Tokyo, Japan: Thieves bored a hole in the concrete wall of a jewellery shop on Tokyo's fashionable Ginza street and made off with watches worth about 300 million yen ($4.5 million), police said Sunday Jan 3.

About 200 luxury watches were stolen from glass showcases in the Tenshodo store in the bustling shopping district, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police Department said after the theft was discovered on Saturday Jan 2.

"The hole was bored into a concrete wall located in a narrow strip of land between Tenshodo and an adjacent building," he said.

A security camera caught two intruders moving around in the basement hours before employees came to work Saturday Jan 2 for the first day of new year sales at the shop, press reports said.

In February last year, another shop was robbed of 50 million yen worth of jewellery.