The J-Wave

AT IZUMI IN MUMBAI, teriyaki chicken, that polite gateway drug of India’s early experi­ments with Japanese food, has faded from memory. The tables carry different cargo now, including bowls of oden, a miso broth warmed by fish cakes, a dish chef Nooresha Kably calls “graduate level”. She has learned to expect questions that once belonged only to chefs or obses­sive travellers: about yuzu-kosho and natto and other obscure ingredients. The curios­ity is fluent, insistent, a sign of diners not chasing novelty but asserting knowledge.

Kably is wary of calling Japanese food “premium”. “If you search for sushi deliv­ery in Bandra, there are a dozen or more options,” she says. What she sees instead is a kind of coolness that will not erode with popularity. “India’s appetite for Japanese food will keep evolving,” she insists. Her regulars may refuse to relinquish the hamachi truffle ponzu with wasabi jelly, but they want to know what’s new, what’s next. They are also seeking her out for wed­ding catering—destination extravaganzas in Udaipur, Kolkata and Kochi—where sashimi and ramen are laid out beside the butter chicken, and where hundreds of guests, sequinned and turbaned, queue­for carpaccio and robata skewers. She remembers a night in Udaipur when a sudden rain drenched the venue, and the demand for ramen shot through the roof. “We thought the cold food would move faster,” she says, “but the hot bowls just vanished.” At another tasting, a vegetarian family dissected every ingredient of her menu like seasoned critics. This is the new clientele: urbane, familiar, emboldened.

The Japanese government’s subsidies on flights, the ease of securing visas, the steady stream of Indians heading to Tokyo or Kyoto like never before, and returned with cravings that domestic chefs must satisfy—all of this has helped, Kably says. Just as potent is the Instagrammed allure of Japan—its curated neatness, its fetish for detail—qualities that discerning din­ers now seek in the food as much as in the plating.

Beyond the logistics of imports and bulk orders, there are those trying to coax Japanese flavours out of Indian soil, experimenting not with distribution but with time. In a small factory in Goa, Prachet Sancheti of Brown Koji Boy tends to jars of miso the way others might tend to their gardens. His longest ferment— a three-year-old white pea miso made with beans from Goa—is still a work in progress. “Fermentation is farming at a microbial level,” he likes to say. “You have to understand the environment.” When he began fermentation during the pandemic, there was no one “doing miso scientifically in India”, he says. Kom­bucha and kimchi had their moment, but koji—the filamentous fungus that transforms grains into umami—was still waiting for its evangelist. The catalogue he has built since then reads like a pantry of experiments: black garlic miso dark as molasses, shiitake miso with the musk of damp forests, cashew miso with a nutty sweetness that borders on confection. There are playful graftings like miso chilli oil, koji hot sauce, koji caramel, and even a DIY kit that lets home kitchens flirt with the patience of a Japanese-style ferment.

Brown Koji Boy now supplies some of the country’s best Asian restaurants, with B2B orders making up 80 per cent of its sales, and growth clocking 15 per cent each quarter. The jars are edging into homes too, though cautiously. “In India, most people don’t cook for themselves,” Sancheti says, “though they will buy ferments for ex­perimenting with on a weekend meal.” He argues that miso is easy to naturalise: a teaspoon in soup, or as a direct stand-in for salt. The company also makes semi-viscous sauces for restaurants, further easing miso’s passage into Indian plates.

In Bengaluru, ramen has found its shrine in Naru Noodle Bar. What be­gan as a pandemic pop-up is now a viral restaurant with limited seating where reservations vanish within minutes of release. Chef-owner Kavan Kuttappa’s menu veers between orthodoxy and improvisation: spicy tori paitan, pork gyoza, chicken karaage, hazelnut tantan­men, and of course, ramen for vegetar­ians and meat lovers, the springy noodles crafted in-house using a Yamato noodle machine. The small space thrums with a strange alchemy where food becomes at­mosphere, atmosphere becomes belong­ing, and transforms into legend. Naru has become more than a ramen bar. It is an emblem of the Japanese wave rolling through Indian cities—a place where scarcity sharpens longing, where the meal itself becomes theatre, and where one gets to briefly glimpse the cadence of Tokyo.

MEANWHILE, KAWAII CAFÉS in Bengaluru, Mumbai and Goa serve thick shokupan toast, jig­gly pancakes, mochi, soufflé cheesecakes and kakigori, training saccharine Indian palates toward texture and restraint. These are the edible surfaces of the wave. But its undercurrent runs further back, through Soka Gakkai meetings in apartments in Chennai, Delhi and Bengaluru that echoed with chants of nam-myoho-renge-kyo. The Buddhist organisation, an offshoot of Nichiren Buddhism founded in Japan in 1930, set up its India wing in the 1960s and now counts over two lakh members across the country. The movement has seeded Japanese values in practitioners through kosen-rufu, the idea of peace by personal transformation, and through a lived ethic of optimism and sustainability. In its own way, it foreshadowed the hunger for Japa­nese culture that would arrive decades later, when the so-called J-wave finally broke on India’s cultural shore.

If food and faith were the first conduits, commerce has followed, carrying with it the textures of everyday life: clothes, fur­niture, moisturisers, shoes. At Uniqlo, five years into its India launch, you can feel the scale shift. Two new flagships opened in late 2024—Mumbai’s Phoenix Palladium and Delhi’s Pacific Mall in Tagore Garden— and Bengaluru is all set to get its first store. Uniqlo India’s income rose 32 per cent in FY24, profits went up nearly a quarter, a rhythm the parent company now wants to double through local sourcing and 30 stores on the horizon. The same ambition animates Nitori, Japan’s largest furniture retailer. In December 2024, it chose Mum­bai’s R City Mall for its first India store, with plans to open nearly 280 outlets by 2032. These brands are wagering that In­dian households, flooded with Ikea, will choose Japanese minimalism and quality as their baseline.

While Korean beauty remains an influ­encer favourite in India, Japanese brands are slowly testing the waters. DHC, a cult Japanese cosmetics brand, has entered the market, and Shiseido is betting on India’s higher beauty spends, having introduced NARS, a makeup brand from its stable, in 2023. For the consumer, what was once a drugstore souvenir in Tokyo now sits in the basket with Lakmé lipsticks and The Ordinary serums. Onitsuka Tiger shoes, too, have edged in from subculture to mainstream, and are now worn unself­consciously on metro rides and in tech parks. The brand is considering India not only as a market but as a possible manu­facturing hub.

Anime has made the same journey, from niche to lingua franca. Crunchyroll, an anime OTT platform, now releases shows with Hindi, Tamil and Telugu dubs and subs. Netflix notes that globally, 150 million of its subscribers are anime fans, with India’s share growing. This August, Anime India in Mumbai became a land­mark: Tetsuro Araki, the director of Death Note and Attack on Ti­tan, attended in person, as did Susume Fukunaga of The Pokémon Company. For the first time, the architects of anime’s modern canon set foot in India, addressing thousands of fans dressed as shinobi and shinigami. The con­vention hosted Q&As, concerts, cosplay parades, and merch stalls selling acrylics, hoodies, and figurines. The halls buzzed like a festival, and for many, it felt like a homecoming. What makes this wave dif­ferent from earlier phases of fandom is its density. Anime is not just streaming con­sumption, a late-night binge with subtitles; it is meme pages, fan-subs in Hindi, Discord servers thick with inside jokes, collectors scouring Mumbai’s Crawford Market for knock-off figurines, and now, halls filled with thousands of people who no longer see themselves as fringe. Anime in India has finally become more than a cool teen­age flirtation—it is a cultural commons, elastic and unmistakably alive.

Even wellness is acquiring a Japanese lexicon. In Khar, Mumbai, a “crying club” re­cently opened, borrowing the Japanese practice of rui­katsu, or tear-seeking. In Ja­pan, Hidefumi Yoshida codi­fied it as stress relief. A shared room, tissues, tea, a sanctioned moment of release—it feels eccen­tric until it doesn’t, until one admits that in a city running on overdrive, a room for crying is infrastructure.

And then there is matcha. Once a novelty in a wellness influencer’s feed, it is now a café staple. In tier-2 and many tier-3 towns, you can order a matcha latte without explanation; in metros, cafés run weekend whisking workshops for `2,000 per head. Its grassiness, once jar­ring, is becoming a habit. At Teabox, a pioneering fine tea startup, procurement has become a daily game of improvisa­tion. “Ninety-nine per cent of the mat­cha India buys is culinary grade,” says Gopal Upadhyay, head of procurement, “not even premium. Very few here have ever tasted ceremonial matcha.” The com­pany imports premium lots from a farmer in Shizuoka. A couple of years ago, Teabox sold 60 or 70 kilos of matcha each month. Today, that figure is closer to 400 kg, and only half of it is B2B. The rest is a hybrid demographic: matcha fans, yes, but also ordinary chai drinkers curious enough to buy a tin, whisk the powder, and sip the green froth. “That’s the biggest change,” Upadhyay says. “The average tea drinker wants to try it.”

The supply side tells another story. This year’s tencha harvest in Japan is down about 25 per cent, a squeeze exac­erbated by middlemen who hoard and release stock to inflate prices. “I was on an emergency call with our inventory team this morning,” Upadhyay says, “a vendor cancelled two lots, the rate has doubled.” In the scramble, Assam-made matcha and even Chinese powders are circulating in the Indian market, their bright green masking their distance from the Kyoto hillsides con­sumers imagine. What is striking is not the shortage but the persistence of appe­tite. Even as harvests falter and prices spike, the J-wave continues to lap steadily into Indian kitchens, spoon by spoon.

“Many bookstores now have a dedi­cated shelf for Japanese fiction,” says Arunima Mazumdar, with the amused wariness of someone who has been reading it long before it became décor. “Publishers are crazy about giving away copies. There is a lot of demand for meet-ups and events, and even restaurants that aren’t doing Japanese food are interested.” The hunger for Japanese fiction is real, but fickle: first-time readers often stumble in through Instagram, seduced by cult best­sellers like Butter or Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, the former a parable about ap­petite and female desire, the latter a pastel daydream of second chances and book­shop life. They reassure as much as they intrigue. Then there is Haruki Murakami, a rite of passage for any modern reader of Japanese literature. “Murakami is pretty shit by now,” Mazumdar says, refusing to let Japan’s most global novelist stand in for a literature far wider and stranger.

Dokusha, the book club she started, has over 4,500 follow­ers on Instagram, although she doesn’t actively promote it. “I increasingly focus on introducing women authors or authors who aren’t popular in India,” she says. That serious­ness reveals itself in her recommen­dations: Mieko Kawakami, whose Breasts and Eggs made working-class woman­hood unsparingly visible; Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, a surreal allegory about erasure that feels like an instruction man­ual for living under authoritarianism; Natsuko Imamura’s Asa: The Girl Who Turned Into Chopsticks. When she men­tions Sayaka Murata, it is with the awareness that Convenience Store Woman, with its refusal of normalcy, can unsettle a new reader. These works are less likely to appear in bookstagram reels. They de­mand patience; they inflict discomfort.

Mazumdar doubts the depth of the so-called J-wave. “I have seen upscale Japa­nese restaurants empty,” she says. “I have read Japanese books for a long time, but I did not feel inclined to visit Japan.” For Mazumdar, the books do not function as a passport to lifestyle. They are not acces­sories; they are ways of thinking. Still, out of a craze, she imagines, something endur­ing might be carved—perhaps a Japanese whiskey-tasting evening, or a reading retreat. Already, in just a couple of years, Dokusha has grown into a community with heft. With more women readers than men, what Mazumdar has discovered is that a book like The Bookshop Woman by Nanaka Hanada can “remind them of their agency”, offering a jolt of recognition dis­guised as a gentle narrative. For first-time readers, that jolt can be transformative—just as a bowl of ramen at a wedding, a ka­raoke night, or a Zojirushi rice cooker can be for others. If the J-wave falters, it will not be for lack of ambition but for the uneven­ness of appetite. Still, between supermar­kets and streaming apps, between miso fermenters and fashion flagships, Japanese culture has entered daily Indian life with a breadth that makes it difficult to dismiss.

Arunima MazumdarBrown Koji BoybusinessDokusha book clubJapanese cultureJapanese foodramen barsskincare aislessushi