Photo/Illutration A Chinese woman on a business trip to Tokyo makes a large purchase of cold medicines. (Go Takahashi)

Drug stores in Tokyo are being forced to limit purchases of cold medicines due to a rush on stocks by foreign, mostly Chinese, customers.

Cold remedies suddenly started flying off shelves earlier this month, staff at the stores said.

Drug stores in the vicinity of Ikebukuro Station said they are limiting the purchases due to dwindling stocks.

A particularly popular brand of cold medicine is Pabron Gold A produced by Taisho Pharmaceutical Co. Some drug stores limit purchases to one box per customer and only display sample boxes on shelves. Customers are required to take the empty box to the register to make a purchase.

A woman from China’s Anhui province visiting Japan for business reasons went on a medicinal shopping spree after accessing Chinese social media to determine what was popular in her home country. While most of the products she bought had limits of two boxes, she still paid about 20,000 yen ($150) for around a dozen boxes, including cold medicine for children as well as painkillers.

She explained that she frequented drug stores when she had free time and made purchases for relatives and friends who had asked her to buy the medicine when in Japan.

With reports China is bracing for another tsunami-level wave of COVID-19 cases, many drug stores there have simply run out of stocks of cold medicines believed to help alleviate novel coronavirus symptoms.

As of Dec. 23, the Anhui woman said she had bought between 30 and 40 boxes of medicine so far.

She noted that while the situation in her hometown had settled down somewhat, panic erupted after drug stores ran out of medicine. A relaxation of measures to deal with COVID-19 led to a sharp increase in new cases.

“I think half of my suitcase will be taken up by medicine when I return to China,” she said.

Chinese customers are not the only ones stockpiling on cold medicine, Japanese are also raiding shelves.

Still, a drug store chain official said there had been a noticeable increase from December of customers believed to be from China who scooped up as many boxes of cold medicine as they could. That led to a limit of two boxes per customer from mid-December.

Another drug store chain with a similar limit said some branches ran out of products before the restrictions were put in place, citing instances of customers buying as many as 20 boxes at a time.

“We are considering raising prices to avert a situation where people in need won’t be able to buy the medicine,” one official explained.

An official with Taisho Pharmaceutical explained that Chinese social media sites praised the effectiveness of Pabron cold medicine in alleviating symptoms of COVID-19.

The company plans to change its production structure to meet the surge in demand for the brand.

(This article was written by Go Takahashi and Takeshi Suezaki.)

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