Why Do Asian Brands Pretend to be Japanese?

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Why Do Asian Brands Pretend to be Japanese?<br>A working theory on how aspirational consumption in Asia created faux Japanese brands like MINISO, Oishi, and Japan Home Center.

Patrick Kho<br>Sep 23, 2025

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