Localization blind spot: Japan’s Wego returns to China with a row in tow

What happened Japanese fashion retailer Wego announced on its Chinese social channels on September 4 that Wego Harajuku, a concept flagship, would open at 755 Huaihai Middle Road in Shanghai on September 29. The store returns the brand to offline retail in China more than a decade after it exited the market. Why the ‘My Hero Academia’ collaboration collided with September 18 in China Three days later, on September 7, Wego’s Japanese parent company announced a collaboration with “My Hero Academia” for the Japanese market, with the collection scheduled to launch on September 18. The manga and anime franchise has been largely absent from Chinese platforms since 2020, when a villain who conducted human experiments was given a name incorporating “maruta,” or “logs” — the term Japan’s Unit 731 used for the people it experimented on. The unit was a biological warfare program of the Imperial Japanese Army headquartered in occupied Harbin, where it ran lethal experiments on Chinese, South Korean and Russian prisoners through the 1930s and 1940s. Publisher Shueisha and author Kohei Horikoshi apologized and the character was renamed, but the title was pulled in China and has not returned to normal distribution. September 18, 2026 marks the 95th anniversary of the Mukden Incident, when Japan’s Kwantung Army staged an explosion on the South Manchuria Railway at Liutiaohu and shelled the Chinese garrison at Beidaying, triggering the occupation of northeastern China. Chinese accounts treat the date as the start of a 14-year war of resistance. Criticism built from September 10, when consumers posted objections under the brand’s overseas accounts and disrupted a Taobao livestream then in progress. Wego removed the collaboration posts without comment, though reposts of them remained live. The apology followed the deletion rather than preceding it. The Jing Take Founded in 1994 as a 10-sqm used-clothing store in Osaka’s Amerikamura district, Wego opened its first Tokyo store in Shimokitazawa four years later and went on to build a flagship in Harajuku, shifting from vintage reseller to a fashion and lifestyle retailer aimed at teenagers and consumers in their twenties. It now operates about 190 stores in Japan, according to parent company Onward Holdings, which acquired the remaining stake in Wego in September 2024 and holds it outright. How ‘ita bags’ built Wego’s following among China’s young anime buyers Recognition in China falls well short of Uniqlo or Muji, but Wego has built a following among younger consumers through anime and character merchandise, and above all through “ita bags” — totes and backpacks with a clear window panel for displaying pins, badges and figures. The brand sells on Tmall, Taobao, Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote) and Douyin, and its two Taobao storefronts have more than 400,000 followers between them, according to brand materials cited by Beijing News. Its ita bags come in several sizes with interchangeable inserts and compartments built for collectibles, a specification that goes beyond the single display panel most competitors offer. The Shanghai flagship takes that business offline. Wego tested the market with two ita bag pop-ups first — at Jing’an Joy City in October 2024 and at Wujiaochang Bailian ZX in June 2025 — and cites the response to both as the basis for committing to a permanent site. The company describes the 187-sqm store as its first in China, a decade and a half after its original Shanghai venture closed. What Wego China and its Japanese parent said about the cancelled collaboration Late on September 11, Wego’s China operating entity, Shanghai Weiguo Trading, issued a statement on Xiaohongshu saying its Japanese parent had planned and announced the collaboration in Japan, for the Japanese market, and had failed to check the content carefully enough. It apologized for the lapse and said it had consulted the parent company. The statement said the collaboration had been terminated and the related material deleted, and that the company would tighten its review and approval process for future collaborations and public announcements. Japan’s notice took a different line. Wego said on its Japanese website that the collaboration goods would not go on sale, citing unspecified circumstances and apologizing for the inconvenience. The statement made no reference to Chinese consumers or to the September 18 date, and Japanese trade coverage read its phrasing as a shelving rather than a cancellation, leaving room for a later release. Wego China had told consumers the project was terminated. Why Japanese fans turned on Wego over the withdrawn anime collection Reaction among Japanese fans was hostile. Japanese outlets reported that comment threads under the announcement ran heavily against the company, with readers criticizing it for withdrawing a collaboration days before release while offering no explanation. Some tied the reversal directly to the Shanghai opening and read it as a concession to the China market. The company is now being criticized in both markets — in China for scheduling the collaboration, in Japan for abandoning it. Calls to boycott Wego spread across Chinese social media, but the effect on its core customers appears milder than the online reaction suggests. Anime and ita bag buyers who spoke to Jing Daily said the speed of the cancellation and apology had stopped the row from escalating. Lea Liu, a third-year university student in Nanjing who owns several Wego bags, said the brand has held its standing among ita bag buyers for years. “It’s considered one of the original ita bag brands,” she said. “People generally think its quality, design and capacity are very good.” That reputation, she said, makes it hard for buyers to drop the brand over a single controversy. The damage to Wego’s image, then, may prove more contained than the volume of the reaction implied. The harder question is what the episode exposes about the limits of localization: Wego’s China business was built on anime culture and ita bags, and it was a decision taken in Japan, about Japanese stores, that put the Shanghai opening at risk. What Wego’s misstep reveals about the limits of localization strategy in China Localization has conventionally meant adapting products, stores, marketing and communications for the market. That definition assumed a degree of separation between markets that no longer holds. A campaign announced in Tokyo for Japanese stores reached Chinese consumers within days, and they judged the company on it — not on its China business, which had done nothing wrong. So the test of a localization strategy is no longer only what the China team can do. It is whether headquarters can recognize the limits of its own judgment, and whether sign-off sits with people who would have known what September 18 means. Wego China said it would tighten its review process, but the collaboration it apologized for was approved in Tokyo. Wego Harajuku is due to open on September 29, 11 days after the collaboration would have gone on sale. The company has committed to a permanent site in a market it left once before, on the strength of a subculture it has just demonstrated it can misread — and it now has a store opening to stage while Japanese customers are angry about the decision that saved it. The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.

Localization blind spot: Japan’s Wego returns to China with a row in tow

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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Localization blind spot: Japan’s Wego returns to China with a row in tow

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag