Instead, they seem as determined as ever to buy foreign assets and are even branching out beyond the foreign currency "uridashi" bonds marketed at them and picking up investment trusts featuring foreign assets and even derivatives.

Global market turmoil and resulting strength in the yen has made their foreign currency assets worth less at home, but so far they appear undeterred.

"Many individual investors holding millions of yen took the recent rise in the yen as a great opportunity to snap up foreign bonds," said Tsutomu Soma, a senior manager at Okasan Securities.

Uridashis — especially in the New Zealand and Australian dollars — have been hugely popular in the past four years because of much higher yields than those offered within Japan.

Even though the Bank of Japan’s two rate rises since last summer have lifted overnight rates to a decade-high 0.50 percent, bank deposit yields are a meagre 0.2 percent.

That pales compared with coupons usually set above 5 percent for Aussie uridashis, above 6 percent for kiwi uridashis, and higher than 7 percent for South African rand uridashis.

Such yields mean that even if the yen rallies against high-yielding currencies, as happened in the past few weeks when carry trades were slashed, currency losses would have to be large and sustained to wipe out the returns involved.

In the latest carry trade shakeout over six days in late February and early March, the kiwi tumbled nearly 10 percent versus the yen and the Aussie slid as much as 8 percent. Since then, both have rebounded.