  Flavour-violating Higgs interactions are suppressed in the Standard Model
such that their observation would be a clear sign of new physics. We
investigate the prospects for detecting quark flavour-violating Higgs decays in
the clean ILC environment. Concentrating on the decay to a bottom and a light
quark $j$, we identify the dominant Standard Model background channels as
coming from hadronic Standard Model Higgs decays with mis-identified jets.
Therefore, good flavour tagging capabilities are essential to keep the
background rate under control. Through a simple cut-based analysis, we find
that the most promising search channel is the two-jet plus missing energy
signature $e^+e^-\to bj+E_{T}^\text{miss}$. At 500 GeV, the expected $95\,$% CL
upper limit on $\mathcal{B}(h\to bj)$ is of order $10^{-3}$. Correspondingly, a
$5\,\sigma$ discovery is expected to be possible for branching ratios as low as
a few $10^{-3}$.
