When Tata, one of India's largest business groups, was looking to finance its landmark takeover of UK's Jaguar and Land Rover, it tapped a source it had seldom tapped before – it went to Japan and raised Y80bn ($740m) via a syndicated loan to part-finance the deal.

While Japan has for years been the happy hunting ground for western companies in search of low-cost capital, in the past year or so, companies across the booming economies of Asia and the Middle East are traversing the same route in their quest for capital in a liquidity-starved world.

Annual capital flows from Japan into Standard Chartered's six largest markets in Asia and the Middle East (Greater China, India, Korea, Singapore, the UAE and Malaysia) alone surged to $66bn in 2007 from $25bn in 2005.