It is not every day that the opening of a shopping centre attracts a prime minister, but then Aeon Mall in Phnom Penh is not any old shopping centre. The Japanese-built complex is Cambodia's biggest, complete with an ice rink, television studio and bowling alley. For Hun Sen, the attending prime minister, it is a symbol of Japanese investment. Governments across South-East Asia are courting Japanese firms, and a torrent of yen is surging their way. Japanese investment in the region doubled to 2.3 trillion yen ($24 billion) last year, the latest in a series of sizeable increases (see chart). Part of that is mergers and acquisitions by Japanese firms, which have skimped on investment at home and so have a cash hoard of some ¥229 trillion. SoftBank, a Japanese mobile carrier, just led a $100m investment in Tokopedia, an Indonesian e-commerce firm; Toshiba, a conglomerate, has pledged to invest $1 billion in South-East Asia over five years. A year ago Mitsubishi ufj Financial Group, Japan's biggest bank, spent ¥536 billion to buy 72% of Thailand's Bank of Ayudhya. During the first wave of Japanese investment, in the 1980s and 1990s, money poured into Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, building up their automotive and electronics sectors. That flow largely ceased after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, when Japanese firms began to focus on China's vast, cheap labour force.
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