Walk into any convenience store, variety shop, or pharmacy in Tokyo this summer and you’ll find something that barely exists anywhere else: an entire section devoted to cooling down.
Cooling towels. Cooling mists. Neck wraps. Patches for your forehead, your wrists, the back of your neck. Roll-on cooling gels. Portable fans with misting nozzles. And lately, charm-shaped cooling gels and scented accessories made to hang off a bag (function and fashion in one!), snapped up by young women who want both at once.
These are summer staples, stocked from May through September in every 7-Eleven, Loft and Matsumoto Kiyoshi drug store in the country. The market runs to over ¥300 billion (roughly $2 billion) a year, and it has been growing for more than a decade. Yet outside Japan and parts of Northeast and Southeast Asia, the category is almost entirely absent from mainstream retail.
That absence is key because this isn’t just a local quirk– but a preview of what’s to come.
How Japan Became a Cooling Products Market
There’s a saying worth keeping in mind: politics is shaped by culture. The same goes for marketing. When the culture around us changes, it often leads to new consumer habits, sometimes faster than we realize. By paying attention to which way the culture is moving, you can spot upcoming trends before they become obvious.
The cool-down category is that lesson at scale. It’s what it looks like when a culture meets a changing climate and the market answers before anyone can write the strategy deck. To understand the opportunity, we have to understand the driving forces:
The climate changed, fast. Japanese summers were always hot and humid, but what’s happening now is a different kind of change. The Japan Meteorological Agency puts the rise at roughly 1.24°C per 100 years since records began in 1898, but the recent acceleration is far steeper. The summers of 2023 and 2025 both broke all-time national heat records. In 2025, 132 of 153 weather stations recorded their highest-ever average summer temperatures. On 5 August 2025, Gunma Prefecture hit 41.8°C, the highest ever measured in Japan.
Scientists have started using the word subtropicalisation: a temperate, four-season climate sliding toward something closer to tropical Southeast Asia. The cool-down category is, in a real sense, the consumer market’s answer to a climate that has changed faster than our infrastructure was built for.
Sweating in public carries social weight. Japanese consumers have a complicated relationship with personal presentation, especially in professional and public settings. A product that lets you manage body heat quietly(without visibly struggling, changing clothes or hauling something bulky) solves a cultural problem as much as a physical one.
Japan is a country of walkers. Japan doesn’t have a car culture where air conditioning is simply ambient and constant. People walk to stations, stand on platforms, ride packed trains. The use case is built into how people move and live.
Retail made it happen at speed. Over 56,000 convenience stores nationwide, plus a dense layer of variety shops (Loft, Plaza, @cosme) and pharmacy chains (Matsumoto Kiyoshi, Sundrug), created an efficient way to bring affordable new personal-care products to customers. A product can reach tens of millions of people in just one season.
What the category actually looks like
For anyone unfamiliar with the category, it’s broader, and more culturally layered, than it first appears.
| Sub-category | Example products | Price range | Key players |
| Cooling mists | Face/body sprays with menthol or thermal effect | ¥300–¥1,200 | Lion, Shiseido, Biore |
| Cooling towels | Reusable cloths that activate when wet | ¥300–¥800 | Various, incl. private label |
| Cooling patches | Adhesive gel pads for forehead, neck, wrists | ¥150–¥500 | Kobayashi Pharmaceutical |
| Cooling wearables | Neck wraps, wristbands with phase-change material | ¥1,500–¥8,000 | Koolpak, Thanko |
| Cooling apparel sprays | Spray-on fabric cooling effect | ¥500–¥1,500 | Gatsby, Rohto |
| Handheld misting fans | Rechargeable USB fans with water tanks | ¥1,000–¥5,000 | Various electronics makers |
| Charm-type cooling accessories (trending) | Keychain-shaped roll-on gels, scented cooling charms | ¥500–¥1,500 | Variety shops, emerging indie brands |
That last row is the one to watch, because it’s the stream changing direction in real time. Riding the keychain-cosmetics trend, where beauty products designed to dangle from a bag became a Gen Z status item, a wave of cooling accessories has appeared that blurs the line between personal care and fashion. They’re made to be seen, shared, gifted. For teenage and twenty-something women, they’re self-expression that happens to keep you cool.
Look at where retailers put them. Since summer 2025, charm-type cooling accessories have sat at the checkout and beside the cosmetics aisle in Tokyo variety shops and pharmacies, not in the seasonal-goods section. That placement is a tell. Retailers are reading the consumer correctly: this is beauty, not utility, and younger consumers don’t separate the two.
It’s helpful to understand why worldwide data providers often underestimate the size of the cool-down category. It includes personal care, functional clothing, and consumer electronics all together. Because it doesn’t fit neatly into any one existing market research category, most overlook it.
Why it hasn't crossed over, yet
The demand is already building elsewhere. Southeast Asia has similar or even hotter and more humid weather than Japan, with large, growing cities full of commuters. Southern Europe is experiencing longer heatwaves more regularly, and attitudes towards managing heat are changing quickly. The southern US and the Gulf region have clear uses for these products in outdoor work, sports, and live events, even if car-focused infrastructure reduces everyday demand.
The need is there, what’s missing is the awareness of the category, the retail setup, and, often overlooked, the right way to talk about them with consumers. Japanese consumers have spent years learning that these products actually work. In a new market where the category doesn’t exist yet, the more difficult job isn’t just meeting existing demand — it’s creating demand itself.
What does this mean for foreign innovators?
It’s a test case for climate-driven category creation. As extreme heat becomes a recurring fact in more markets, how consumers adapt, and what they’ll buy to do it, becomes one of the defining innovation questions of the decade. Japan already has the answers. The work is understanding why they emerged here first, and which conditions have to exist before they emerge anywhere else.
The formulation and IP sit in Japan. Lion, Rohto, Kobayashi Pharmaceutical hold decades of cooling-technology R&D that global players will need to replicate or license. Knowing who owns what here is going to matter.
The charm-type trend is a window into Gen Z behaviour everywhere. The fact that cooling products are being redesigned as fashion accessories, and succeeding, tells you something durable about how younger consumers relate to functional things.
Consumer education is the barrier, not product development. The hard problem in global expansion isn’t making the products. It’s getting people to understand why they’d want them. That’s ethnographic and behavioural work, far more than it is quantitative market sizing.
Japan excels at teaching that in this category, a seasonal range isn’t just marketing—it’s also survival. Consumers expect newness aligned with the calendar. Cool-down follows that rhythm: stocked as soon as the season shifts, refreshed annually, gone by October. Stand still, and you lose your shelf spot and consumer habit.
The bottom line
Japan’s cool-down category is one of the clearest examples anywhere of a consumer market solving a problem the rest of the world is only starting to recognise as a problem. The climate is changing. Urban density is rising. The behavioural and cultural conditions for a global cool-down category are assembling, market by market.
The brands and research teams that study Japan now, before the category gets crowded, will be the ones with real expertise when the window opens elsewhere. And that expertise begins with reading why Japan got there first.
The category is sitting in plain sight, in every pharmacy and variety shop in Tokyo. Most of the world just doesn’t know to look for it yet.
Ready to explore Japan’s consumer trends and new categories?
CarterJMRN runs qualitative and quantitative research programmes built for FMCG, beauty and sports brands entering or scaling in Japan.
About CarterJMRN
Our qualitative toolkit spans from in-depth interviews and focus groups to in-situ ethnography and digital ethnography, allowing us to move fluidly between methods and combine them where needed to unlock deeper understanding. We apply this methodological breadth across a wide range of categories, including food and beverage, dining out, personal care, luxury, and AgeTech, where the nature of the question often demands different levels of immersion, sensitivity, and contextual depth.
Want to go deeper? Look at our case studies and other blog articles:
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