking out $129 billion in 2013, according to the World Tourism Organization. Some 2 million mainlanders visited Japan in the first 10 months of 2014, more than double the number from 2006, data from the Japan Tourism Agency shows.

They still have to take the top slot for visitors to Japan, remaining behind South Korea and Taiwan. In all, more than 10 million foreigners traveled to the third-largest economy last year. (Bloomberg)