Good morning. Ethan here; Rob is off. Wednesday was a quieter day for markets, if you ignore a 13 basis point move in the 10-year yield (I am). Email me: ethan.wu@ft.com.

Someone is buying Japan

Japan is a hard place to invest in. Markets never fully recovered from the 1990s bust, and plenty of smart investors betting on a turnround got burnt. The forces keeping Japan from growth, and booming equity markets, are formidable and well-known: an ageing population, a rigid labour market, low female labour force participation and much else.

These are perfectly sensible reasons to avoid Japanese stocks, and many global investors have. Valuations are a cut below other markets’. But as Unhedged wrote earlier this month, the upshot of this consensus is that public markets have mostly looked past a recent burst of strength. Japanese firms are flush with cash and set to reap a $35bn tourism windfall later this year, just as the Bank of Japan may be inches from vanquishing deflation.