From bubble tea and corn dogs to K-pop and plushies, Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese brands have captured the pocket-money market.

Ayla and Edie, both aged 12, are hanging out in Westfield Stratford City, a shopping centre next to London’s former Olympic Park, on a Saturday afternoon. They first go to T4, a Taiwanese outlet that sells bubble tea – a sweet, multicoloured cold drink with chewy, or exploding, tapioca balls at the bottom. Ayla went for a rose tea; Edie for strawberry flavour. They cost £6 each. “It is quite expensive,” says Ayla, “but I earn money from doing chores like unloading the dishwasher, hanging up the laundry.”

They head a few metres down the centre to Kenji, a gift, homeware, snack and stationery shop that describes itself as an “east Asian-influenced brand”. As a birthday present for a friend, Ayla buys a £10 “sushi cat” plushie – a squidgy stuffed animal with a pillow strapped to its back as if it were a bed of rice topped with tuna. “My friend brings in sushi to school every day. She’s really into it,” Ayla says.

Finally, they head to Pop Mart, a Chinese shop, where I meet them. The shelves are lined with hundreds of 8-10cm figurines, intricate and brightly painted £13.50 plastic statues that the company describes as “art toys”. Some are based on well-known characters, such as Harry Potter or Teletubbies, but most are designed specifically for Pop Mart and share a distinctively east Asian aesthetic, with exaggeratedly large eyes and disproportionately large heads.

The two friends are huddled over the section that houses Skullpanda, a character created by Chinese artist Xiong Miao, which is part goth, part spacewoman, with ethereal hair and vampiric makeup. “I think they’re both cute and scary,” says Edie, trying to explain the appeal. “They’re weird – you just don’t see anything like this anywhere else.”

In the space of an hour, despite being in east London, they have not left east Asia. They are not atypical. I chat to various Pop Mart shoppers, mostly students in their early 20s, mostly (though not all) female, and many talk about how they watch anime, Japanese cartoons, on Crunchyroll, a specialist streaming app; how they have embraced the big hits to come out of South Korea – K-pop, K-dramas, Korean corn dogs (chicken sausages on a stick coated in breadcrumbs and fried) and kimchi; the fact that bubble tea is their go-to “treat” beverage. And this is by no means a London phenomenon – Oxford has at least 10 bubble tea shops; Kenji can be found in Liverpool and Preston; Miniso, a rival Chinese retailer of homewares, toys, stationery and cosmetics, has branches in Brighton and Newcastle; Glasgow’s Buchanan Galleries shopping centre hosts Kim’s, serving Korean corn dogs and kimchijeon (pancakes); and Costa Coffee – Britain’s biggest coffee chain – is selling blueberry burst and mango berry bubble tea.

When I was growing up in London in the 1980s, nearly anything cool – toys, snacks, fashion, TV or films – came from the US: Levi’s jeans and Converse trainers, The A-Team, scratch-n-sniff stickers, hamburgers and milkshakes, Marty McFly and Ferris Bueller. Now, teenagers and their older siblings are increasingly turning east, specifically to east Asia: China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. It’s not just in shopping centres. This year at Glastonbury one of the acts on the Pyramid stage was Seventeen, a Korean boy band that sold more than 10m albums last year. Only one act sold more: Taylor Swift.

I ask the girls why they and their friends have turned their gaze eastwards. “Back then, America was futuristic,” says Edie. “Now, all the things that are out-there and crazy and different are from Asia.”

Part of the rise is pure economics. In the case of South Korea, the government has actively funded cultural exports such as K-pop and K-dramas, investing £229m last year. And while the meteoric rise of China’s economy may have faltered, some companies have raised huge sums on the stock market to expand on a global scale. The parent company of Temu, the Chinese retailer rivalling Amazon, is one example, and another is Pop Mart, now worth £5.2bn.

There’s more to this shift from west to east than money, however. A generation of young British consumers appears to have found something in the food, culture, brands and bands of east Asia that they can’t find in the west. “I don’t think the young hate America, it’s just they’re now able to see what’s on offer all around the world,” says Zareen Islam, 38, from London, a toy collector who is visiting Pop Mart with her daughters, Ella, seven, and Haani, six. “When we were young, America was always on TV. We didn’t have a window to look into what else was on offer, and now the windows have been opened.”

To find out what windows have been opened, I spent a couple of days talking to customers and bosses at Westfield Stratford City, which welcomes 52 million visitors through its doors every year, and houses a number of east Asian brands other than T4, Kenji and Pop Mart. There is also Miniso; Bunsik, a Korean fast-food outlet serving corn dogs and ddukbokki; (spicy rice cakes); and Fuwa Fuwa, a Japanese fluffy pancake cafe. “It really is such a massive growing trend, it is super exciting,” says Kate Orwin, 49, the UK leasing director of Westfield.

Possibly the most curious of all these brands is Kenji. As a Briton, you would presume it was from Japan. There is a section selling packaged food and snacks, such as matcha-flavoured KitKats and bubble milk tea mochi (spherical Japanese desserts with a chewy outer layer), and a whole wall of plush toys. The rest of the store is a mix of stationery, keyrings, gifts and small homewares. Nearly everything is infused with “kawaii”, the Japanese term for cute.

Browsing the sticker section is Verity Smith, 22, who is about to start a master’s in museum curatorship. She tells me she is a huge fan of Kenji and its stationery. “When it was just in Manchester, I would take the train specifically from London to visit the Arndale shopping centre. I know that’s a bit extreme.” She adds: “They have my favourite stickers in the entire world.”

She specifically likes Suatelier, a Korean brand that makes tiny stickers that are small enough to fit on to a thumbnail: dogs, food, love hearts, bicycles, doll-like figures wearing kimonos. “I put them everywhere, in my notebooks, on my phone. They bring me joy. I just love how cute they are. Look at their faces.”

I ask why she likes the kawaii look. “It’s just the aesthetic that is so very different from what we are used to. Because of the rise of minimalism and decluttering, and the plethora of beige and white, on social media these kinds of shops stand out – it’s the maximalism effect,” she says. “People like the unknown.”

Kenji is not really from east Asia. It was started a decade ago by Derek Yong, now 34, who was born in Malaysia and came to the UK to study economics at Birmingham University before becoming an accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He and his business partner were “brainstorming ideas in terms of what the UK market was lacking”. They had spotted that various distinctively British brands had done well in Asia, notably Laura Ashley, Cath Kidston and Marks & Spencer. “People do appreciate that mismatch of culture, that newness, that freshness,” he tells me from his head office in Warrington. “So we thought, why don’t we create an east Asian-focused brand that would complement the UK market. That’s how Kenji came about.” There are now 10 shops, mostly in the north-west, but he is aiming for 250 within the next 10 years.

So is the brand British or east Asian? “Kenji is British. That’s where our stores are and our team,” he says. “But we always introduce ourselves as an east Asian-influenced brand.”

The day I visit Kenji, many of the shoppers are GCSE pupils who have just finished a chemistry exam. This includes Misbah Chaudhary, 16, and a friend looking for an end-of-school present for their French teacher. “We have a joke with him about avocados. So maybe we’ll get him an avocado plushie,” says Misbah, who adds: “Kawaii is very popular right now, it’s trending all over social media, on TikTok and Instagram.”

Is Kawaii childish? Not necessarily. “We’re at that stage in our life where we have mixed emotions about growing up and becoming an adult,” says Misha. “Leaving secondary school is a big thing, a real transition, and I feel a part of my life has been taken away from me. This kind of allows me to say goodbye to my childhood. Because we’re all children at heart, honestly.”

A few of the shoppers talk about “nostalgia” for their childhood, even though they are barely out of their teens. Shan Ahmed, 20 and studying law, is browsing the Hello Kitty and Cinnamoroll oversized water bottles in Miniso. “Life is a bit bleak at the moment, especially with the cost of living. When you look at all this stuff, it’s just really colourful.”

And few things are as joyful and bubblegum colourful as Korean pop music. Keeyanna, 16, who is in Miniso buying a plushie, tells me that she would take a free ticket to Red Velvet, a K-pop girl band, over Taylor Swift any day. Elizabeth Whitfield, 26, from Chelmsford, shopping in Pop Mart, says: “A lot of my friends are into K-pop. BTS are taking over the world.”

In June, Ateez, an eight-piece boyband, secured their third Top 10 album in the UK in a single year. Stray Kids, another clean-cut octet, headlined Hyde Park early this month.

Some experts believe K-pop is a crucial factor in the rise of the east Asian aesthetic on the UK high street. Prof Kate Taylor-Jones, 44, has just finished a five-year stint as head of east Asian studies at the University of Sheffield. For her, Gangnam Style – a 2012 dance song by Psy that became the first video on YouTube to generate 1bn views – was a watershed. “It opened the door to people becoming passionate fans of K-pop bands – BTS, love them or hate them, hit the stratosphere; Blackpink and all the other ones.”

The rise of K-pop, as well as other Korean exports sweeping the west – the so-called Hallyu Wave – was not spontaneous. “It’s heavily government organised,” Taylor-Jones explains, “sponsored by the government to promote Korean culture worldwide, and this has included food, fashion, music, film and television drama.”

Many of her students, especially those wanting to study Korean, have had their interest sparked by these cultural exports. About 50 to 80 students do Korean at Sheffield, at a time when most foreign language departments at universities are in crisis. “If you went back to 1989, it was about four people,” she says.

She argues that many of the aspects of east Asian culture popular with youngsters, especially girls, share some similarities. “They’re cute. They’re quite friendly. There’s a kind of an ease and a comfort to them,” she says. “These are not threatening in any way. BTS is a perfect example of that – lovely young boys.”

Jae Cho, the owner of Bunsik, agrees, saying that you can trace a link from Gangnam Style to a generation of British teenagers willing to try the ddukbokki and Korean corn dogs that his restaurants sell. I point out that Gangnam Style hit the stratosphere more than a decade ago, when many of his customers were in nappies.

“One hundred per cent. Culture is so powerful,” he says, arguing that Gangnam led to BTS, who sold out Wembley in 2019, and other Korean acts. “I paid £800 for a ticket for me and my daughter,” he blows out his cheeks in horror, “and our seats were so far away. I was expecting to see mostly Asian people in the audience, but it was all Europeans.”

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