India Wants 10 Million Medical Tourists. Where's Japan?

India Japan Kaizen — Health & Beauty Bridge Series, Part 3

Part 1 of this series split health and beauty into a regulated medical side moving almost entirely one way — Japanese med-tech building inside India while Indian pharma exports to Japan sat near zero — and a consumer wellness side already moving both ways, as J-beauty and Ayurveda crossed into each other's markets. Part 2 added real deliverables to both tracks: a vaccine-technology transfer into Serum Institute, a government mandate for Indian-caregiver language centres, and Kao's exclusive Bioré distribution deal — and promised a closer look at medical tourism and the Ayurveda-Kampo overlap. Doing that honestly means starting with a number India just put on the table itself, one that reframes how lopsided this corridor still is.

A Ten-Million-Patient Target — and an Admission of What's Missing

At Sanjeevani 2026 — the medical-value-travel track of the Bharat Health Global Expo at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi — Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal set a target on 7 September 2026 of 10 million international medical value tourists a year, after noting that roughly 3.5 million patients have used Indian healthcare over the past seven years. He paired the target with a five-point plan for the ecosystem that needs to exist to support it:

• Workforce. Train and certify caregivers at the scale international patients expect.
• Transparency. Get more hospitals onto the official "Heal in India" gateway, publishing honest, comparable treatment packages.
• Insurance and health-tech. Goyal explicitly called on insurers and health-tech companies to build products that make the patient journey seamless — timely reimbursement, wider cashless coverage — because today, mostly, they haven't.
• Verified facilitators. Expand facilitator tie-ups abroad while restricting treatment to NABH-verified, panelled hospitals only.
• Geographic spread. Push medical value travel beyond metro hospitals into Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.

The expo itself wasn't small — 50,000 square metres, more than 1,200 stalls, over 1,000 overseas buyers and delegations from more than 150 countries, with Goyal projecting the next edition will be four times larger with sixfold more participation. But the third point on that list is the one worth sitting with: a sitting minister publicly asking insurers and health-tech firms to go build the product, because the product mostly doesn't exist yet. That's exactly the gap Part 2 promised to come back to.

Japan's Side of the Ledger Is Almost Empty

Here's the asymmetry a 10-million target has to confront: medical value travel between India and Japan currently runs almost entirely in one direction, and it isn't the direction "medical tourism" framing usually assumes. Japan's own inbound medical tourism is tiny — Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimates roughly 20,000-30,000 foreign patients a year travel to Japan for treatment, against Thailand's approximately 3 million, Malaysia's more than 800,000, South Korea's roughly 600,000, and Singapore's roughly 500,000. Japan isn't competing for medical tourists at all, let alone Indian ones. The flow that actually matters for this corridor is Japanese patients potentially travelling to India — not the reverse — which makes Goyal's 10-million target, and the facilitator and insurance infrastructure needed to hit it, the more relevant side of the ledger for Japan specifically.

Who's Actually Doing the Work

One facilitator doing the unglamorous coordination work Goyal's plan calls for already exists at real scale. Shinon Healthcare was named "MVT Facilitator of the Year" and "Most Transformative Medical Value Travel Company of the Year" at Sanjeevani 2026 on 8 September, for a model that runs the entire patient journey — treatment matching, travel, airport pickup, interpretation, on-ground support, and post-treatment follow-up — across 18-plus countries and patients from more than 50 nationalities. It isn't a Japan-specific operation, and that's the point: the facilitator layer exists and is maturing, but no one has yet built a version of it with a Japanese-language front end.

A quieter bet comes from the Japanese side. Konoike Transport, one of Japan's largest logistics groups, bought an 82% stake in SPD India Healthcare — a surgical-instrument and equipment sterilization company — in June 2024, converted its Indian subsidiaries into a single management company that October, and is now building toward dedicated sterilization centres in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, and Chennai by 2030, targeting roughly ¥600 million (about $3.9 million) in annual revenue by then. It's a bet on the boring infrastructure — clean, properly sterilized instruments — that underpins hospital accreditation rather than a patient-facing deal, but it's exactly the kind of quality layer that makes an NABH-verified Indian hospital credible to a cautious Japanese referral.

On the consumer side, a smaller channel has quietly existed since 2023: ICMG Partners, a Tokyo-and-Singapore-based Japanese investment and consulting firm, partnered with NirogStreet — India's largest Ayurveda platform, serving a network of Ayurvedic doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and clinics — specifically to bring Japanese health and personal-care products into the Indian market. It's modest next to Kao's Bioré deal from Part 2, but it's a real, working route for a mid-sized Japanese wellness brand that isn't Kao-sized.

Ayurveda's Real Home in Japan Is Inside Kampo, Not Beside It

Part 2 flagged the policy layer catching up to the Ayurveda-Kampo overlap — joint research tying Ayurveda to Japan's ME-BYO concept, and AYUSH-backed Centres of Excellence inside Japan. Market-research firm Bonafide Research's latest read on Japan's Ayurvedic products market adds the commercial texture: the market is growing at more than 8.49% annually through 2031, but it's doing so in what the firm calls a "selective maturity phase" — Ayurveda isn't building an independent retail category in Japan, it's being absorbed directly into the existing Kampo, functional-food, and premium-wellness ecosystem, strongest in Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and Nagoya. Ashwagandha, turmeric, and digestive herbal blends are seeing steady growth; Ayurvedic skincare and haircare are moving faster, riding Japan's own dominant cosmeceutical industry. Either way, any Ayurvedic product entering Japan has to clear Japan's FOSHU and functional-labelling frameworks — the same regulatory lane Kampo products already use, not a separate one built for Ayurveda.

That absorption has a research-institution counterpart worth naming. The University of Toyama's Institute of Natural Medicine, Japan's leading academic centre for Kampo, already runs formal international collaborative research with Thailand's Chulalongkorn University and Peking University in China, and has hosted short Ayurveda-focused student-exchange programmes with an Indian university. What it doesn't yet have is a standing, formal research partnership with an Indian Ayurveda institution comparable to its Thai and Chinese ties — a specific, fillable gap for exactly the kind of academic-to-academic bridge this series keeps surfacing.

What's Still Missing

Line up everything above and the shape of the gap is precise rather than vague. Goyal's own five-point plan names the missing insurance and health-tech layer directly; Shinon's facilitator model exists but isn't built for a Japanese patient; Konoike's sterilization centres build hospital credibility but don't speak to a Japanese referral network; ICMG's channel moves Japanese wellness products into India but nothing comparable moves Indian Ayurveda into Japan's Kampo-adjacent retail shelves at scale; and Toyama's Kampo institute has formal research ties to Thailand and China but not yet to India. None of these gaps need a new idea — they need a specific introduction between people already doing adjacent work on each side.

If you run a medical-travel facilitator, a hospital's international-patient desk, an insurer, or a Kampo-Ayurveda research programme in India or Japan — get in touch. Closing exactly these kinds of gaps is what India Japan Kaizen exists to do.

This is Part 3 of India Japan Kaizen's Health & Beauty Bridge Series, publishing weekly. Part 4 will look at whether any insurer or health-tech company actually answers Goyal's call over the coming months, and track the first Japan-specific medical-travel product or Ayurveda-Kampo research tie, if one appears.