SENDAI--The tour groups that used to crowd the Sasakama-kan souvenir store in this quake-hit city are nowhere to be seen, according to manager Yoshihiko Watanabe, but sales are surprisingly healthy in their absence.
SENDAI--The tour groups that used to crowd the Sasakama-kan souvenir store in this quake-hit city are nowhere to be seen, according to manager Yoshihiko Watanabe, but sales are surprisingly healthy in their absence.
“We used to have package tourists coming in more than 10 buses each day,” Watanabe said. “There have been none this year. But we have individual customers who say they want to be of help to Tohoku’s reconstruction.”
On Oct. 13, one such customer, a woman from Yamagata Prefecture, ordered “sasakama,” a bamboo-leaf shaped fish cake for which the shop’s operating company Kanezaki Co. is well-known.
“Three packs of sasakama,” the woman said, “How long will this keep?”
There has been a steady flow of individual customers in recent months. The company’s production lines were suspended for two weeks after the March 11 quake damaged its buildings and disrupted supplies of raw materials, and ran at reduced capacity for months after the catastrophe.
But, despite the disruption, sales between April and August were only 2.9 percent lower than the same period in 2010, according to an interim consolidated settlement released on Oct. 12. Electricity savings and fewer cheap offers for customers actually increased the operational profit by a factor of 9 compared with the previous year.
Watanabe says supportive local residents and an influx of relief workers from across the country have been largely to thank for maintaining the business.
The Sendai store is not alone. York Benimaru, a major Tohoku retailer based in Koriyama, Fukushima Prefecture, had forecast an 88.7 percent drop in operational profits to 1 billion yen ($12.8 million) in fiscal 2011, but its figures in August actually reported an operational profit of 9.6 billion yen.
It attributes the turnaround to increases in purchases of clothes and daily commodities by disaster survivors, tourists and relief volunteers.
Construction of new houses in the disaster areas and public projects are also boosting the local economy, while replacement of the more than 200,000 cars lost or damaged by the tsunami is also stoking demand.
Yakuodo Co., a drug store in Yahaba, Iwate Prefecture, and Fukushima-based home center Daiyu Eight Co. reported year-on-year increases in sales in August.
Sales at supermarkets in the region in August increased 3.7 percent year on year, compared with a 2.9 percent drop in the national average.
Aeon Co. said Tohoku was likely to be one of its stronger performing regions, and Daiei Inc. said its Sendai outlet had shown an increase in profits of more than 10 percent over 2010. An initial plan by Ito Yokado stores to close outlets in the Tohoku region has been abandoned.
(This article was written by Koji Nishimura and Tokuhiko Saito.)