NISSAN and Honda have turned around their sales in China in May after they fell due to the anti-Japanese boycott amid a dispute with China over the Diaoyu Islands.

Nissan, whose sales exposure to China is the biggest among all Japanese carmakers, sold 103,000 units last month with its Chinese joint ventures, a rise of 2 percent from a year earlier, according to the company yesterday.

Honda's China deliveries increased 4.6 percent from a year earlier to 54,564 vehicles, the automaker said.

For both automakers, the sales marked their first year-on-year monthly increase since January due to seasonal factors caused by the Spring Festival, a traditional slack time for car sales, which fell in January last year but February this year.

On Monday, Toyota also said its China sales staged a 0.3- percent recovery last month after they dropped 11 percent during the January-April period.