What would Japanese youngsters respond when asked about Chinese culture? Chances are that they will point to the neon-lit streets of Yokohama Chinatown, the culinary tradition that invented gyoza and mapo tofu, and perhaps something they overheard from friends, classmates, and coworkers who are part of the 900,000-strong Chinese diaspora in Japan. 

But what about Genshin Impact, the role-playing video game created by Shanghai-based miHoYo?

It certainly is wildly popular. After launching in 2020, it earned $10 billion in revenue by the end of 2025, becoming the fastest mobile game ever to reach that milestone. In Japan, it was ranked first in popularity as late as 2024, and remains within the top 20 for new downloads, more than six years after launch. 

While created by a Chinese firm, Genshin Impact draws heavily from Japanese pop culture. Its graphics use the typical nijigen visuals perfected through the country’s anime and manga industries, while the gameplay features gacha mechanics of obtaining mystery items, so culturally rooted in Japan’s gachapon capsule toy vending machines.

MiHoYo, branded internationally as Cognosphere, had been publishing games for China’s otaku community since its founding in 2011. The co-founders stated that their inspiration for creating games came from personal love for Japanese anime and technology. However, their business has expanded far beyond those roots. Only 5 percent of Genshin’s total downloads come from Japan despite the game’s popularity in the country. And as miHoYo increasingly expands globally, its games now mix Japanese, Chinese, and Western elements to attract a more diverse audience, as the transnational visuals of its successful Honkai series attest. 

Translating Japanese cultural vocabulary for the global audience has become a source of success for other Chinese firms too. Toymaker PopMart manufactured a global fad for its Labubu dolls by applying that same gacha mechanics to its blind boxes, compelling fans to buy more to chase those rare varieties. Consumer goods retailer Miniso – much derided in Japan as “(Daiso + Muji) / 2” – has become an international promoter of Japanese characters such as Chiikawa and Hello Kitty through licensing agreements.

Notably, Miniso has more than 8,000 stores in 110 countries. With Japanese firms largely absent from large swathes of Africa and South America, Chinese firms have become the first point of contact local consumers have with Japanese aesthetics.

Now, these Chinese firms are ready to sell Japanese culture back to Japan. If miHoYo’s success in Japan through Genshin was accidental, the next wave of Japanified Chinese products will be anything but. 

Following PopMart’s entry into the Japanese market in 2022, Miniso-owned toymaker TopToy entered Japan in 2025 using the same formula. Mellojoy, leveraging Japan’s love for punipuni, engineered a craze among young Japanese women for its own handmade squishies. Even Miniso itself is making a return to Japan through a pop-up shop in collaboration with renowned idol Lisa. 

Japanese firms will now be in an unusual situation of competing for Japanese consumers in products they have long believed to be idiosyncratically Japanese. The case of the BYD Racco is illustrative. The Chinese electric vehicle giant became the first foreign company to ever launch a dedicated Japanese kei car, a class of ultra-compact cars found only in Japan. Japanese carmakers long considered the kei class to have a technological, cultural, and regulatory moat deep enough to deter foreigners. After the Racco sold more than 1,000 two weeks after its launch, domestic rivals were driven out of their complacency and compelled to respond. Suzuki’s recent launch of the e SKY, an electric kei car using BYD-made batteries, will surely ignite more competition in the previously insular market.

As that competition heats up, Japanese firms may come to discover that consumers no longer really care what it means for a product to be culturally Japanese. A coordinated effort to promote the country abroad through the Cool Japan Fund’s investments in media and retail proved a costly failure, while Miniso plans 900-1,000 new stores every year and BYD is readying the Racco for the international market. 

As Genshin Impact showed us, people are interested in a Japanese aesthetic that anyone can access affordably. That means commercialized and scalable products, rather than ones completely made by Japan.