Now the epidemic has had a similar impact. Although restaurants in the city were allowed to stay open throughout the outbreak, most took a serious hit as people stayed at home and avoided public areas.

“Most of my guests are Japanese executives who host their clients in my restaurant. Almost all of those events are cancelled,” he said.

Even so, Taniguchi, a 50-year-old native of Shiga county, said he will not give up on his restaurant, located on the first floor of an obscure residential building in the Hongqiao area, joking that “my customers and staff are more important than my wife and kids.”

Shanghai has one of the world’s largest populations of Japanese expatriates, with more than 40,000 living there as of October 2018, according to the Japanese foreign ministry.

Nishihara Keisuke, who plays the sanshin, a traditional three-stringed instrument from Okinawa, said the epidemic had forced him to cancel all the gigs he had booked in February and March.

Nishihara, 32, said he has stayed put China since the beginning of January after returning from a trip home to celebrate New Year.

He says he has not considered leaving China because he has a day job at an electrics company and a Chinese girlfriend.

“For some weeks, there were no masks available at the market. It’s the most worrying thing for me,” said Nishihara.

“I didn’t feel scared when there was a Sars [severe acute respiratory syndrome] outbreak in China in 2003 and I believe China has experience in dealing with this kind of crisis,” he added. “I think if everyone follows the health protocols, it should be no problem.”

Jason Zeng, an assistant to the general manager of a major Japanese airline’s office in Shanghai, said his company had been dealing with a lot of requests for refunds.

“In the past our company operated seven lines between Shanghai and Japan every day. In the past two months, our flights have been cut dramatically and our planes only fly [between Shanghai and Japan] every Monday, Wednesday and Friday,” he said.

His boss, who is in charge of the mainland China business usually travels frequently to Beijing and Guangzhou, but has had to stay in Shanghai in recent weeks because these cities require new arrivals to spend 14 days in quarantine.

Japanese businessmen Ou Funki, 50, said many of his compatriots had yet to return to the city after returning home during Lunar New Year, including two mangers at the company, a textile manufacturer with branches in Shanghai, Suzhou and Japan, have yet to return to China.

“But my company hasn’t decided to send my colleagues back to Shanghai due to Shanghai’s [previous] entry policy that all travellers from Japan must be isolated for 14 days and my company regarded it as inconvenient.”

China has since announced that it will ban almost all foreign visitors from entering the country.

Ou said that over the past two months, he had stopped going to restaurants for lunch and instead had food delivered for him to eat in the office.

“I still don’t feel assured, so I go to restaurants very occasionally these days,” he said. “Like a lot of Japanese living alone in Shanghai and living alone, I didn’t cook for myself. But now we have to and it’s really troublesome.”

When he was preparing to return to Shanghai at the beginning of last month after spending a 10-day holiday in Japan, many of his friends asked him, “Do you really need to go back to China? It is so dangerous there.”

Ou said although he shared their concern over the epidemic, he thought would be fine as long as he paid attention to hygiene and took precautions such as wearing masks and not going outside.

He added: “China has got the epidemic under control, but the situation in Japan is more serious.”