With Japanese food enjoying a global boom, culinary training institutes in Japan have seen a surge in foreign students eager to learn how to make the country's traditional cuisine.

The number of international students has more than doubled, with 424 enrolled in fiscal 2017 compared with 178 in fiscal 2010, according to the Japan Association of Training Colleges for Cooks.

Their popularity seems to be a reflection of the 30 percent rise in Japanese restaurants abroad in the past two years, with 118,000 on record as of October 2017. Helping to fuel the boom was the addition of washoku — or traditional Japanese cuisine — to UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2013.