Why Do Asian Brands Pretend to be Japanese?

A working theory on how aspirational consumption in Asia created faux Japanese brands like MINISO, Oishi, and Japan Home Center.

Imagine this: you are a young Filipino child, traveling to a large Japanese city like Tokyo for the first time in your life. It’s the ‘90s, and people from the Philippines didn’t often travel overseas.

You are inside a large department store in Ginza accompanying your parents, who are holding several bags containing an afternoon’s worth of shopping. You turn and an aroma wafts from a restaurant nearby. You walk towards it. A young girl—probably around your age—is holding a tray with a bowl of ramen. You smell the noodles some more, and she exclaims, “Oishi!”

At first, you have no idea what she means: “Who, me?” you ask.

“No no… please come with me. Let’s eat together,” she replies in straight Japanese. She serves you a chopstick full of noodles and the taste is too good not to exclaim the word: “Oishi!”, which means “delicious” in Japanese.

I’d imagine that’s the narrative-arc that copywriters at Oishi, the brand advertising two flavors of instant noodles, had in mind when developing this 50-second segment:

Oishi is not a Japanese brand. It’s a snack company based in the Philippines with Filipino-Chinese owners. Headquarters are in Metro Manila, while their products—mostly snack versions of Filipino foods—are also distributed throughout China, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong.

Oishi’s faux Japanese-ness is a dead giveaway just a few seconds into the ad, which quickly reveals itself as a kitschy, exaggerated pastiche of Japanese culture: The opening sequence begins with a percussion-ized version of the intro to Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting” (a knock off of Chinese music, by the way); later on, a more-Filipino-than-Japanese-looking chef speaks in an exaggerated Japanese accent to introduce the Oishi products being advertised: “It’s the noodles: Kobe beef and chicken flavor!” he says, swapping his Rs for his Ls. It’s not very Japanese at all. But the average Filipino consumer in the 1990s was probably not a great judge for what authentically belonged to the culture.

My parents, both Gen Xers who spent adolescence and young adulthood in the ‘90s, tell me that for the country’s average consumer back then, the idea of Japan was unfamiliar, but aspirational. In Manila, there were sleek Teppanyaki restaurants with dark, opulent interiors, often frequented by the nouveau riche for birthday parties or special events. My maternal grandparents had worked in and frequented Japan, and mom was the envy of other kids in grade school classes for her Sanrio stickers and stationery. As the Philippines’ consumer middle class gradually expanded in the 1990s, a fair share of their leisurely spending went to products that were Japanese.

A similar phenomenon was brewing across Asia, where a growing middle class was stuck pondering what a “modern” lifestyle looked like (and how they could consume it). The “American dream”—the marketed idea of home ownership, college education, and conspicuous middle-class consumption—felt distant, or not directly translatable to Asian cultural contexts. It had been coined in the 1930s, nearly half a century earlier, and, as media sociologist Kōichi Iwabuchi notes, didn’t align much with the “Asian value thesis” of Lee Kuan-Yew of Singapore and Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia. So instead, these classes looked to the lone nation in the region that had already become a developed economy in the decades prior: Japan.

In the 1970s, Japan’s middle class had already formed—a decade before the Asian Miracle completed in the ‘80s, and two decades before Southeast Asian economies grew to maturity in the ‘90s. Japan as Asia’s North Star of economic development provided a unique vector to channel this aspirational middle class lifestyle, and transform it into a marketable, culturally familiar form for Asia’s new middle class.

In Recentering Globalization, Iwabuchi argues that in the 1990s, Japanese media companies exported the Japanese experience of Western culture to Asia, transforming Western lifestyles and middle class values into a format that was familiar to Asian consumers. It coincided with Japanese civilization theories of the decade that framed Japan as “a new guiding principle of global history” particularly for its “capacity for assimilating the best from other cultures and civilizations.” The result: Japan became a country whose lifestyles the region could aspire towards. Purchasing Japanese goods, seeking something akin to the modern Japanese lifestyle, as my dad recalls, “was an aspiration for sophistication.”

It would be later observed that middle-class lifestyles in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines were modeled after “American, Japanese, Chinese, [and/or] Islamic” influences, as Japanese think-tank RIETI notes. But this Japanese influence is particularly outsized: Chinese and Islamic culture have longer-standing histories in the region, while the United States boasts a larger apparatus for global cultural influence.

At the same time, “Language barriers were difficult to cross,” my mom says. Since few people in the Philippines had actually traveled to Japan, “it was aspirational because it wasn’t accessible to everyone.”

That’s one working theory on why brands like Oishi feigned Japanese-ness to the point of absolute parody. Adjacency to Japanese culture placed these products within the conception of the modern Asian lifestyle—one that middle-class Filipino consumers were still in the process of defining.

Oishi is not the only snack brand in the region that feigned some kind of Japanese branding. And it’s far from the most guilty one at that. In 1993, two men from Hong Kong, Lai Chan Yuk Hing and Lai Hin Tai, founded Aji Ichiban (stylized as “優の良品), a Japanese-style snack store chain. But most of its branches looked a lot more like Chinese medicine stores: the beef jerky, dried squid, shrimp crackers, and wasabi peas Aji Ichiban sold were neatly divided into plastic transparent boxes.

The region’s consumer electronics companies were also performing similar branding experiments. AKIRA, a Singaporean brand selling televisions, home appliances and audiovisual equipment, was launched in 1984, around the same time monocultural American blockbusters like Die Hard imagined Japanese tech companies taking over the world. Two decades later, in the Philippines, a lighting company named Akari launched. Both AKIRA and Akari are very Japanese in name alone—both companies’ logos use type faces that could be pulled from a science fiction anime poster; one of them even shares a name with the cult-classic manga, AKIRA.

Today, Asia is abundant in faux Japanese brands that feed the lingering desire for aspirational Japanese consumption. Yoyoso, Usupso, Yubiso are three different retail chains with Japanese monikers, but all operate and sell entirely in China. The largest housewares retail brand in Hong Kong is called “Japan Home Centre,” while Kojie San, a Filipino skincare company, sells Japanese-style skin-lightening serums across Southeast Asia.

But the most successful example of the fake Japanese brand is probably MINISO, the retail giant that sells cosmetics, cute plushies, and toys styled after Kuromi or One Piece. By design, the brand sounds and looks like a variety store alternative to UNIQLO. Both share fully-capitalized names that end with an “O,” and use red square logos with white text. MINISO, however, is headquartered in Guangzhou, founded by Chinese businessman Ye Guofu. Their global store count is nearly 7,000, but not a single one is in Japan.

In 2025, companies probably would not get away with blasting ads filled with clumsy imitations of Japanese culture. Many of Asia’s middle class know Japanese culture well enough already: traveling to Japan annually is already a large part of the lifestyles of consumers in the Asia-Pacific, as data from Expedia and Mastercard reveals.

But in speaking to some friends about this subject, many were surprised to find out that MINISO was a Chinese brand, and not a Japanese one. In 2022, MINISO publicly apologized for pretending to be Japanese, but by then the company was already a resounding success: it had IPO’d on both the New York and Hong Kong stock exchanges, and today, its market cap hovers around US$7.6 billion.

The rest of Asia knows Japan a lot better now than it did in the 90s. But aspirational consumption for all that is Japanese leaves many just as easily fooled.