This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on June 2, 2022.
YIFAN reported that Japan's reopening after the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions in Tokyo and 17 other prefectures came too late for many bubble tea operators. A category that looked highly promising before the pandemic had already cooled sharply, especially for newer Chinese tea-drink brands that had treated Japan as a priority overseas market.
FASHIONSNAP counted 26 milk tea shops in Omotesando in 2019; by 2021, 18 had closed. Nayuki, described as the first listed tea-drink brand, shut its first Japan store after only about one year of operation. Heytea's long-rumored Tokyo debut never moved beyond consumer speculation on Xiaohongshu, while machi machi, once featured in Jay Chou's music video, had also faded from view.
The Japan expansion logic for Nayuki and Heytea was built on a real tea-drink boom. According to Fuji Keizai, Japan had about 1,300 tea-drink stores by the end of 2019, more than triple the number three years earlier.
Taiwanese brand Chun Shui Tang entered Japan in 2013 and helped reposition milk tea beyond pearls, with greater emphasis on tea itself. Gong cha and CoCo followed, presenting themselves clearly as tea-specialty cafes rather than only tapioca sellers. Later, brands including Happy Lemon, The Alley, Chatime, Shiny Tea and machi machi opened in high-traffic youth and fashion districts such as Omotesando, Shinjuku, Shimokitazawa and Yokohama.
When machi machi opened its first Japan store in 2019, Jay Chou appeared in support. The store also appeared in the music video for his song "Won't Cry," where Ayaka Miyoshi's character worked there, immediately turning it into a social-media check-in destination.
At the peak, "milk tea" and "drinking milk tea" ranked first in different categories of a Japanese schoolgirl buzzword ranking. The verb "tapiru," meaning to drink tapioca milk tea, became one of Japan's top buzzwords of the year. Harajuku even opened what was described as the world's first bubble tea theme park.
The saturation of Japan's coffee market also helped create room for tea drinks. Domestic coffee consumption was about 453,000 tons in 2019, down 4% from its 2016 peak. Liu Lier, a veteran media professional and writer living in Japan, wrote for Nikkei Chinese that some consumers, especially women, considered tea healthy but did not want to brew it traditionally; diversified bubble-tea formats made adoption easier. Gong cha Japan president Ryosuke Kuzume similarly said people who liked Starbucks but did not like coffee were a core customer group.
Social media amplified the boom. Young Japanese consumers used Twitter, Instagram and TikTok to share photos and videos, helping the category reach unprecedented scale.
But the reversal was just as fast. Japanese customs data showed tapioca pearl imports reached 3,000 tons in 2018. From January to July 2019 alone, imports hit 6,300 tons, more than double the full-year 2018 volume. From January to July 2020, they fell to 3,900 tons. By September 2020, Asahi Shimbun was already reporting that bubble tea had lost its appeal and that Harajuku, once a key destination, had a high closure rate.
Some Japanese media compared the cycle with earlier food fads such as tiramisu, crème brûlée and cheese steamed cake in the 1990s: fast up, fast down.
That timing hurt late entrants. Nayuki did not open its first Japan store until July 2020 in Osaka, during a COVID-19 peak, when restrictions had already reduced offline commercial activity and the opening generated limited social-media momentum.
The first wave of bubble tea brands differed from China's newer tea-drink players. Nayuki and Heytea were built around fruit tea, tea-leaf quality and flavor layering. Before entering Japan, Nayuki founder Peng Xin said the company invited Japanese product and business teams to inspect Nayuki stores in Shanghai, Nanjing and other cities. The Japanese team believed Japan had not previously had this kind of new-style tea brand.
Fruit tea and original-leaf tea were expected to become the next growth categories after bubble tea, but they did not reach the same height. The problem was partly product-market fit and partly timing.
Some consumption barriers had already improved during Japan's third tapioca boom. The Alley founder Chiu Mao-ting had previously worried that bubble tea had failed in Japan before and that Japanese consumers were not accustomed to eating or drinking while walking. From 2015, however, street snacks such as ice cream and crepes became more popular, making on-the-go consumption more accepted.
Waste remained a problem. Public trash cans are scarce in Japan, and discarded milk tea cups became a burden. A Shibuya environmental policy official said casually discarded cups created new local issues, including insects and rodents.
Fruit tea created additional barriers:
For Japanese consumers, paying more than 500 yen for a fruit tea with limited fruit content compared poorly with buying fruit directly at a supermarket. This mismatch weakened the new-style tea model from the start.
The chain brands that survived in Japan were rarely fruit-tea-led. Gong cha, for example, added coffee in some stores over the previous two years, pricing it below milk tea at 250 yen for a small cup and 300 yen for a medium. In July 2021 it also launched a series using fruit vinegar, positioned around beauty benefits.
The article noted that new-style Chinese tea brands were also under pressure at home. Nayuki, despite raising capital through its listing, was not necessarily flush with cash amid COVID-19 and a weaker economic environment. Its expansion had slowed, and in 2022 it used repeated price cuts to widen its consumer base and support performance. Heytea also cut average prices by RMB 3-5.
Japan carried higher store-opening and ingredient costs than China, making it difficult to replicate the fast-store-opening strategies that brands such as Nayuki or Chayan Yuese had used domestically.
Heytea may have drawn lessons from Nayuki's early setback. Although it created an official Japan Twitter account, HEYTEAJAPAN, in October 2019 and released recruitment information in 2020, the account had stopped updating by late 2021. Its Tokyo first store, expected two years earlier, still existed only in overseas Xiaohongshu discussion.
The broader lesson for operators is that Chinese milk tea did not receive the reception in Japan that brands expected. External shocks over the previous two years played a role, but the more important issue was reliance on China's domestic success formula: heavily loaded drinks and influencer-driven check-in marketing. As with content products, daily-consumption brands need precise localization when going overseas.
Note: IPO, expansion and pricing figures are historical, based on the article's June 2, 2022 context.