Japanese food still sells in China. That part has not changed. What has changed is everything around it: which categories can legally cross the border, how you register your factory, and how quickly a political statement in Tokyo can freeze your shipments. If you plan a China launch in 2026 on the assumptions that worked in 2017, you will lose money. This guide covers what actually works now, what is blocked, and how to build a position that survives the next diplomatic incident.
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency, based in Shanghai since 2012. I have run China market entry for Japanese sake, snack and seasoning brands through the 2023 import ban, the 2025 partial reopening and the 2026 re-suspension, and I deal with GACC registration files every month.
First, the honest part: what is blocked in 2026
China suspended all Japanese seafood imports on 24 August 2023, the day the treated water release from Fukushima Daiichi started. The suspension held for almost two years.
On 29 June 2025, the General Administration of Customs published Announcement 2025 No. 140, which reopened the door on conditions. Ten prefectures stayed excluded: Fukushima, Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano, Saitama, Tokyo and Chiba. Exporters whose registration had been suspended had to re-apply. Each shipment needed an official Japanese health certificate, a radioactivity test certificate and a proof of origin.
The first Hokkaido scallops reached China in early November 2025. Two weeks later it was over. On 19 November 2025, China suspended Japanese seafood again, this time over Prime Minister Takaichi’s remarks on Taiwan. That suspension is still in force as I write this in mid-2026. From January 2026, Chinese customs also slowed clearance on Japanese sake and packaged food, with some containers held several weeks longer than usual.
Read that timeline again. Twenty-two months of ban, four months of paperwork, two weeks of trade, then a ban again. If seafood is your core product, China cannot be your primary growth market in 2026. It can be an option you keep warm. Those are not the same thing, and confusing them is how Japanese exporters burn three years of cash.
What is not blocked, and it is most of the category
The restrictions target aquatic products. Dry and processed goods sit in a different lane: soy sauce, miso, dashi and seasoning bases, instant and fresh noodles, rice crackers and konbini-style snacks, green tea and matcha, sake, shochu, whisky, konjac, curry roux, dried mushrooms, vinegars.
The numbers back this. Japan’s total agri-food and fishery exports hit a record 1.7005 trillion yen in 2025, up 12.8% year on year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Mainland China was still the fourth destination at 179.9 billion yen, behind the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Green tea nearly doubled, up 98.2% to 72.1 billion yen.
Sake tells the same story with more detail. In 2025, sake exports to mainland China reached 6.66 million litres, up 25.1% in volume, and 13.304 billion yen, up 13.93% in value, per a Huxiu analysis of Japanese customs data. Average price per litre fell 8.9% to 1,998 yen, the first real price drop into China since 2014. Then December 2025 turned: volume down 10.8%, value down 12.2%.
Two lessons in one dataset. Volume is available if you accept a lower price point. And the political shock hits within weeks, not quarters.
GACC registration: the step that stops most brands
Since 1 January 2022, under Decree 248, every overseas facility that produces, processes or stores food destined for China must be registered with the General Administration of Customs and hold a China registration number. No number, no customs declaration. Distributors cannot fix this for you. It attaches to the manufacturing site, not to the trading company.
Two routes exist. High-risk categories, which include aquatic products, meat, dairy and a handful of others, must be recommended and submitted by the Japanese competent authority. Everything else, which covers most seasonings, snacks, noodles and beverages, can be self-registered by the company through the CIFER portal. Self-registration is faster, but the file is rejected constantly for small reasons: mismatch between the facility address on the certificate and the one on the application, product category code chosen wrong, HACCP documentation not translated.
Practical points from files we have handled:
- Register the exact product categories you plan to sell in three years, not just the first SKU. Adding a category later restarts a review.
- Your registration number must appear on the outer packaging or the shipping documents in the format customs expects. Get this checked before you print 20,000 cartons.
- Chinese-language labelling rules are separate from GACC registration. Nutrition panel format, allergen wording and importer details are a different rejection risk at the port.
- Registrations expire and need renewal. Brands that let a number lapse discover it when a container is already on the water.
Cross-border e-commerce is the workaround many brands use for a first test. Goods shipped through a bonded zone to a Chinese consumer are treated as personal imports, so the Chinese label and part of the general trade paperwork are not required. It is a real entry path, not a permanent one, and the rules on it tightened recently. We covered the change in our note on the new cross-border e-commerce thresholds for foreign brands.
The tourist strategy is dead, and you need to know why
For fifteen years, the standard playbook for a Japanese food brand was simple. Get discovered by Chinese tourists in Japan, let them carry the product home, ride the word of mouth, then open a China channel once demand exists. The Japanese even had a word for the buying frenzy: bakugai, explosive shopping.
That funnel has collapsed. Chinese arrivals in Japan fell 60.7% year on year in January 2026 and 60.4% in May 2026, after Beijing issued travel advisories and airlines cut routes, according to JNTO figures reported by Travel Voice. Total inbound to Japan in the first half of 2026 was 21.08 million, down 2.0%, and China was the reason the whole number went negative.
Everything the old article said about serving Chinese tourists well in your Japanese stores is still correct, and still worth doing. Chinese-speaking staff, WeChat Pay and Alipay QR codes at the till, product cards in Mandarin. Those things raise basket size and build memory. They just cannot be your acquisition engine any more. With arrivals down 60%, you are seeding awareness with a rounding error.
The discovery now has to happen inside China. Which means Chinese platforms, Chinese search, Chinese content.
The restaurant channel is bigger than your retail channel
Most Japanese food brands arriving in China obsess over Tmall and skip the channel that moves the most volume. Japanese restaurants in China are a distribution network of tens of thousands of buyers who already want your ingredients.
The scale is real, and shrinking. Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture counts Japanese restaurants worldwide every two years. Its December 2025 edition, reported by Guangming Daily, put China at around 63,000 outlets in 2025, down from about 78,000 in 2023, a fall of nearly 20%. It was the first global decline since the survey began in 2013, and China drove it. China still has more Japanese restaurants than any other country.
The market itself is worth roughly 69 billion RMB and grew only 2.24% in 2024, per Huaon Intelligence. The structure moved down-market fast: 63.3% of Japanese restaurants in China now sit at 100 RMB per head or less. Conveyor sushi chains and curry-rice formats took share from the omakase counters.
That reshapes what they buy. A 90 RMB per head chain with 300 outlets does not want your artisanal single-brewery soy sauce at import prices. It wants consistent supply, a stable landed cost, and a Chinese-language spec sheet its central kitchen can work with. If your product can meet that, one chain contract beats a year of Tmall advertising. If it cannot, price for the 20% of restaurants that still run a premium ticket and stop pretending you are a volume supplier.
The same logic applies to any premium imported food category in China. We saw it play out identically in the oyster market in China, where foodservice absorbs the volume and retail carries the brand, and in the truffle market in China, where restaurant chefs are the real gatekeepers.
How Chinese consumers find Japanese food in 2026
Xiaohongshu search, not Xiaohongshu posting
Xiaohongshu passed 350 million monthly active users, more than 70% of them use the search bar as a habit, and the platform handles around 600 million searches a day. For food, it has replaced the review site and, for a lot of urban women under 35, it has replaced Baidu.
The mechanism matters. Xiaohongshu search ranks notes by engagement density and keyword match, and it favours recent content. So the working method is not “post twenty brand posts”. It is: pick eight to twelve long-tail queries a buyer actually types, then commission enough real creator notes on each query that your product occupies the first screen when someone searches it. Queries like 日式酱油推荐 (Japanese soy sauce recommendations) or 日本零食测评 (Japanese snack review) convert far better than your brand name, which nobody is searching yet.
Volume of small creators beats one big name here. Fifty KOC notes at 3,000 to 30,000 followers each will hold a search page longer than one post from a celebrity, and cost less than a tenth as much.
GEO: getting cited by DeepSeek and Doubao
A growing share of Chinese buyers now ask an AI assistant before they buy. DeepSeek and ByteDance’s Doubao are the two that matter for consumer questions. Ask either one “which Japanese soy sauce brands are available in China” and it answers with a short list. If you are not on that list, you do not exist for that user.
These models do not read your Japanese corporate site. They pull from Chinese-language sources they trust: Baidu Baike, Zhihu answers, industry media, Xiaohongshu and Douyin content, e-commerce product pages. Generative engine optimisation for a food brand means producing structured Chinese content that states plainly what you make, where, since when, what it is used for, and what certifications you hold. Comparison content works especially well, because the models reuse comparison tables. A Zhihu answer explaining the difference between koikuchi and usukuchi soy sauce, with your brand named as an example, gets quoted back for months.
Douyin interest e-commerce for impulse categories
Douyin does not wait for demand, it creates it. The algorithm pushes a product video to people who never searched for it, and the purchase happens inside the app in about twenty seconds. That suits snacks, instant noodles, sauces and gift boxes: low price, visual, easy to explain in eight seconds.
It suits premium sake and aged whisky much less. High ticket, slow decision, and a return rate that will eat your margin. Put those on Tmall Global or a WeChat store and use Douyin only for brand exposure. Plenty of brands are shifting budget between the two platforms right now, and the trade-offs are covered in our piece on why brands are moving from Tmall to Douyin in 2026.
WeChat private domain: your insurance policy
This is the part I push hardest with Japanese clients, because of the political risk. Everything you build on Tmall, Douyin or Xiaohongshu is rented. Your WeChat official account, your WeChat mini-program store and your customer groups are owned.
The mechanism is straightforward. Every order, every trade show contact and every restaurant buyer gets pulled into a WeChat group or onto a company account through a QR code with a small incentive. You then message them directly, at zero cost per contact, forever. When a category gets politically noisy and platform traffic dries up, a 40,000-person private domain keeps selling. We have seen it work through three separate China-Japan incidents since 2012.
Add an AI assistant on the account for customer service. Questions about allergens, shelf life, how to use a seasoning, delivery timing: these repeat endlessly and eat your team’s day. A trained bot handling the first layer in Chinese, with a human taking over on complaints, cuts response time to seconds and keeps buyers from drifting to a competitor while they wait.
A Mandarin site and Baidu still matter for B2B
Consumers have largely moved to in-app search. Buyers have not. The purchasing manager of a restaurant chain, the category buyer at a supermarket group, the importer looking for a new supplier: they still open Baidu, and they still judge you on whether you have a Chinese site that loads.
A translated brochure site is not enough. The Chinese consumer, and the Chinese buyer even more, wants to know exactly what they are buying before deciding. Put the production region, the brewing or processing method, the ingredient list, the certifications, the GACC registration number and the existing China distributors on the site. Host it in mainland China or at least in Hong Kong so it loads in under three seconds. A site hosted in Osaka behind the Great Firewall will lose half its visitors before the first image appears.
The same rules apply to any imported grocery category, and we detailed them in our guide to selling imported food products in China.
KOL and KOC: what to pay for
Key opinion leaders still carry weight in China because peer opinion drives food purchases more than advertising does. Food and cooking creators are plentiful across Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Bilibili and WeChat Channels.
Rates depend on the same factors they always did:
- Audience size and, far more important, engagement rate
- Format and length of the content produced
- Platform and whether a link or store is included
- Genuine fit between the creator’s usual content and your product
What has changed is the payment model. Flat fees for a single post are the worst way to buy this now. Move to affiliation: the creator earns a commission on tracked sales, typically 15% to 30% for food, and you pay for outcome. The good ones accept it because they trust their own conversion. The ones who refuse are usually telling you something about their audience. For a fuller view of what to expect from this channel, read our assessment of whether KOL marketing actually works in China.
Case study: Haruto, a Kyushu seasoning maker
Haruto runs a fourth-generation soy sauce and ponzu brewery in Kyushu. Family business, 40 staff, strong domestic reputation, no China presence beyond a grey-market flow through Chinese tourists buying at Fukuoka department stores.
He came to us in 2024 with a plan built on the old model: open a Tmall Global flagship store, run a launch campaign, wait for the tourists to come back. He spent about 1.8 million yen on store setup and 4 million yen on platform advertising over eight months. Result: 61 orders. Cost per acquisition above 65,000 yen on a product with a 900 yen retail price. His conclusion was that Chinese consumers did not want a small Japanese brand. That was the wrong conclusion.
Three problems. Nobody in China searched his brand name, so his Tmall ads were competing on generic category keywords against Haitian and Lee Kum Kee, at Chinese pricing. He had no Chinese content anywhere, so the buyers his ads did reach found nothing when they checked him. And he was ignoring the channel that fit his product: restaurants.
What we changed. First, GACC self-registration for seasonings and sauces, filed correctly, cleared in eleven weeks. Second, we stopped the Tmall advertising entirely and put the budget into Xiaohongshu: 74 KOC notes over five months, built around nine specific search queries about Japanese soy sauce, ponzu and Japanese home cooking, plus three mid-tier creators paid on affiliation. Third, we built a Chinese site with full product specs and pushed it on Baidu with B2B keywords, then had a Shanghai-based salesperson work the inbound enquiries.
Fourteen months in, his brand name generated around 6,400 monthly searches on Xiaohongshu, from near zero. Retail sales through cross-border e-commerce reached roughly 340 orders a month. But the money came from the second channel: two Japanese restaurant groups, 44 outlets combined, signed annual supply contracts worth about 62 million yen. Total China revenue passed 90 million yen in year two, with the restaurant side at a much healthier margin than the consumer side.
The part Haruto did not expect: when Chinese customs slowed Japanese food clearance in early 2026, his restaurant customers stayed. They had already switched their recipes to his ponzu and had no fast substitute. Consumer sales on the cross-border side dipped 30% for two months. B2B held.
Managing the political risk without pretending it does not exist
Japanese food in China carries a political premium that French or Italian food does not. Since 2012 I have watched this category get hit roughly every three or four years, and each time some brands disappear while others barely notice.
The difference between the two groups comes down to four things.
- Never let China exceed a share of revenue you cannot survive losing. Japanese seafood exporters averaged nearly half their sales in China before 2023. Many did not recover. Twenty to thirty per cent is a number you can absorb.
- Own your customer list. Private domain on WeChat keeps working when advertising platforms go quiet and distributors get nervous.
- Sell the product, not the flag. Chinese consumers kept eating at Japanese restaurants through the whole 2025 to 2026 dispute, because they read those places as normal restaurants rather than political statements. Brands that market taste, craft and use cases stay in that safe zone. Brands whose entire positioning is national imagery become an easy target.
- Keep your registrations and paperwork current even during a freeze. When the door opens, it opens for two weeks. In November 2025, the exporters who shipped were the ones whose GACC re-registration was already approved.
FAQ
Can I sell Japanese seafood in China right now?
Not as of mid-2026. China suspended Japanese aquatic product imports again on 19 November 2025 and the measure is still in force. The June 2025 customs announcement that reopened trade for 37 prefectures, excluding Fukushima, Gunma, Tochigi, Ibaraki, Miyagi, Niigata, Nagano, Saitama, Tokyo and Chiba, remains the reference text for when it reopens. Use the pause to complete your GACC registration and build brand awareness, so you can ship on day one rather than starting the file then.
How long does GACC registration take for a Japanese food producer?
For self-registered categories such as seasonings, snacks, noodles and most beverages, expect eight to sixteen weeks if the file is clean. Rejections usually come from address mismatches, wrong product category codes or untranslated HACCP documents, and each round trip adds a month. Categories requiring recommendation by the Japanese authority, including aquatic products, meat and dairy, take substantially longer and depend on the bilateral protocol being active.
What budget do I need for a serious first year in China?
For a mid-size producer, plan roughly 15 to 25 million yen over twelve months. That covers GACC registration and labelling compliance, a Chinese site, a WeChat official account and mini-program store, and around six months of sustained Xiaohongshu content plus KOC seeding. Cross-border e-commerce first, general trade later. Spending less than that produces the Tmall outcome described above: a store nobody finds.
Is the Japanese restaurant channel worth it if my product is premium?
Yes, but target differently. With 63.3% of Japanese restaurants in China now at 100 RMB per head or less, mass chains will not pay import prices. Focus on the omakase and izakaya segment in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Chengdu, where chefs sell the provenance to their guests and the ingredient cost is part of the story. Smaller volumes, much better margin, and those chefs become your credibility for the retail launch.
Working with us
Gentlemen Marketing Agency has been in Shanghai since 2012 and we have taken Japanese food, sake and seasoning brands through GACC registration, cross-border launches and restaurant distribution, including through two import bans. We handle the Chinese-language side end to end: Xiaohongshu search positioning, WeChat private domain, Baidu B2B lead generation and buyer introductions to restaurant groups and importers. We work on long-term retainers, not one-off campaigns, because this category rewards brands that are still standing when the door reopens.
Contact us for a free assessment of your category, your registration status and your realistic China opportunity.
