Founder / Awards & Recognition
Awards
A record of the recognitions earned across two countries and three decades of building — one relationship, one venture at a time.
Sherjung Bahadur
Singh 'Raji' Sandhar
President of the Seinan Group and founder of Tokyo Mithaiwala, his career began not in sweets but in the fashion houses of Tokyo, where he arrived in the aftermath of the 1984 riots with little Japanese and no roadmap. What followed was a slow, deliberate build — a garment manufacturing house, a chemical trading company, restaurants across two nations, and eventually Japan's first Indian sweet store. The recognitions below trace that arc.
International Business Leadership
What started as a single garment order from a Tokyo fashion house — samples flown in from India and finished with a quality no one expected — grew into a company spanning industrial supply, imported goods and manufacturing across four countries. Building trust in a market that had never bought from an Indian supplier before took longer than the plan allowed, but the order book that followed became the base for everything after it.
Today that same enterprise, the Seinan Group, operates across Japan, Vietnam, India and North America — a footprint few first-generation entrepreneurs manage to build from a standing start in a foreign country.
Excellence in Hospitality
Ghungroo, the first Indian fine-dining room in Tokyo's Omotesando district, opened in 1993 on the belief that Indian food deserved the same table Japan reserved for French or Italian cuisine. Imported spices, reworked recipes and an insistence on authenticity slowly changed what Tokyo expected an Indian meal to taste like.
The restaurants that came after it — including EN in Delhi, named Times of India's Restaurant of the Year, and Tokyo Mithaiwala, Japan's first dedicated Indian sweet store — extended that same standard across borders, in both directions.
Global Brand Development
From a single fashion sample line under the name EKOM — taken from the Punjabi 'Ek Onkar', one God — the portfolio grew into apparel manufacturing, chemical production, imported wine and beverages, and eight restaurants split across Japan and India. Each new venture was entered the same way: research it fully before scaling it.
The next chapter is already under way, with the next generation choosing Canada as a base — close enough to the diaspora to keep the culture, far enough from the original struggle to build on what already exists.
Cross-Cultural Entrepreneurship
Long before a formal Sikh community existed in Tokyo, a home shrine stood in for the gurudwara that hadn't yet opened. That instinct — to hold onto where you came from while fully belonging where you are — carried into the business itself, in a partnership that paired a Punjabi trading sensibility with Japanese precision and long-term thinking.
Two children raised across both cultures, a marriage that bridged New Delhi and Tokyo, and a business built on Japanese retail relationships all point to the same principle: cultures aren't a compromise to manage, they're a resource to combine.
Food & Beverage Innovation
Noticing Japanese food had no real presence in India led to opening EN in Delhi in 2013; noticing the reverse — that Japan had never had a proper Indian sweet counter — led to Tokyo Mithaiwala in 2019, the country's first dedicated mithai store. Between the two openings sat years of importing spices, wine and beer, and reworking recipes so neither palate had to compromise.
The pattern was always the same: find the gap nobody else was serving, then be patient enough to get the sourcing and the recipe right before opening the doors.
Lifetime Achievement in Business
The story starts with one suitcase and a one-way ticket out of Delhi in 1984, taken not as an adventure but as the only safe option at the time. Everything since — the modelling years, EKOM, the chemical plant, eight restaurants across two countries — has been built on the same discipline his parents instilled before he ever left home.
Three decades on, the measure of that career isn't any single venture but the people who stayed on for the ride: a team that, by his own account, treats the office less like a workplace and more like a place where things they once only hoped for actually happen.
“Always share your knowledge and success with the people around you, because you wouldn't have made it this far without them.”
A legacy still being written
These recognitions sit alongside three decades of restaurants, factories and family — a story still unfolding across Tokyo, Delhi and Toronto.
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