The trend has already hit Sydney, Vancouver and the US. Now it's happening in Japan: busloads of real estate buyers from China coming in, buying up homes and pushing prices higher.

Realty agencies in Beijing are organising twice-monthly tours to Tokyo and Osaka, where 40 Chinese at a time come for three-day property-shopping trips, seeking safe places to invest their cash abroad. They're being prompted by the yen's decline to 22-year lows and excitement over the 2020 Tokyo Olympics driving up prices, as they did in Beijing in 2008. Property tours will soon start from Shanghai too.

Tokyo apartment prices have risen 11 per cent in two years, and are set to climb further as Chinese buyers are boosting demand. Credit:Akio Kon/Bloomberg

Partly as a result of nascent Chinese buying, Tokyo apartment prices have reached the highest levels since the early 1990s, up 11 per cent over two years, according to the Real Estate Economic Institute.

"The demand is like water exploding up from a well," said Zhou Yinan, an Osaka-based agent at Chinese brokerage SouFun Holdings, who said he had about 20 per cent more mainland buyers than at this time last year. "The Chinese buyers had mainly been from Taiwan until last year, but that trend reversed since October as the yen weakened against the yuan."