In June 2025 Nikkei wrote that products and services that “colour shared spaces with scent” were drawing attention in Japan.¹ Two of its examples come from large companies not usually associated with hotels or offices: S.T., the household-freshener maker, will ship deodorising fragrance for hotel rooms — a cumulative 300,000 rooms by 2028; and Rohto, a pharmaceutical company, sells aroma diffusers for offices. Both are selling the same thing — not a smell, but the feeling that a place is looked after.

Relaxed, but still able to concentrate.

The report opens at the Shinjuku head office of Misawa Homes, a housing developer. Step into a room on the 15th floor and a faint citrus hangs in the air. “We wanted a place where people can relax yet still concentrate,” says Miyako Uemura, who worked on the floor’s design.¹

Those two things — faint, and a clear purpose — are the whole lesson. Scent in a workplace is not meant to be smelt; it is meant to go unnoticed, until people go home and realise the day felt lighter.

A place where people relax — but can still concentrate.

Two big companies, two ways in.

S.T. came in through hotels: deodorising fragrance products for guest rooms, with a cumulative target of 300,000 rooms by 2028.¹ Rohto came in through offices, with diffusers from its scent laboratory BÉLAIR LAB, on sale since 2021.⁴

The most telling example may be S.T. itself. The company created its own corporate fragrance — from more than 34,000 words of employee and partner interviews, three candidates, then a company-wide vote — and uses it at the entrance of its head office and on the business cards it hands to clients.³ A fragrance company scenting its own space: a sign that this is taken seriously.

The numbers from Japan’s aroma association.

How big is it? The Aroma Environment Association of Japan (AEAJ) puts Japan’s space-scenting services market at 2.3 billion yen in 2024 — up 6% on 2021 — inside a 419.3 billion yen market for scented products.² Small next to household fresheners, but moving up, and the players are now large companies. In Indonesia we see the same pattern two or three years behind: from hotels, to showrooms and clinics, then to offices.