April 17, 2025
KYOTO – The area around Kyoto University in Sakyo Ward, Kyoto, is seeing more restaurants that serve Chinese cuisine like that available in China. These “gachi chuka” restaurants are frequented by many foreign exchange students at the university.
“Gachi” means “serious” or “for real” in casual Japanese while “chuka” means China.
Japanese students also visit these restaurants. What’s behind this surging popularity?
Feels like home
Heading north from the Hyakumanben intersection along Higashioji-dori street, about 10 gachi chuka restaurants are concentrated in a less than one-kilometer-long section. The street also houses apartments and supermarkets geared toward students.
Kafugen, one of the restaurants, mainly serves dishes from northeastern parts of China. One of most popular is pork flavored with spices and soy sauce. Even on weekdays, the restaurant is packed with students.
Li Ming is a frequent customer of the restaurant. The 29-year-old is a graduate student at Kyoto University and president of the school’s Kyoto region Chinese Student Friendship Association. He especially likes the restaurant’s offal dishes.
“Since I’m surrounded by menus written in Chinese, I feel a sense of relief as if I were back to my hometown,” Li said. “Compared with those in Tokyo, the restaurants in Kyoto serve dishes that are low-priced and have big servings since many customers are students. I’m happy with that.”
Li feels a sense of security from gachi chuka restaurants run by owners from his country, saying, “They are important places that I can rely on while living in a foreign country.”
Taking business opportunities
Yu Shiwei, 35, from Dalian, runs Kafugen. He discovered a business opportunity around the Hyakumanben intersection, where many students live, as there were few gachi chuka restaurants.
He opened the restaurant in 2018 and another branch near Kyoto University in 2020.
Kyoto-style Chinese cuisine, called “Kyo-chuka,” has taken root in the city. The style uses dashi stock and soup made from chicken bones. A famous Kyo-chuka dish is karashi soba, in which karashi mustard is mixed with Chinese noodles.
But a sizable number of Chinese people do not like the Chinese dishes catered to Japanese tastes. They stick to the same style as dishes made in China, which are more oily.
Yu said that gachi chuka restaurants began increasing six to seven years ago in the area. He assumed that people wanting to open restaurants gathered in the city through networks of Chinese living in Japan, partly because the number of Chinese students has been on the rise.
The number of Chinese nationals who entered Japan with a foreign student resident status in 2024 was 8,634, according to Kyoto city government statistics. That is a roughly 30% increase from 6,656 in 2020.
“In the past, many Chinese students tried to reproduce the flavor of their hometown by cooking on their own,” Yu said. “There are many restaurants that opened in anticipation of the demand from such students.”
Also catering to Japanese students
However, the gachi chuka restaurants around Kyoto University instead choose to cater to Japanese students as customers.
Kafugen copies the business style of the Gyoza-no-Osho chain that originated in Kyoto and serves dishes which are also favored by Japanese. Yu said about half of the customers in his restaurant are Japanese.
Recently, many gachi chuka restaurants prepare their menus to have photos accompany a dish for Japanese who cannot read Chinese.
A 31-year-old Chinese man who runs Zuikouen, a gachi chuka restaurant opened by a trading firm in Osaka Prefecture in autumn last year, said he is satisfied with the business results saying, “There are many Japanese students who want reasonably priced set meals, and so my restaurant has been successful.”
A 20-year-old Japanese student who often goes to gachi chuka restaurants around Kyoto University said, “Though they are often talked about in comparison with ‘machi chuka’ [Japanese-style Chinese food], the dishes have a nice amount of spice. There should be many Japanese who like them.”
Kiyomi Yamashita, a professor emeritus of the University of Tsukuba who is an expert of studies of Chinese migrants, said about the increase of gachi chuka restaurants: “It is not only due to Chinese real estate agents, but also Japanese real estate firms that began accepting real estate deals for the Chinese because Japan fell into an economic slump. That may be a contributing factor.”
He added, “Prompted by refraining from overseas trips due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is possible that demand for gachi chuka, in which people can casually enjoy tastes of Chinese cuisine, has risen.”