The Japan Idea

Japan's Capsule-Toy Machines Are Now a ¥196 Billion Business

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Japan has had gacha since 1965 (the idea is actually American: the first machines were imported from the US, where gumball machines also dispensed small toys). They are the coin-op machines where you turn a crank and a plastic capsule drops out with a small toy inside, usually one of five or six in a series, and you don't get to choose which. For decades they lived in rows outside supermarkets, aimed at kids holding their parents' spare change.

It is no longer a kids' business. According to the Japan Capsule Toy Association, the capsule-toy market (measured at manufacturer shipments) reached about ¥196 billion (about $1.2 billion) in fiscal 2025, up 39% in a single year from about ¥141 billion (about $899 million). In FY2022 it was about ¥72 billion (about $459 million). That's close to a tripling in three years, for a product where a turn typically costs a few hundred yen.

Much of the growth has come with a new retail format: the capsule-toy store, a shop that is nothing but walls of machines stacked two and three high. Bandai Namco alone ran 303 official Gashapon shops in Japan as of October 2026.

Teikoku Databank, the credit-research firm, looked at the whole toy-store sector and found the shift in plain view. Total toy-store sales reached ¥762 billion (about $4.9 billion) in FY2025, the highest in its data going back to FY2015 (the figures include estimates). But indexed to 2020, capsule-toy specialists had grown to 385 — nearly four times their size — while traditional toy stores stood at 151. Capsule and trading-card shops together delivered more than 70% of the sector's ¥60.2 billion (about $384 million) growth, and their share of the market went from 9.9% in 2015 to 27.5%.

The buyers are the surprise. In a 2025 survey of Japanese adults aged 20 to 69, 52.7% said they'd bought capsule toys, and interest was highest among people in their twenties and thirties. Industry coverage calls adult toy buyers kidults. Demand from overseas visitors adds to sales.

How did a kids' impulse buy become a ¥196 billion category with its own store chains? Part of the answer is a hole the pandemic left in Japanese retail.

The storefront arbitrage

When COVID emptied shopping malls and station-front retail, landlords were left with vacant units. Securities research on the sector, from Monex and Mitsubishi UFJ eSmart Securities, describes capsule-toy specialists spreading into exactly those vacated spaces.

In our reading, the appeal is easy to see. The machines do the selling, so there is no checkout line or fitting room, and the product line refreshes itself as manufacturers release new series. Machines still have to be restocked, maintained and cleaned, and we have not found published figures on how much labor a store actually needs, so treat the cost advantage as a hypothesis, not a measured fact.

Who actually makes money

The industry has three layers, and one of them is unusually concentrated.

Makers design and manufacture the toys: giants like Bandai and Takara Tomy Arts, plus a long tail of small specialists. The product is built around chance: a series typically has several variants, at prices such as 400 yen a turn, and you can't pick which one you get. Completing the set is the game.
Distributors move capsules and machines to locations. Here one company stands out: Happinet, a listed toy and entertainment wholesaler, was described by Monex Securities in 2024 as holding about 60% of capsule-toy distribution. That is a share of distribution, not of profits.
Operators run the stores. Happinet plays here too: its gashacoco chain had 154 stores at the end of March 2026 (121 company-run, 33 franchised), and it co-runs Bandai's official Gashapon shops with Bandai Namco Amusement. Aeon Fantasy, the Aeon group's amusement-center operator, ran 253 capsule-toy shops as of spring 2026 and has rolled out fully cashless machines.

Being in two layers is what makes Happinet worth watching: it earns from moving capsules to other people's machines and from running its own stores.

Why adults, why now

The products have changed too. In our reading, capsules now look less like children's toys and more like collectibles, and at a few hundred yen a turn they are an easy small luxury.

The catch

Store growth like this tends to overshoot. With chains opening stores this fast, cannibalization and saturation are the obvious risks, and, in our reading, character products live and die by whether a series becomes a hit. It's also worth remembering what the headline number measures: ¥196 billion is the manufacturers' shipment value, not retail sales and not anyone's profit.

Japan is now exporting the format. Bandai Namco, which says its Gashapon brand has about 57% of a capsule-toy market it puts at over ¥170 billion (about $1.1 billion), runs 184 official Gashapon shops outside Japan and wants 500. Where are they, where aren't they yet, and how did America make coin-operated toys work without coins? That's the members' edition.

Could This Work in the U.S.?

In 2023 a Japanese maker's executive called coins and security a problem in America. The American examples we found sit inside stores, and some run on tokens or cards. Would your local mall, grocery or bookstore be the next place to find a wall of them?

What's in the members' edition

The story above is complete on its own. When memberships open, members will also get, by email: gacha around the world

The scoreboard
France: a toy chain and a €5 capsule
Indonesia: in the malls, in a QR-payment country
Saudi Arabia: no official shop yet
Brazil: an official shop is coming
The U.S.: where vending supposedly wouldn't work
Notes: the rules, country by country

Sold separately, a premium brief: hosting capsule-toy machines in a US store

Three routes at a glance
Who to contact
What is public, and what you must ask
Worksheet: your own numbers
If you import yourself (route C)
An inquiry email you can send
Compare the replies
Questions to ask before you sign

Company links

Links to the companies' own sites and to stock quotes. We have no business relationship with them.

Gashapon (Bandai) — Official site
Gashapon USA — Official site
Takara Tomy Arts — Official site
GENDA — Official site
Bandai Namco Holdings (7832, Tokyo Stock Exchange) — Stock quote
Takara Tomy (7867, Tokyo Stock Exchange) — Stock quote
GENDA (9166, Tokyo Stock Exchange) — Stock quote
Happinet — Official site
Happinet (7552, Tokyo Stock Exchange) — Stock quote

Dollar figures are approximate: yen converted at ¥156.87 = $1 (Federal Reserve H.10 (noon buying rate in New York, via FRED DEXJPUS), 2026-10-23). This is the rate on that date, not the rate at the time of each figure.

Sources

G1. Capsule toy market grows 39% to about ¥196 billion (Japan Capsule Toy Association figures) — Real Sound Tech, 2026-05 G2. Gacha and capsule-toy related stocks — SBI Securities (investment research), 2026-07-22 G3. Capsule toy market nearly doubled from FY2022 — Gendai Business, 2025 G4. Toy-store industry survey (FY2025): record ¥762 billion, 70% of growth from gacha and trading-card shops — Teikoku Databank (press release via PR TIMES / Inside Games), 2026-10-01 G5. Toy-store market: gacha and trading-card specialists drive growth — Forbes Japan, 2026-10 G6. Happinet expands its 'gashacoco' capsule-toy shops — gamebiz, 2026-05-20 G7. Capsule-toy related stocks: Happinet, Aeon Fantasy, Takara Tomy — Monex Securities, 2024-05-16 G8. Deep-dive theme stocks: capsule toys — Mitsubishi UFJ eSmart Securities (kabu.com), 2026-09 G9. Survey on capsule toys (2025) — Cross Marketing Inc., 2025-08-06 G11. Happinet results briefing, first half of FY3/2026 (summary) — EDINET DB (summary of Happinet IR material), 2025-11-19 U1. How to start a gacha (capsule toy) business: costs, fees and profit — Money Forward (business guide), 2025-12-11 U2. Interview: Takara Tomy Arts on the growing capsule-toy market — gamebiz, 2023 U3. CAMSHOP.JP starts online sales of a capsule-toy machine starter set (press release) — Face Inc. via PR TIMES / Inside Games, 2026-09-21 U5. Bandai Namco Amusement America shops and events news (Gashapon stand at BOOKOFF Phoenix; Cross Store Brooklyn) — Bandai Namco Amusement America, 2025-01 U7. Discover the magic of Gashapon at Uwajimaya — Uwajimaya (retailer blog) U9. Player One Amusement Group North America joins GENDA (press release) — GENDA Inc., 2025-04-09 U10. Toys, games and sports equipment: US tariff rates (HTS chapter 95) — ustariffrates.com U11. US legal updates for Japanese companies from the first half of 2026 — Hughes Hubbard & Reed, 2026 U12. Tariff news 2026: Section 122 expires, Section 301 replaces it — TariffsTool, 2026 U14. Children's Product Certificate (CPC) — US Consumer Product Safety Commission U15. 16 CFR 1500.19: Misbranded toys and other children's articles (small parts labeling) — Legal Information Institute U16. 19 CFR 133.23: Restrictions on importations of gray market articles — Legal Information Institute U17. How to negotiate revenue share agreements for your claw machines — CandyMachines.com (vending equipment seller U18. Gashapon Spin — Bandai Namco (bandai.com) U19. Oakland Mall's Gashapon shop: 530-plus machines — RePlay Magazine, 2025-02-01 U20. YuMe Toys launches zero-risk retail solution to drive foot traffic, increase profits and reduce theft (press release) — YuMe Toys via PR Newswire, 2026-02-05 U21. Anime & arcades: Kiddleton's FIGUNO captures the collector market — BriefGlance, 2026-03-27 U22. Gashapon USA: contact (for business) — Bandai Namco Toys & Collectibles America W1. Gashapon Bandai Official Shop: world store list — Bandai Namco Amusement W2. Bandai Namco's Gashapon stores: 184 overseas in 18 countries and regions, 1,000-store goal — Mynavi News, 2026-10-08 F1. Bandai opens its first Paris shop in partnership with King Jouet (AFP) — La Gazette France, 2026-04-03 F2. Gashapon: we tested the first official shop in Paris — Journal du Geek, 2026-04-09 F3. New European Toy Safety Regulation (EU) 2025/2509 comes into force: key points at a glance — Noerr (law firm) ID1. These children's toys require mandatory SNI — Prolegal.id, 2018-10-02 ID2. QRIS grew fast in 2025, used by more than 59 million people (Bank Indonesia data) — GoodStats, 2026-02-05 SA1. Exporting to Saudi Arabia: additional products to be registered in SABER — Intertek SA2. E-payments make 85% of total individual transactions in 2025: SAMA — Arab News, 2026-04-13 BR1. Importing toys from China: what you need to know (INMETRO) — Guelcos (import consultancy) U8. Takara Tomy Arts 'Gacha' exhibits at Anime Expo 2026 (press release) — Takara Tomy Arts via PR TIMES, 2026-06-23 U23. National Entertainment Network acquires Bandai Namco US business — Vending Times U24. Kiddleton Japanese claw machine opened 9th store in 99 Ranch Market (press release) — Kiddleton Inc. via 24-7 Press Release, 2023-04-18 U25. T-ARTS capsule toy brand Gacha unveils exhibit at Anime Expo 2026 (press release) — T-ARTS via Cision, 2026-06-22 G20. Gacha Day: 60 years since gacha machines arrived in Japan (news release) — Takara Tomy Arts, 2025-02-17 G21. The history of gacha (Japan Gacha Gacha Association chairman) — nippon.com

Takoyaki Without the Octopus: How Osaka's Street Snack Conquered the Philippines

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the Philippines, takoyaki often comes without the octopus.

The snack itself is Osaka street food: balls of batter cooked in a griddle of half-round molds, turned with picks until they are crisp outside and soft inside, and traditionally built around a piece of octopus. In the Philippines it became something else. A local chain called Sumo Takoyaki launched in September 2014 selling three pieces for ₱28, filled with vegetables such as carrots and cabbage and topped with pork and chicken flakes. Its founders said they disliked the fishy aftertaste of the original and called their version "not really the authentic" one. Authentic takoyaki, the BusinessMirror noted at the time, cost about ₱80.

The cheaper version sold. Sumo reached 35 branches within three months, three of them franchised, and its owners put the startup capital for a stall, including all equipment, at ₱200,000.

Eleven years later, in July 2025, Gindaco, presented as one of Japan's most popular takoyaki brands, opened its first Philippine store inside SM Mall of Asia. A second followed at SM North EDSA. Its Original Takoyaki, with a piece of octopus inside, costs ₱199 for four pieces, and the menu also has a triple-cheese version.

So the same snack has sat at two ends of the market: under ten pesos a ball from a cart at Sumo's 2014 price, or about ₱50 a ball from a Japanese brand in a mall today. The two prices are a decade apart and not adjusted for inflation, so the gap shows the range of the market, not a measured price premium.

A snack built for carts

In our reading, takoyaki fits the Philippine food-cart business almost perfectly.

A takoyaki cart needs a griddle, a burner and a small counter, and a 2025 Philippine guide puts the startup capital at about ₱57,000.

The filling is where the local version freed itself. The same guide lists octopus or squid, but also crab stick, hotdog, cheese, ham and tuna mayo, with servings priced at ₱35 to ₱70. A seller does not need a supply of octopus to sell takoyaki; the ball, the sauce and the name are enough.

The original arrives

Gindaco's owner, Hotland, opened in the Philippines more than a decade after local cart brands had shaped the market. In our reading, Gindaco is betting that Filipinos who grew up on cheap cart takoyaki will pay mall prices for the version with octopus in it.

A pan the world already owns

Takoyaki did not land in an empty kitchen. The pan with rows of half-round cups is an old idea in many countries.

Denmark makes æbleskiver at Christmas in a cast-iron pan with hemispherical cups, turning the batter with a knitting needle, skewer or fork to keep it round.
The Netherlands sells poffertjes, small fluffy batter cakes cooked in a pan with shallow indentations, fresh from stands at fairs and Christmas markets.
Thailand has khanom krok, coconut milk and rice flour cooked in an indented pan.
South India has paddu, also called paniyaram or appe, a batter of black lentils and rice cooked on a pan with many small indentations.

The Philippines has its own round street snacks too: fish balls and squid balls, deep-fried and sold at street stalls.

In our reading, that is part of why takoyaki travels so easily. Plenty of places already know a ball of batter from a dimpled pan, or a fried ball from a stall. For some customers, the octopus may be the unfamiliar part, though how familiar octopus is varies a great deal from country to country.

So who actually eats octopus, where else has takoyaki gone, and what do Manila and Jakarta suggest? That's the members' edition.

Could This Work in the U.S.?

Gindaco sells takoyaki with octopus inside Dodger Stadium. In the Philippines, a ₱28 cart version without octopus reached 35 branches in three months, years before Gindaco arrived. Could a cheap, octopus-free takoyaki cart work at American malls and food halls?

What's in the members' edition

The story above is complete on its own. When memberships open, members will also get, by email: takoyaki around the world

The scoreboard
Indonesia: a mall brand with a cheap layer below
The U.S.: the octopus question
Europe: just starting
Who actually eats octopus
Manila and Jakarta: the octopus is optional
The sauce that links Japan and the Middle East
Where could it go next?

Company links

Links to the companies' own sites and to stock quotes. We have no business relationship with them.

Gindaco — Official site
Hotland Holdings — Official site
Hotland Holdings (9933, Tokyo Stock Exchange) — Stock quote
Otafuku Sauce — Official site

Sources

T1. Sweet Corner founder opens Sumo Takoyaki, another local franchise brand — BusinessMirror, 2014-11-25 T2. Sumo Takoyaki: the Filipino couple behind the business — Vulcan Post, 2018-02-20 T3. Takoyaki food cart business guide — Business Diary Philippines, 2025-06-30 T5. Consolidated financial results for the fiscal year ended December 2025 (kessan tanshin) — Hotland Holdings, 2026-02-13 T6. Gindaco opens in the Philippines — Primer, 2025 T9. Gindaco (brand page) — Kawan Lama Group T10. Food franchises under Rp5 million — Fortune Indonesia, 2025-02-14 T12. Cephalopods: tighter supplies and rising prices — FAO GLOBEFISH, 2023-04-27 T14. Trik membuat takoyaki dengan bahan yang mudah didapat di pasar lokal — Liputan6, 2026-03-09 T15. Cheese Jalapeno, a new flavor from Gindaco Indonesia — Medcom.id, 2019-10-01 T16. Æbleskiver — Wikipedia T17. Poffertjes — Wikipedia T18. Khanom krok — Wikipedia T19. Paddu — Wikipedia T20. Fish ball — Wikipedia T21. Halal okonomi sauce (product page) — Otafuku Sauce (official site) T24. Okonomiyaki to the world! OTAFUKU SAUCE got Halal certification — Halal Media Japan, 2017-04-15 T26. Los Angeles Dodgers and Tsukiji Gindaco announce multi-year partnership — MLB.com (press release), 2024-05-20 T27. December 2 is Date Day: we want to spread dates further in Japan (news release) — Otafuku Sauce (official site), 2020-11-20 T25. Otafuku Sauce Malaysia Sdn Bhd grand opening ceremony of the new halal-certified factory, Sendayan TechValley, Negeri Sembilan — MIDA (Malaysian Investment Development Authority), 2025-12-10

Japan Has 9 Million Empty Homes — and a Growing Market for Giving Them Away

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Picture a real-estate listing where the price field says ¥0. Not ¥0 down. Not a typo. Zero.

On Japanese sites like Minna no 0-en Bukken ("Everyone's Zero-Yen Properties"), that is the whole point. Owners list houses and vacant lots for free, and whoever they pick can take the property over once the contract and registration are done. On this site, it is the giving side that pays; the recipient still takes on the ordinary costs of owning a property.

The supply side of this market is enormous. Japan's 2023 Housing and Land Survey counted 9.0 million vacant homes, 13.8% of the entire housing stock, both record highs. The number has roughly doubled over 30 years. And the category that matters most here — homes that aren't for rent, aren't for sale and aren't anyone's vacation place, they're just empty — reached 3.85 million, up from 3.49 million in 2018. Neither number counts houses on offer for ¥0: the 9.0 million includes homes for rent, homes for sale and second homes, and even the 3.85 million includes houses whose owners are only temporarily away or that are waiting to be demolished. What they show is how large the pool of unused houses is, not the supply of free listings.

Not all of those houses are abandoned in any dramatic sense. One common way to end up with one, for example: a parent dies, the children live in a big city, and suddenly they own a house in a town they left decades ago, along with its property tax, its upkeep and its liability if the roof comes down in a typhoon.

Minna no 0-en Bukken, run by a small company in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, has been matching these reluctant owners with takers since July 2019. By early 2021, the most recent figure we found in our searches before publication, it had listed 160+ properties, and about 80% of them had found someone. Asahikawa Shinkin Bank said it planned to hand the site's flyers to customers inheriting property they had no use for, and Obihiro Shinkin Bank signed a formal partnership with the operator on 28 January 2022. The national government has paid attention too: a model project backed by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism used the company to work through the legal and tax kinks of free transfers.

Free doesn't mean unwanted, either. The "free old farmhouse" has become its own genre: in October 2025 a 113-year-old wooden house in Yunomae, Kumamoto, was offered at zero. Applicants had to view it in person and submit a business plan, and the owner picks who gets it.

So why does a country with a functioning real-estate industry need a separate marketplace for houses that cost nothing? The answer is a nice little lesson in incentives.

Why brokers won't touch a ¥100,000 house

In Japan, a broker's fee is capped by regulation as a percentage of the sale price. Until July 2024, the cap meant that on a ¥100,000 (about $637) property, a broker could collect at most 5% from the buyer, or ¥5,000 (about $32) plus consumption tax. Viewings, title checks, the legally required explanation of material facts, the contract — all for about ¥5,000. Unsurprisingly, many brokers didn't bother, and cheap rural property circulated poorly.

The government tried to fix this. Since July 2024, on properties priced at ¥8 million (about $51,000) or less, a broker can charge a buyer up to ¥330,000 (about $2,100) including tax, as long as the costs justify it and the buyer agrees in advance. But as housing writer Yusuke Yoshikawa points out, bolting a ¥330,000 fee onto a house nobody would buy for ¥100,000 doesn't make it sell. It just makes the gap between "real estate" and "this thing my late uncle owned" more explicit. The result is a parallel channel for low-value houses, where many deals happen without a broker.

The seller is the real customer

The counterintuitive part: in a ¥0 transaction, the person getting the better deal can be the one giving the house away. Obihiro Shinkin Bank describes the benefit to owners plainly: they're released from the ongoing burden of taxes, utilities and upkeep. Japanese has a pun for this kind of asset, fu-dōsan — the word for real estate with the first character swapped for "negative."

Once you see the seller as the customer, the market makes sense, and it has already layered up:

Matching sites like Minna no 0-en Bukken connect givers and takers directly. Recipients pay the site nothing; the giving side pays. As of 2021, owners could list for free with no support, or choose a full-support plan that charged them ¥150,000 (about $956) (before tax) once the transfer went through. Current pricing may differ.
Paid takeover. The newest layer goes past zero. Writing in 2025, Yoshikawa said services where the owner pays someone to take the property had expanded rapidly over the previous two to three years. When a ¥0 price still can't clear the market, the price simply goes negative.
Heritage projects. The kominka (old farmhouse) scheme behind the Kumamoto listing pairs free transfers with a mission to keep old buildings alive. It is still tiny: the Kumamoto case was described as one of only about five nationwide.

The catch

For the person taking the house, the catch is everything that isn't the purchase price. Many of these are direct transfers between the two parties, and when no licensed broker is involved, the legally required explanation of material facts may never happen. In our view, that's the real risk: roofs, plumbing and earthquake retrofits can cost far more than the price you saved, so a taker needs to check the house, and the contract, with the same care as any purchase.

That's why the most interesting players in this market aren't selling houses at all. They are selling trust and process — screening, paperwork, introductions, local-government relationships — around an asset whose price has already hit zero.

Japan isn't the only country trying to get empty houses back into use. Italy and Ireland have tried very different fixes. How do they compare, and what would it actually take for a foreigner to take on a Japanese akiya? That's the members' edition.

Could This Work in the U.S.?

Ask anyone who has inherited a house in a town they left: what would they pay to hand it on to someone who wants it? Is there room in the US for a marketplace where the seller is the paying customer? What would you charge — and to whom?

What's in the members' edition

The story above is complete on its own. When memberships open, members will also get, by email: three ways to move an empty house

Italy: sell it cheap, but make the buyer renovate
Ireland: pay the owner to fix it
Japan: let the owner pay to leave
What the comparison shows

Sold separately, a premium brief: taking on a Japanese akiya from abroad

"Free" still has costs
New paperwork in 2026
The risks the price hides
Worksheet: your own numbers
Next step

Company links

Links to the companies' own sites and to stock quotes. We have no business relationship with them.

Minna no 0-en Bukken — Official site

Sources

S1. 2023 Housing and Land Survey — Summary of Results (Housing and Households) — Statistics Bureau of Japan, 2024-09 S2. Final count of vacant homes: 9.002 million — StepOn (Mitsui Sumitomo Trust Realty) real-estate news, 2024-09-27 S3. Partnership agreement with 0-en Toshi Kaihatsu LLC on vacant-property circulation — Obihiro Shinkin Bank, 2022-01-31 S4. Asahikawa Shinkin Bank's vacant-home initiative: Minna no 0-en Bukken — Shinkin Central Bank Research Institute, 2021-03-09 S5. Model project report: issues and methods in zero-yen (free transfer) vacant-home transactions — Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) S6. Why zero-yen properties still don't sell after the brokerage-fee reform — ITmedia Nlab (Yusuke Yoshikawa), 2025 S8. '0-yen kominka project' launches in Kumamoto — KAB Kumamoto Asahi Broadcasting, 2025-10-27 S12. Excerpt from 'Bubble Resorts Today' — zero-yen properties in Naeba — Gentosha Gold Online (Yusuke Yoshikawa) S13. Brokerage fee rules for low-priced vacant homes (revised July 2024) — Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) A1. This Italian town is selling homes for $1 (Sambuca, Sicily) — CNN Travel A2. Vacant Property Refurbishment Grant — Limerick City and County Council A3. Fixed asset tax (overview) — Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications A4. Gift tax basic exemption (Tax Answer No. 4402) — National Tax Agency A5. Registration and license tax rates for land and buildings (Tax Answer No. 7191) — National Tax Agency A6. Real estate acquisition tax (local tax system) — Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications A7. Reporting system for acquisitions of real estate in Japan by non-residents — Ministry of Finance A8. Leaflet: reporting acquisitions of real estate in Japan by non-residents (from 1 April 2026) — Ministry of Finance A10. Mandatory nationality information in real-estate registration: requirements from October 2026 — Fudosan Meigi Henko Tetsuzuki Center (judicial scrivener corporation), 2026-10-22 A9. Circular on handling real estate registration after the amended registration rules (nationality information) — Ministry of Justice, 2026-09-04

The Housewives' Workshop That Became Kyoto Animation

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1981, in Uji, a city just south of Kyoto, a woman named Yoko Hatta started a small business: painting color onto animation cels for studios in Tokyo.

Her workforce was her neighbors. Hatta recruited local housewives to fill in the colors on the hand-drawn frames that Tokyo studios sent out to subcontractors. It was about as far from the spotlight as the anime business gets. The little workshop called itself Kyoto Anime Studio.

Four decades later, the company that grew out of it, Kyoto Animation, would be one of the most admired animation studios in the world, with a recognizable look, a devoted international fan base and an unusual way of running a studio. Getting there took 22 years before it led its first TV series, a tragedy no company should face, and a series of choices that ran against the way most of its industry works.

A brother at the start of anime

The story starts with family. Hatta's older brother, Taku Sugiyama, was there almost at the beginning of Japanese TV animation. Born in 1937, he joined Toei Doga's first trainee intake in 1956 — about 800 people applied and 10 were accepted — and later went to Osamu Tezuka's Mushi Production, where he worked on Astro Boy and became a director.

Sugiyama has told the rest himself. In a 2019 blog post, he recalled that back in the 1960s his younger sister asked him about working in animation. He introduced her to Mushi Production, where she did coloring work.

Later, she moved to Kyoto for a different job, met Hideaki Hatta, married him, and settled in Uji. Then, in 1981, she asked her brother again: could he help her find coloring work? He introduced her to Daikichiro Kusube, a former Toei colleague who was then running Shin-Ei Animation. Shin-Ei sent work. She gathered housewives from the neighborhood, and the workshop was in business — as Sugiyama remembers it, a sole proprietorship called Kyoto Anime Studio. That workshop, he writes, is the direct origin of today's company.

Climbing the ladder, one department at a time

In 1985 the workshop became a company, Kyoto Animation. What followed was a slow climb up the anime production chain. Painting cels is one of the last steps before filming, and the studio worked backwards from there: in 1986 it set up its own animation department, drawing the in-between frames it had previously only colored.

The credits tell the story. Zillion, in 1987, was in effect its debut as a lead studio. In 1992 it co-produced Noroi no One Piece. From 2000 it worked on episodes of Inuyasha, and in 2002 it was co-lead studio on Nurse Witch Komugi. It was steady, skilled work, much of it on other studios' shows.

None of that made Kyoto Animation a name most viewers knew. The studio's own official list of works begins in 2003, with Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, its first TV series as lead studio, and the original OVA MUNTO. By then, 22 years had passed since the workshop began.

Then the world noticed

What came next happened quickly. AIR came in 2005, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya followed in 2006. K-On! arrived in 2009, Sound! Euphonium in 2015, and the film A Silent Voice in 2016, which went on to compete at the Annecy animation festival. Violet Evergarden aired in 2018, was picked up by Netflix, and got its own feature film in 2020.

Pop-culture expert Ryusuke Hikawa, speaking to NHK in 2019, said Kyoto Animation "demonstrated that a top brand can come from outside the capital."

The opposite of the industry

How does a former subcontractor outside the capital end up with that reputation? In our reading, largely by doing the opposite of what most of its industry does.

It brought most of the work in-house. Anime production typically spreads work across a web of subcontractors and freelancers. Kyoto Animation, which had spent two decades as one of those subcontractors, pulled much of the work inward. Today it describes doing most of the production process, from planning to filming, inside the company. When the same team handles a show from start to finish, a studio can hold a visual standard that's hard to enforce across dozens of outside vendors.

It hired people instead of buying drawings. The industry leans on contractors and freelancers. Kyoto Animation hires much of its staff full-time. When it reopened recruitment in 2020, Cartoon Brew reported that full-time animators were offered a monthly salary of 202,000 yen, a figure that included 30,000 yen of fixed overtime pay. In 2019, the company had 160 employees, with studios in Uji and Kyoto and only an office in Tokyo.

It trained them itself. The company runs professional training courses for animators and for art and backgrounds, with the stated aim of training its own staff. The company describes the idea behind them with a motto that roughly translates as "making people is making works." In our reading, it is the housewives' workshop scaled up: when the skills you need aren't available locally, you teach them.

It started owning the stories, not just drawing them. This is the least-known part of the model. Kyoto Animation has run its own fiction prize, the Kyoto Animation Award, and has its own book imprint, KA Esuma Bunko, which publishes many of the winners. Violet Evergarden won the award's grand prize, became a novel on the company's imprint, then a TV series, then a film, with merchandise sold through the studio's own KyoAni Shop. A studio that began by coloring other people's frames now finds, publishes and animates its own stories.

Loss, and continuity

On July 18, 2019, an arson attack on the company's 1st Studio killed 36 Kyoto Animation employees and injured at least 32 others. In January 2024, the Kyoto District Court sentenced the perpetrator to death.

The studio kept going. It reopened hiring in 2020, and its works page now lists a new title for 2027. In February 2026, its long-time president Hideaki Hatta — Yoko Hatta's husband — died at 76, and Shinichiro Hatta became president.

The company's official outline still gives just two dates: founded in 1981, established in 1985. Everything else is in the credits.

Could This Work in the U.S.?

Kyoto Animation's path was: do the invisible piecework, learn each step of the craft from the inside, then bring those steps in-house until you own the product and the story behind it. Which unglamorous subcontracting job in your industry is someone's first step toward owning the whole chain? And what would it take to build a world-class studio somewhere nobody expects one?

Company links

Links to the companies' own sites and to stock quotes. We have no business relationship with them.

Kyoto Animation — Official site

Sources

K1. Kyoto Animation and me, part 1 (blog post by Taku Sugiyama) — Taku Sugiyama (founder's brother), Ameba blog, 2019-08 K2. Company outline — Kyoto Animation, 2026-10 K3. Business — Kyoto Animation, 2026-10 K4. Works — Kyoto Animation, 2026-10 K5. KA Esuma Bunko — Kyoto Animation, 2026-10 K6. Anime studio hit by deadly fire is known for skill, fan base — Associated Press (Mari Yamaguchi), via The Canadian Press / CFJC Today, 2019-07-18 K13. Anime studio hit by deadly fire is known for skill, fan base (AP, republished) — Associated Press (Mari Yamaguchi), via Khaosod English, 2019-07-19 K7. A year after arson attack, Kyoto Animation is hiring again — Cartoon Brew, 2020-07-02 K8. Death sentence in Kyoto Animation arson case — CNN.co.jp, 2024-01-25 K9. On the passing of our President, Hideaki Hatta — Kyoto Animation, 2026-03-02 K11. Kyoto Animation — history — Wikipedia (Japanese), 2026 K10. Taku Sugiyama (animation director) — Wikipedia (Japanese), 2026

The World Wants Matcha. Japan Can't Grow It Fast Enough

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Japan sold more green tea abroad in 2025 than ever, and most of it was powder.

Green-tea exports reached ¥72.1 billion (about $460 million) in 2025, nearly double the year before, and 12,612 tonnes, according to the farm ministry. Powdered tea, the category that includes matcha, made up about 69% of the volume and about 84% of the value, worth ¥60.38 billion (about $385 million).

The biggest customer by far is the United States, which bought ¥29.34 billion (about $187 million) of Japanese green tea in 2025. In our reading, cafés and iced lattes, more than the tea ceremony, are behind the growth, though the trade figures do not show how the tea is used.

A crop that can't just double

The problem is on the farm. Matcha is ground from tencha, tea leaves grown in shade and dried flat. Japan produced about 6,278 tonnes of tencha in 2025, about 3.2 times as much as in 2014. That is fast growth for a crop. But it is happening inside an industry that is not growing: Japan's total output of crude tea was 75,100 tonnes in 2025, and the ministry describes it as holding in the 70,000-tonne range.

Buyers felt the squeeze early. A Chicago tea importer told CBS News in April 2025 that it had noticed the shortage in late 2024, and that Japan was at its "critical mass" for matcha production.

Prices followed. A Kyoto matcha supplier, citing the JA Zen-Noh Kyoto tea market, says the average price of hand-picked Uji tencha rose 135% in 2025, and about 11% more in the 2026 first harvest. The farm ministry's own report says 2026 first-flush tea traded at about double the previous year's price in Kagoshima and about 70% higher in Shizuoka.

Kyoto raises its prices

Even the most famous names are adjusting. Ippodo, the Kyoto tea merchant, says it has had to raise prices on many items, citing "a massive increase in demand for matcha" and new US tariffs on Japanese goods.

In our reading, this is the shape of a boom that outruns its supply chain. The demand arrived in a few years through cafés and social media. The supply depends on shaded fields, spring harvests and grinding capacity, which take years to expand.

The warning signs were there in 2017

None of this came out of nowhere. In 2017, a survey for Japan's tea export council, carried out by Accenture with interviews at US businesses and a poll of 198 consumers, already described the American market that is straining supply today. By the report's estimate, one large café chain alone bought about 1,000 tonnes of matcha in 2016, about 750 tonnes of it from Japan, mostly drunk as matcha lattes by young women, and it forecast 1,200 tonnes for 2017. The report cautioned that these are estimates and that the total probably included supply later sent outside the US, to Canada for example.

The same report flagged the rest of today's story. That chain's Chinese matcha cost a third to a quarter of the Japanese price. Nothing legally restricted the word "matcha". And buyers were already worried that Japan's supply would not keep up, forcing them toward Chinese or Taiwanese powder.

Japan is not the only country making matcha, though.

The twist: China says it makes most of the world's matcha

The biggest surprise is on the supply side. People's Daily, citing an industry report, says China produced over 12,000 tonnes of matcha in 2025, nearly 70% of global output. We could not check how that report defines matcha or measures the world total, and its figure is for finished powder, while Japan's official number is for tencha, the leaf before grinding. So the two are not a like-for-like comparison.

One Chinese city shows how fast this is moving. Tongren, in Guizhou province, produced 2,500 tonnes of matcha in 2025 and exported 1,300 tonnes, and local media say its matcha has passed more than 500 EU pesticide-residue tests. In our reading, that last detail is aimed at European buyers, though test counts are not a guarantee for any single shipment.

In our reading, "matcha" is turning into a category rather than a Japanese product, the way "parmesan-style" cheese is made far from Parma. Japanese producers are left to compete on origin, grade and story, not on being the only source.

What this means for buyers

For a café, the choice is no longer simply "Japanese matcha". It is Japanese ceremonial grade, Japanese latte grade, or powder from China, which buyers need to compare on grade and delivered price; back in 2017, one big chain was paying a third to a quarter as much for its Chinese matcha. Our premium brief, sold separately, covers how a café sources matcha in a shortage: grades, prices, contract timing and US import rules.

What About the U.S.?

The US bought ¥29.34 billion of Japanese green tea in 2025, more than any other country. If Japanese matcha keeps getting scarcer and pricier, would American cafés switch to Chinese matcha, or pay more for "Made in Japan"?

What's in the members' edition

Sold separately, a premium brief: sourcing matcha for a café in a shortage

Grades and prices
Timing
Bringing it into the US
Questions to ask a supplier
Worksheet: cost per drink

Company links

Links to the companies' own sites and to stock quotes. We have no business relationship with them.

Ippodo Tea — Shop

Sources

M1. Agricultural exports hit a record ¥1.7 trillion in 2025 (MAFF figures) — nippon.com, 2026 M3. The situation of tea (October 2026) — Ministry of Agriculture, 2026-10 M4. Have the prices changed? — Ippodo Tea, 2026-10-19 M5. Threat of a matcha shortage concerns U.S. businesses — CBS News, 2025-04-08 M6. China brews global matcha success (People's Daily Online) — Hangzhou municipal government (ehangzhou.gov.cn), 2026-06-17 M7. Uji matcha wholesale 2026: sourcing, pricing and verification after the Kyoto shortage — First Agri (matcha supplier), 2026 M9. Survey report on matcha distribution and demand in the US (commissioned research by Accenture) — Japan Tea Export Council, 2017-11 M8. Importing tea into the US — USA Customs Clearance, 2026-09-22

Japan's Restaurants Rent Their Fake Food by the Month

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Walk past restaurants in Japan and you will often see the menu before you are handed one: bowls of ramen, plates of curry rice and trays of sushi, set out behind the glass in the window. Look closer and none of it is food. These are shokuhin sampuru, food replicas, made and painted by hand to look real enough to eat. Even a visitor who cannot read a word of Japanese can tell at a glance what the restaurant serves, and roughly what will arrive on the plate.

The replicas look like something the shop bought once and dusts occasionally. At Japan's biggest maker, most client shops don't own them. They rent them.

Iwasaki Co., which calls itself No. 1 in national share for food replicas, says on its website that about 70% of its client shops use its rental service. The shop pays a monthly fee instead of buying the samples outright. When the menu changes for the season, the samples change too, and the shop pays only for the period each one was on display. Samples are replaced before they fade or get grimy. If one breaks unexpectedly, the company says it repairs or replaces it free. And a sales rep visits regularly to check on them.

In other words, the fake food in the window comes with a subscription.

A business model as old as the product

Renting was not an afterthought. Takizo Iwasaki founded the business in Osaka in 1932, and the group's own history says he chose to lend his samples for small monthly payments from the start, which helped him win customers. The samples were not cheap: the same history says they were priced at roughly ten times the cost of the real dish.

Iwasaki Co. still makes the case in the same terms. Buying outright, it says, means a large upfront payment and the trouble of keeping samples looking clean. Renting spreads the cost into a monthly promotion budget.

What the shop is really buying

In our reading, the rental turns a one-off purchase into a service, and the service is where the value is.

A replica's job is to make a dish look appetizing to someone walking past. It loses that power as it sits in the sun and collects dust, and it becomes wrong the moment the menu changes. A shop that owns its samples has to notice, pay again, and wait. A shop that rents them has someone whose job is to notice.

For the maker, the monthly fee is steady revenue, and the regular visit is a sales channel. Iwasaki Co. now also offers food photography, promotional tools and restaurant fixtures, and a rep who comes to swap the summer noodles for winter ones is in the right place to offer them.

It is also labor-heavy work. CNN, covering a 2024 exhibition of Iwasaki replicas at Japan House London, quoted the curator as saying the company needs to make on average one replica every 40 minutes to stay viable. They are still made and painted by hand.

Replicas abroad

Today the Iwasaki group lists related companies in South Korea, the UK and Germany. For the London exhibition, Iwasaki was commissioned to make 47 new samples, one for each of Japan's prefectures, for a cultural center rather than a restaurant window.

Outside Japan, demand also shows up in smaller ways. JETRO reported in 2019 that a restaurant owner in Singapore had been buying nigiri-sushi samples in Japan, because food samples were not sold in overseas markets. The same report described a practical problem from the experience of another maker, Iwasaki Mokei Seizo: in the company's view, Japanese and foreign customers find different colors appetizing, so a replica made for Tokyo may not sell food in Singapore.

Could the rental model work abroad?

The overseas examples we found are about selling or showing the replicas themselves: a Singapore owner buying sushi samples in Japan, an exhibition in London. In our English- and Japanese-language web searches in November 2026, we did not find a report of Iwasaki's monthly rental service being offered outside Japan. That is the limit of what we looked at, not proof that no such service exists anywhere.

In our reading, the rental would be harder to export than the replica. The replica is a product; the rental is a service of monthly fees, seasonal swaps and a person who visits. It is likely to work best where a company has enough client shops close together to make the visits pay.

Could This Work in the U.S.?

In Japan, about 70% of Iwasaki Co.'s client shops now rent instead of buying. Would an American restaurant pay a monthly fee for a window display that someone else keeps fresh?

Company links

Links to the companies' own sites and to stock quotes. We have no business relationship with them.

Iwasaki Co. — Official site
Ganso Shokuhin Sample-ya — Shop

Sources

F1. Service plans: the Best plan (rental service) — Iwasaki Co. (official site) F2. Company outline — Iwasaki Co. (official site) F3. Replica foods: history of Iwasaki (brochure) — Iwasaki group (Ganso Shokuhin Sample-ya), 2022-11 F4. Company profile — Iwasaki group (Ganso Shokuhin Sample-ya) F6. This food looks too good to be real, and it is (Japan House London exhibition) — CNN Style (via ABC17), 2024-12-16 F7. Exporting food-replica products and culture: Iwasaki Mokei Seizo's overseas expansion (Singapore, Japan) — JETRO, 2019-08-21 F8. Japan House London announces Looks Delicious! Exploring Japan's food replica culture — Japan House London via PR Newswire, 2024-07-31

Sushi Made in Japan, Frozen for an American Supermarket

Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

At a Japanese supermarket chain in the United States, some of the sushi has crossed the Pacific frozen solid.

DayBreak, a Tokyo company that makes industrial freezers, began exporting frozen sushi in earnest in 2024, according to LOGISTICS TODAY. In June 2025, the company says, Mitsuwa Marketplace, the Japanese supermarket chain in the US, started carrying it. DayBreak calls it the first time frozen sushi developed in Japan has been fully introduced into American retail as a standard product, says it can be thawed in the refrigerator, and says the sales area is spreading from the West Coast to Hawaii. In November 2025 DayBreak set up a subsidiary in California.

Yoshihiro Katayama, who heads the new US subsidiary, gave a plain reason for the push: an American food industry facing labor shortages, food loss and logistics problems.

Three ways to fill a sushi case

In our reading, every supermarket that sells sushi has to answer one question: where does the rolling happen, and who does it?

Hire someone to roll it in the store. This is the model America's big grocery-sushi operators built. Advanced Fresh Concepts, founded by Ryuji Ishii, started with Vons in Southern California in 1986 and by 2011 ran sushi counters in 2,500 US supermarkets. Hissho Sushi said in 2018 that it had passed 1,200 locations in 41 states, with sushi bars in upscale supermarkets and other venues, and it works with franchisees.

Buy a machine. Suzumo Machinery, the Japanese maker of sushi robots, held 74.1% of the world market by value in 2024, according to a Fuji Keizai report cited by President Online. Its president told the magazine in 2026 that the US is by far its fastest-growing overseas market: Japanese food is well rooted there, and with American prices already high, an imported sushi robot does not feel expensive.

Make it in Japan and freeze it. This is DayBreak's bet. The sushi is finished in Japan, frozen, shipped, and thawed before it is eaten. Public sources we could check do not say whether that happens in the store or at home, so the comparison below covers both.

The hard part is the rice

Frozen sushi itself is not new: J-Stories notes that it is widely eaten, though poor freezing often hurts its quality. By DayBreak's own account, the hard part is the rice. Katayama, who is also DayBreak's vice president, says the company can freeze sushi and rice together while keeping them moist and tender, but he calls rice "very sensitive" and says every food needs its own freezing process. The company also sells the freezers: it says more than 700 businesses have adopted them since sales began in 2021.

There is a limit. High-end restaurants, J-Stories points out, usually avoid frozen ingredients.

The twist: much American sushi fish is already frozen

Here is a detail American customers rarely see. The FDA's Food Code is a model that states and cities can adopt as their food-safety rules. Delaware's version, for example, requires most fish served raw to be frozen first to kill parasites, though some tunas, some farmed fish and some shellfish are exempt under set conditions (details in the note at the end).

In our reading, freezing fish is therefore nothing new for American sushi in places with rules like this, and frozen sushi itself is already widely eaten. What sets DayBreak's model apart is narrower: finished pieces made in Japan, frozen with its own equipment, shipped across the Pacific and sold in an American supermarket. What it asks customers to accept is sushi made thousands of miles away.

What each route trades

	Chef in the store	Robot in the store	Made in Japan, frozen
Work done in the store	Cooking rice, rolling, packing	Cooking rice, running the machine, topping, packing	Frozen stocking; thawing, if the store thaws it before sale
What the store needs	Counter, tools, trained staff	The machine, plus staff to run it	Frozen storage; a thawing routine and a chilled case only if sold thawed
Freshness story	Made today, here	Made today, here	Made in Japan
Waste	Unsold fresh sushi	Unsold fresh sushi	Frozen stock that expires, plus unsold thawed sushi if thawed in store

This is our reading, not data from DayBreak or any store. A store that keeps sushi frozen until it is needed might throw away less, but we found no published figures on staffing, total cost or waste for frozen sushi, so we cannot say which route is cheapest.

Note on the freezing rule: Delaware's rule allows -20°C (-4°F) for seven days, -35°C (-31°F) until solid and then 15 hours, or -35°C until solid and then 24 hours at -20°C. Exceptions include molluscan shellfish; some tunas such as yellowfin and bigeye; farmed fish such as salmon raised in net-pens or land-based operations on formulated feed with no live parasites infective to them; rinsed fish eggs; and scallop product that is only the shucked adductor muscle. Other states' rules may differ.

Could This Work in the U.S.?

Many American supermarkets sell sushi rolled by someone behind the deli counter. Now some sushi on those shelves can arrive from Japan in a freezer instead. Would your customers buy sushi whose label says "made in Japan, frozen"?

Company links

Links to the companies' own sites and to stock quotes. We have no business relationship with them.

Suzumo Machinery — Official site
Suzumo Machinery (6405, Tokyo Stock Exchange) — Stock quote
Mitsuwa Marketplace — Official site

Sources

R1. DayBreak establishes American subsidiary to promote frozen sushi (press release, repost) — DayBreak via APOC Wire, 2025-12-08 R3. DayBreak sets up US subsidiary (Japanese) — LOGISTICS TODAY, 2025-11-21 R4. Fresh Japanese sushi on your table? Innovative freezing technology — J-Stories, 2025-03-21 R5. AFC Sushi celebrates 25 years in supermarkets — Supermarket News, 2011-03-28 R6. Hissho among 2018 middle market leaders (press release) — Deli Market News, 2018-08-13 R7. Interview with Suzumo Machinery president Tohru Taniguchi on its overseas sushi-robot sales — President Online, 2026-06-30 R8. Food Code 3-402.11 Parasite destruction (as adopted in Delaware) — Legal Information Institute R9. States get a new model Food Code from FDA — Food Safety News, 2023-01-04