In the interwar period, women and men across Indian Ocean Africa dressed in Japanese-made apparel and locally tailored clothing made from Japanese fabrics. This paper reflects on the nexus of consumer culture, capitalism, and empire through a consideration of this unprecedented demand for Japanese cotton goods in Eastern Africa and its myriad reverberations. Before the Second World War, no other category of imports was as important to British colonial Eastern Africa’s global interface as cotton goods. From the early 1920s, Japanese textiles and apparel circulated across Indian Ocean Africa, and by the 1930s Japanese goods accounted for nearly 90% of the most popular imported textile varieties in much of Eastern Africa. Changing sartorial cultures, combined with Japanese manufacturers’ efforts to appeal to regional consumers, resulted in strong commercial ties between Indian Ocean Africa and Japan. This was a boon to Japanese industry, but it produced a perceived crisis of British imperial power that engendered multifaceted efforts to redirect African consumer choices. To appreciate some of the implications of these linkages, the paper sketches patterns of global inter-determination and highlights the limits of British imperial economic policies. Just as important, it suggests that demand for Japanese goods reveals gendered, transcultural ways in which Eastern African consumer choices simultaneously affected patterns of Indian Ocean connectivity, industrial production, economic policy, and international relations.