Company history

The company begins with a café. In 1974 Munetsugu Tokuji and his wife Naomi opened Bacchus in Nagoya; he was twenty-five, born in 1948, raised in a children’s home, and had come to the restaurant trade by way of a housebuilder and a spell in real estate. Aichi was thick with coffee shops competing by piling free bread and salad beside the coffee — service as goods — and Naomi later said their differentiator from day one was the opposite: service as service, hospitality done properly. When customers began asking for something with rice, the couple settled on curry, which was quick to serve; but the tinned commercial curry the suppliers brought them was not good enough, so they made their own, home-style. That recipe is still the base of the taste.

In January 1978 they opened the first Curry House CoCo Ichibanya in a Nagoya suburb, the name a play on koko ga ichiban ya — “this is the best one.” Letting the customer choose the amount of rice and the level of heat dates from these years, and grew into the chain’s signature: rice from a 300-gram standard in 100-gram steps, heat up to level ten, and some forty toppings. Before opening, the couple had bought every brand of curry roux in the local supermarket and tasted them against each other; they chose House Foods, a decision that would still matter thirty-seven years later. The first franchise followed in 1980, Ichibanya Co., Ltd. was incorporated in July 1982, and a new head office and central kitchen opened in Ichinomiya, Aichi, in 1983.

What made the network scale was the Bloom System, launched in January 1981: employees who had trained in a company-run or owner-run store could go independent, as a married couple, with their own shop. The head office charged them no royalty tied to sales — it earned instead by selling them roux and ingredients — because, in Munetsugu’s reasoning, a system where a franchisee pays more the better it trades destroys the will to trade well. General franchise applications were closed off entirely in 1995: from then on stores went only to people the company had trained. Quality control was correspondingly heavy — dozens of supervisors grading stores monthly, head-office staff visiting incognito, and a founder who arrived at five in the morning to spend two or three hours reading the customer comment cards that arrived by the thousand each day, faxing the complaints on to the owners concerned. When the post-bubble years brought price destruction across Japanese restaurants, Ichibanya refused to discount and held its customers on service instead. It passed 100 domestic stores in 1988 and opened in Hawaii in 1994.

Munetsugu had turned brokers away for years — he had no wish, he said, to run a business facing its shareholders — but twenty-five years and 500 stores from the coffee shop, and in poor health, he changed his mind. The sequence he then followed is the interesting part. He handed the presidency to his wife in 1998 and moved up to chairman; the shares were registered over the counter in February 2000, exposing the company to outside scrutiny; and in June 2002 both founders left the business altogether. He was fifty-three. As “special adviser to the founder” he kept himself entirely out of management from that day on, joking that he could read anything important in the newspaper.

The man who took over, Hamashima Toshiya, had started as a part-timer at twenty when CoCo Ichibanya had four stores, joined the company in 1982, and been the first employee it ever demoted, after sinking a new store handed to him at twenty-one. He had proposed himself for the job — asking, the previous autumn, to be made president from the coming year — and attached conditions: sole representative authority, and the founders out of the board if possible. The founders, who regarded him as the person who best understood what the company was for, agreed. It is worth noting that this was less the fruit of succession planning than the arrival of someone willing to ask.

Hamashima set a target of 2,000 domestic stores and scrapped the internal rule stopping a franchisee from operating in more than one prefecture. Ichibanya listed on the Second Sections of the Tokyo and Nagoya exchanges in March 2004, opened its first Chinese store in Shanghai with House Foods that September, passed 1,000 stores in December, and moved to the First Sections in May 2005. Over the following decade it refurbished more than 1,200 existing stores into places customers could linger with a comic book and a power socket, went entirely non-smoking a month after the health law took effect in 2003, and in 2009 introduced store-level marketing, letting individual outlets design their own promotions and limited menus — one franchisee’s venison curry made it onto the regular menu. Abroad it reached Korea and Thailand in 2008, Hong Kong in 2010, the US mainland and Singapore in 2011, and 100 overseas stores by the end of 2012; in January 2013 Guinness certified it the largest curry restaurant chain in the world. Revenue for the year to May 2015 was $363.6M (¥44bn), about 1.7 times the level at flotation, with a record net profit — earned, unusually for deflationary Japan, without ever joining the price war.

The relationship with House Foods predated the first store — it was the roux the founders had picked in the supermarket taste test — and every gram of CoCo Ichibanya roux had come from it since. House had bought a stake in 1998 and become the second-largest holder in 2002. In July 2015 it was Hamashima, not either principal, who went to House Foods to say the founder wished to sell; that December House Foods Group took 51% by tender offer, and the Munetsugus sold their entire 23.17% for about $165.3M (¥20bn). Ichibanya kept its listing and became a consolidated subsidiary. For House, with household roux demand thinning, the logic was to hold the whole chain from raw material to restaurant, and to let a professional restaurateur lead the export of Japanese-style curry that House had been attempting in China by joint venture since 2004.

The founder’s own conduct was consistent to the end: thirteen years after retiring he had remained a major shareholder purely because the company preferred it, and he took the offer without hesitation, putting the proceeds into the charitable foundation and the Nagoya classical music hall he had built. What the deal did not do was make the business safe. One month after the subsidiary agreement, in January 2016, it emerged that frozen beef cutlets Ichibanya had sent for disposal had been resold by the contractor and were on supermarket shelves. Hamashima called it deeply regrettable, but treated seriously the customer criticism it exposed — that the company was throwing away too much food in the first place — and set out both to change the disposal method and to cut the volume discarded.

The rest of the group-company work was administrative and slow. The fiscal year-end was moved from May to February in 2016 to align with the parent, making the year to February 2017 a nine-month stub, and the shares were split two-for-one. In March 2017 Ichibanya bought out the joint ventures running roughly 60 stores in China and Taiwan and took them under direct management — the acceleration abroad that had justified the deal took more than a year to begin. London followed in December 2018, and in June 2019 Ichibanya formed a joint venture with Mitsui & Co. to enter India, the country curry came from. In March 2019 Kuzuhara Mamoru succeeded Hamashima, who had run the company for sixteen years.

COVID hit the chain through footfall. In the year to February 2021 revenue held at ¥44.2bn but operating profit halved, from ¥5.2bn to ¥2.6bn, and the company got through on takeaway, delivery platforms, mobile ordering and direct support to its franchisees. It did not stop investing: in August 2020 it finally opened in India, in Haryana, with Mitsui & Co., after roughly a decade of planning; that October it took over a plant factory, and in December acquired the trading company Daikoku Shoji. In 2021 it published a long-term plan, Ichibanya Vision 2030.

Customers came back, and prices went up. Revenue recovered to ¥48.3bn for the year to February 2023 and then set records three years running — ¥55.1bn, ¥61.0bn, ¥65.5bn. Operating profit did not follow: ¥4.7bn, ¥4.9bn, ¥4.7bn, all short of the ¥5.2bn earned before the pandemic. Repeated price revisions to cover raw-material costs left domestic same-store customer counts running below the prior year from September 2024. The founding principle of never discounting has, under inflation, turned into a different and harder problem — raising prices without losing the customers.

So the shape of the company changed. Alongside new formats of its own — a store in Kyobashi built to the specification of its overseas outlets, a curry-bread shop under Nagoya station — Ichibanya began buying restaurant businesses outright: the ramen operator Takei in March 2023, the Fukuoka hotpot chain LFD Japan that December, another ramen business in January 2025, a late-night parfait specialist that December, and a spice-curry operator in March 2026. For a company that grew for half a century by polishing one format, absorbing other people’s brands is the largest change of course in its history. Its 2025 capital policy named M&A and overseas expansion as the destinations for retained earnings, and set a target of ¥10bn of consolidated operating profit for the year to February 2030, with North America as the growth priority. The store count stands at roughly 1,200 in Japan and more than 200 abroad.