For years, marketers have treated Northeast Asia as a hierarchy. China was the gravitational centre, the crown jewel market, while Japan and South Korea were adjacent opportunities. Brands won the Chinese Tier 1 markets first, then exported ideas outward.
But according to Julien Lapka, founder of the strategy and cultural insights consultancy Inner Chapter, the regional dynamic is rapidly transforming.
Speaking on the 100th episode of the podcast ShanghaiZhan, hosted by Ali Kazmi and myself, Lapka described Northeast Asia not as three isolated markets but as an increasingly interconnected cultural ecosystem in which consumers, retail concepts, aesthetics, and behaviors constantly flow among Shanghai, Seoul, and Tokyo.
“Travel has absolutely exploded across these three cities,” Lapka said. “All of a sudden, you’re creating a lot of cultural exchanges. People are seeing how different cultures operate, how brands operate, how retail operates.”
Shanghai’s official government data shows South Korea became the city’s largest inbound tourism market in 2025, with more than 909,000 South Korean visitors – a year-on-year increase of over 100%. Meanwhile, the Japan National Tourism Organization data shows Chinese visitors to Japan reached 6.71 million between January and August 2025 alone. Those flows matter because people are no longer simply traveling to shop. According to Lapka, they are traveling to experience different ways of living, consuming, and escaping digitally conditioned routines.
Lapka calls this “algorithmic escapism,” a desire to leave a constant digital trap for more human, authentic experiences. Chinese consumers are increasingly looking to Japan for these moments.
“Even if they want to escape, Chinese consumers know they are still being fed the same visuals and aesthetics as everyone else,” Lapka said. “That is starting to spawn a lot of tourism to Tokyo: to vintage shops, one-of-a-kind items, and retail experiences that cannot be replicated online.”
As a result, coffee shops, museums, concept stores, neighborhoods and hospitality experiences are becoming the new influencers. Consumers in these three markets are no longer simply buying products; they are buying atmospheres, rituals, textures and emotional meaning.
“It’s not faces, but spaces,” Lapka says, describing how influence in Northeast Asia is increasingly shifting away from celebrity creators toward physical environments and communities.
This trend explains why Japan’s cultural influence remains so powerful in the region. Why South Korea has heavily shaped regional beauty culture, ingredient transparency, and trend acceleration across China, Japan increasingly represents something slower and more deliberate: craft, detail, and material quality.
The Japanese concept of omotenashi – attentive, ritualized hospitality – increasingly resonates with consumers exhausted by frictionless yet emotionally empty digital commerce. Luxury becomes more about service, intimacy and human connection, and less about brands and logos.
Lapka does not believe that Northeast Asia will turn into a culturally homogeneous market. If anything, the nuances between China’s hyper-speed experimentation, Korea’s socially engineered trend culture, and Japan’s reverence for craft are becoming more significant in each market.
Brands that succeed will not try to force themselves into culture through blunt visibility or scale alone. Instead, they will create experiences that consumers genuinely want to participate in, in spaces where the brand feels naturally embedded in the story rather than imposed upon it.
“The logic completely flips,” Lapka said. “You’re no longer trying to create a lifestyle through the product. You’re trying to contextualize the product within a lifestyle consumers already want to belong to.”