Tim Cook is touring Apple Stores and meeting users in Japan

By William Gallagher

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been in Japan for two days, and has made a series of visits to developers, Apple Stores, educational establishments, and supplier factories.

Tim Cook visiting Tokyo's Apple Ginza,the first Apple Store opened outside the US (Source: Twitter)

Tim Cook

is in Tokyo, Japan, for a series of meetings that has seen him visiting, and tweeting about, local app developers, suppliers -- and restaurants.

"Hello Tokyo!" he tweeted as he arrived on December 8. "It's wonderful to be back in Japan!"

Tokyo is 17 hours ahead of Cupertino, California, so Cook arrived mid-afternoon local time, and within two hours, he was at Apple Store Omotesando to meet local developers.

Cook spent his first evening in Tokyo with Japanese musician and actor Gen Hoshino at an Izakaya, a type of bar restaurant that serves small meals.

Midmorning on December 9, Tim Cook moved on to see how Apple products are being used at the Keio University School of Medicine. This is a 100-year-old medical school which in 2015 was the first in Japan to use iPhone-aided clinical research.

He then went quickly on to see the developers of TimeTree, an app for sharing calendars across families and friends.

Cook reports that the app has millions of users worldwide -- and singled out how it uses Sign in With Apple.

Cook then went on to meet what appears to be a gathering of all local Apple employees, to whom he tweeted thanks in Japanese.

According to his tweets, Cook next visited Apple Store Marunouchi in east Tokyo, where he took part in a Today at Apple session. He joined children of the Rikkyo Primary School, from Tokyo's Ikebukuro district.

His tweet about them was posted shortly before the store's official closing time mid-evening, so it's most likely that the primary school session was some hours before. Neither Cook nor Apple have commented on his itinerary for the trip.

Cook's next reported stop was on the morning of December 10, when he visited the factories of Seiko Advance. This an Apple supplier that works on the colors of the iPhone.

At lunch time, Cook met with film director Shinji Higuchi at the TOHO production company to see how he's filming on iPhone.

Shortly afterwards, he met with MistWalker Corp, a games developer, where he was shown a preview of its forthcoming Fantasian title. The company says the game is a mixture of "handcrafted dioramaos [and] 3D CGI," and that it will be an Apple Arcade exclusive.

For what may be his last stop in Japan, Cook tweeted about visiting Apple Ginza, the very first Apple Store to be opened outside the United States. There are now nine Apple Stores in Japan, but the Ginza one was opened on November 30, 2003, just over two years from the first US site.

In its 16 years, the Ginza store has only made news for that opening and for a day in 2015 when it was forced to close over a bomb threat.

Once again, Cook or his team wrote part of the tweet in Japanese, this time saying "See you soon!"