Setting up Sushiro Korea and opening the first store in Seoul (2011)

The author’s view

The explanation that it went abroad because the domestic market was saturated does not capture the character of this expansion. At the moment it committed, Akindo Sushiro had left the stock market and sat under a fund, and it operated 321 stores in Japan. That president Toyosaki Kenichi nonetheless placed a local company capitalized at 3 billion won first, and set a target as distant as 80 stores in seven years, was — it appears — because there was no way to learn whether a format assembled in Japan around a flat ¥100 plate would also hold outside Japan, other than to open its own stores and see.

The figures it raised were not, however, realized as raised. Against a target of 80 stores in seven years, the overseas network as a whole, Korea included, passed 200 stores only in February 2025. The plan to launch with almost the same menu as Japan was likewise rewritten early, into a line-up carrying such things as shrimp nigiri topped with tomato. What supported the East Asian expansion that followed was less the accuracy of the plan first drawn than the fact that judgment could be left to the stores on the ground.