The ‘No Chinese-Made Products’ Pledge Disappears: Why Former DHC Chairman’s Mail-Order Business ‘Kaze to Yuki’ Dropped Its Signature Promise

Background and Key Points

DHC’s former chairman, Yoshiaki Yoshida, built a public profile on nationalist rhetoric and controversial remarks about Korean and Chinese residents in Japan, and “Kaze to Yuki” is the mail-order catalog business he runs separately from DHC itself, selling health foods, cosmetics, and lifestyle goods largely to an older, right-leaning customer base that catalog shopping still serves in Japan. The “no Chinese-made products” line functioned as a brand signal to that audience, not a regulatory requirement — Japan has no law barring retailers from stocking Chinese goods, and China has been Japan’s largest trading partner for over a decade, meaning Chinese-sourced components and finished goods are embedded throughout Japanese retail supply chains regardless of a given company’s stated stance.

The thread’s real disagreement was over what the wording change actually means: some posters read the shift from an absolute pledge to “we support quality Japanese-made and domestic products” as quiet abandonment of the policy, likely driven by rising costs; others insisted nothing has changed in practice and only the phrasing was softened, since the company reportedly says Chinese-made items still won’t be stocked.

What outside readers likely don’t know is how loose Japan’s “Made in Japan” labeling standard is: a product can carry that label as long as its final substantial processing happens at a Japanese factory, even if raw materials, components, or earlier manufacturing stages were Chinese — and those factories frequently rely on foreign technical intern trainees for labor. That gap between the label’s marketing power and its actual sourcing guarantee is exactly what made the original absolute pledge nearly impossible to keep, and is likely the unspoken reason the wording was walked back rather than defended.