This picture taken on December 2, 2012 shows Chinese tourists disembarking from a bus at the Ginza shopping district in Tokyo. Photo: AFP / Toshifumi Kitamura
"Until September, we had many Chinese customers and you could hear Chinese
spoken in our shop," said Mika Nakatsugawa, who trains clerks at cosmetic firm Shiseido's flagship outlet in Ginza, the Japanese capital's equivalent of Fifth Avenue in New York.
"Then they suddenly stopped coming. This month, some customers are coming back, but it's very slow and nothing like before."
The number of Chinese tourists -- one of Japan's biggest visitor groups behind South Koreans and Taiwanese -- plunged 33 percent in October from a year ago to 71,000 visitors, according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.
And the figure from last year was already weak with tourism still reeling from the March quake-tsunami disaster and subsequent atomic crisis, which sparked a dive in overall visitor numbers.
As airlines cancelled thousands of flights between Japan and China when the long-standing diplomatic row flared in September, Ginza's upscale retailers soon found that once-jammed Chinese tour buses were nowhere to be seen.
To make matters worse, Chinese tourists, on average, spend over $2,100 during their visits to Japan, on top of their airfare, among the highest of any nationality, according to Japan Tourism Agency data.
The flare-up in the decades-long row over an East China Sea island chain sparked a consumer boycott of Japanese products in China and huge demonstrations, prompting Japanese firms operating there to temporarily close stores and factories fearing mob violence.
Tokyo's nationalisation in September of the disputed islands -- located in rich fishing grounds and believed to sit atop vast mineral reserves -- came at a particularly bad time.
Ginza retailers were hoping for hordes of shoppers during a week-long Chinese holiday in October but the spat kept them away.
"Shops in Ginza have been hugely damaged by the diplomatic fight, as everyone had been preparing for shopping sprees," said Nakatsugawa at Shiseido.