Corporate Strategy
How BIOT sets direction as a Nasdaq-listed holding company: capital strategy, portfolio design, and the decisions behind the group structure.
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Explainers·
What is BIOT? INSTINCT BIO TECHNICAL COMPANY HOLDINGS INC., explained
BIOT is the Nasdaq ticker symbol of INSTINCT BIO TECHNICAL COMPANY HOLDINGS INC., a holding company incorporated in the Cayman Islands whose ordinary shares began trading on The Nasdaq Stock Market on 24 July 2026. Its operating businesses originate in Japan and span research and development, sourcing, manufacturing, regenerative medicine-related technologies, cosmetics, wellness and consumer brands. It is a separate legal entity from its operating subsidiaries, including INSTINCT BROTHERS.
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What does vertical integration mean in biotechnology?
Vertical integration means a single group owns consecutive stages of its value chain rather than buying them from third parties. In biotechnology that typically means research, materials sourcing, manufacturing, brand development and distribution sitting inside one corporate structure. The practical effect is control: one quality standard, traceability from material to finished lot, and faster iteration between research and product. It does not, by itself, make any product more effective, and it does not replace regulatory approval.
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On My IPO Day, I Ate Dinner at Home as Usual
"How did you celebrate your IPO day?" My honest answer: I didn't. On July 24, 2026, our company began trading on Nasdaq. That evening, I had an ordinary dinner at home.
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To Bring Joy to Friends — How My Name Became My Life
My parents chose characters that mean "to bring joy to friends." As a boy in Shimonoseki, a port town in western Japan, I simply could not study. Reading without understanding, failing at arithmetic — all I had was sports. When my junior high school had no soccer club, I switched to basketball, practiced relentlessly, and made the prefectural select team.
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Zero English, and a Plane to Canada 15 Days After Graduation
Fifteen days after graduating from high school, I was on a plane to Canada. I could not speak a single word of English. The trigger was one offhand remark from someone I respected: "Why not go study English abroad?" The moment I heard it, one thought arrived — why not, indeed.
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I Cried for a Month in Saskatoon — The Uses of Homesickness
My Canadian destination was Saskatoon — freezing winters, only a few dozen Japanese residents in town. An eighteen-year-old who knew only sports, with zero English, I spent my first month homesick and in tears. People only get serious when there is nowhere to run.
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"Why Not?" — The Single Remark That Changed My Life
Every turning point in my life began with someone else's casual remark. "Why not study English abroad?" sent me to Canada. "There's someone I'd like you to meet" introduced me to my lifelong business partner.
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No Soccer Team? Then Reach the Top in Basketball
In elementary school I lived for soccer — but my junior high school had no soccer club. A moment where sulking would be understandable. Instead, I started basketball and practiced relentlessly: mornings, evenings, holidays.
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Why We Won Small Tournaments and Lost the Big Ones
My boyhood soccer team won almost every local tournament — yet at the big tournaments, we always lost. Winning small but losing big: I've carried that frustration for forty years. Small stages can be won on individual talent; big stages are decided by total preparation and team design.
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From a Perfume-Loving Teenager to a Cosmetics Chairman
I loved perfume as a high schooler — just a simple "like," with no career calculation. Yet when I job-hunted after Canada, I chose a perfume maker from six offers, because I wanted to work near what I loved. The product development I learned there opened the door to a TSE-listed company, then to my own cosmetics business, and now forms the foundation of BIOT.
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What I Learned at a Tokyo Stock Exchange Company
My product development experience earned me a place at a company listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. There I saw a world that runs not on individual hustle but on systems — for quality, approval, responsibility. But once I ran my own company, I understood: a company without systems dies when its founder falls.
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The Day Two Men at Rock Bottom Started with Part-Time Work
When I met our Senior Managing Director, I was in the hardest stretch of my own life — and he was at rock bottom too. Two people at the bottom usually just lick each other's wounds. "Let's climb up together!" — we worked part-time jobs side by side while stacking up challenge after challenge.
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A Company Is a Work of Art — Why I Build Our Websites Myself
A confession: every website in our group — the holding company's, each subsidiary's, and this very series page — I built with my own hands. "Is that a chairman's job?" I've been asked. My answer is firm: this is precisely the chairman's job.
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Designing a Company on the Five Elements
Our group is designed on the five elements of Eastern philosophy — wood, fire, water, metal, earth. Wood (INSTINCT BROTHERS) grows products and brands; fire (INSTINCT RAS) ignites talent; water (HIROKI GLOBAL) carries trusted materials from around the world; metal (ARTISANS PRODUCTION) transforms materials into products; and the earth — our holding company — supports them all. Standard org charts describe functions; I wanted to design the company as a living organism, where each element generates the next and the whole circulates.
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The Day We Built Our Factory in Kakegawa
In 2019 we built our own factory in Kakegawa, Shizuoka. Outsourcing keeps you light — no capital investment, no maintenance, no hiring. We built anyway, because I refused to entrust the heart of our manufacturing to others.
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Time Flows from the Future Toward Us
Most people believe time flows from past to future. We believe the opposite: the future flows toward the present. This is not wordplay — it redesigns how you live.
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Yoshuku — Those Who Celebrate First Pull the Future In
Japan has an old tradition called yoshuku — "pre-celebration." Hanami, cherry-blossom viewing, was originally a ritual to celebrate autumn's harvest in advance: feast under the blossoms for rice not yet grown, and pull that future toward you. Long before our listing was certain, we raised glasses "as if" listed; we have already celebrated becoming a trillion-yen company, more than once. Pre-celebration makes a future yours — no longer an unseen goal but a landscape already tasted.
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Abandoning "I'll Do X Because Y Happened"
"Sales rose, so we invest." "Results came, so we praise." "We listed, so we celebrate." The world mostly runs on this grammar of because-then. Its true nature is hindsight: moving after seeing results is safe, but decisively slow — and those who move on hindsight walk forever behind the world. Our grammar is reversed: we invest, so sales rise; we trust first, so results come; we celebrate first, so the future arrives.
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Never Spend the Night at a Waypoint
When people reach a goal, they want to stay the night there — banquets, souvenirs, basking in the afterglow. On our listing day, I had an ordinary dinner at home and was moving toward the next blueprint that same day. It is comfortable, and comfort detains people; one night becomes many, and soon you are someone who talks about the past.
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If I Don't Smile, No One Around Me Will
My most important self-discipline as a chairman is not health or time management — it is my own smile. If I am not smiling, the people around me will never smile. A leader's expression becomes the organization's weather: if I cloud over, meetings cloud over, then the workplace, and eventually even customers feel it.
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What Neuroscience Taught Me at 45
I turn forty-five this year, and I have come to appreciate the power of brain science — not as an academic field, but as a simple truth: human drive is determined less by willpower than by the state of the brain. When I am excited, I work dawn to dusk without fatigue; ideas flow, decisions come fast. The same man, drained of excitement, finds even simple tasks heavy.
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My Thinking Is Probably Nothing Like My Seniors'
The world has many magnificent chairmen leading companies worth hundreds of billions — people whose track records dwarf mine. But my way of thinking is probably completely different from those great seniors'. I was a boy in Shimonoseki who couldn't study; I leapt to Canada with zero English, was saved by friends, climbed up from the bottom through part-time jobs.
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On Always Being Affirmative and Positive
Asked what I can do now, my first answer is fixed: remain positive and affirmative — always. It sounds ordinary, but anyone who runs a company knows how hard "always" is. On days of betrayal and unexpected walls, saying "it's over" is easy.
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I Have Decided Never to Run Away
Asked to state my management philosophy in one word: never run. It sounds gallant; the reality is muddier. In business, moments that tempt you to flee arrive regularly — unpleasant reports, heavy negotiations, cleaning up your own failures — and escape routes are always provided.
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What You Do After You Leap on Instinct
I have written repeatedly: trust your instinct and leap. Move on instinct, and a moment of "this isn't what I imagined" always arrives. People split in two: those who turn back declaring their instinct wrong, and those who correct course while moving.
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Koshien, First Round, 12-0 — Dream Big Anyway
Our Senior Managing Director once played at Koshien, Japan's legendary national baseball stadium. His high school team's motto: "The dream is national champions; the purpose is building character." Facing that outrageous dream in earnest carried them to their first national tournament — where they lost the opening game 12–0. He laughs: "Even so, it taught me everything.
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Senior Director's Theme: Enjoy Life
Our Senior Managing Director's essay opens: "Fifty years of life — my theme is 'enjoy life.'" His crushing loss at Koshien, business ups and downs, the grueling road to listing — all line up under that single phrase. "It must have been constant hardship, but inside my head it was fun. We were changing, growing, attempting what we'd never done — and that feeling converted pain into joy." No one can erase hardship, but you can give it meaning: pain understood as part of a challenge becomes the muscle ache of growth.
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Navigating Uncertain Times
Asked about the hardest stretch of our listing preparation, our Senior Managing Director wrote that he struggles to answer: "It was an endless series of firsts, so it was always hard — but once done, it's done, and I barely remember the hardship. The thrill of moving forward outweighed it." The one pain he did name: not knowing — how long it would take, how much it would cost, walls appearing one after another. People who answered 'Let's challenge it positively!' with 'Yes, let's!' — that was everything." When the road has no map, what works is not a map but the face walking beside you.
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"There Is Nothing We Have to Change"
After our listing was set, our Senior Managing Director thought hard and said: "I've been asking myself what must change now that we're a public company's officers — and my answer is: nothing. The real risk is becoming satisfied, stiff, conservative — ceasing to challenge. Changing in the bad sense is our greatest risk." Exactly.
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The Thrill of the First Bus Ride Alone
One of our executives wrote in his essay about his oldest memory: riding a bus alone for the first time as a young boy. The timetable had peeled off; he didn't know if the bus would come, or if the one that came was right; he lacked the courage to ask. Tension first — darting eyes, pounding heart — easing into relief, and only upon arrival, exhilaration.
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Festivals, Bamboo, and the Effort to Stand Out
The same executive's essay describes his town's unusual festival of carrying great bamboo poles — a month of preparation, working late with the town's adults, then four performances a day before crowds, walking tall and thinking "look how strong I am!" His reflection: "There I learned the joy of standing out — and that standing out requires effort." Profound. Adults hide the desire for recognition as something shameful; he converted it into fuel. The wish to be seen, rightly connected, becomes an engine of growth — for children, employees, and executives alike.
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The Night He Missed Olympic Selection and Turned Off the TV
As a national-team trainer, he had one clear dream: the Olympics. Appointed just after one Games ended, he gave three full years — Beijing was within reach. Then the verdict: not him, but his master would go.
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No Geniuses Required — How Ordinary People Beat Talent
His high school basketball team was no collection of prodigies — which is precisely why they discovered something. Unable to win on individual skill, they radically clarified roles: the runners, the coordinated defenders, the set-play executors. Design versus talent — and on a tour of Nagasaki they swept teams they had never beaten.
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The First Time He Saw Adults Enjoy Their Work
Of the day he first walked into our company at twenty-five, he wrote: "I was stunned. I had never in my life seen adults working with such joy." Every adult around him until then had been a complainer; work was suffering to be endured — that was normal. But the people here spoke of work with sparkling eyes and debated the future in earnest.
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Falling for the Man Called Chairman
The youngest executive's essay contains a line that makes me bashful: "Honestly, the biggest reason I joined this company was not the business — I fell for the chairman as a man." Embarrassing, but I write about it, because it holds the essence of hiring and organization. People ultimately follow not conditions but a person. Plans change, products change, offices and salaries change; the one thing that doesn't is "I want to go with this person." Those who join for conditions leave over conditions; those who join for a person prove their worth in hard times.
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An Ordinary Life in Rural Hiroshima
One of our executives grew up in rural Hiroshima — mountains, rivers, an utterly ordinary family. The future he pictured: "Grow up in Hiroshima, work in Hiroshima, become a grandfather there — a peaceful, ordinary life I took for granted." Today he leads a nationwide business as an executive officer of a Nasdaq- listed company in Tokyo. My point is not "never picture an ordinary life" — the opposite: even a young man who pictured the ordinary can be carried anywhere.
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Three Lessons From Losing Business to COVID
Alongside design work, he had built an import business from Europe — until COVID stopped the world. Lockdowns severed the trade at its root; the business he had built was finished. But he converted it into three lessons, written plainly in his essay.
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Never Stray From Your True Calling
From the pain of losing his business, he extracted a single line: "Having drifted from my true calling — design and creative work — was itself the greatest failure." Why do people drift from their calling? Because lucrative-sounding offers always arrive from outside it; one's own field looks plain, and the neighbor's grass looks green. Outside your calling, you are one of the crowd — your accumulated strengths don't apply, and you are dragged into battles of price and capital that bigger players win.
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Why Celebrating in Advance Starts the Brain's Engine — The Science of Yoshuku
Let me examine our practice of yoshuku — celebrating in advance — from the brain's side. Honestly: "dream it and it comes true" is not supported by science; research reports that merely fantasizing about achievement can trick the brain into feeling it already has the prize, draining energy for action. Studies suggest those who vividly picture the desired future and squarely face present obstacles — psychologists call it mental contrasting — act the most.
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Dopamine Fires on Approach, Not Arrival — The True Nature of Excitement
Research on dopamine, the brain chemical deeply tied to drive, reports a crucial property: it works more strongly while approaching an anticipated reward than at the moment of receiving it. The brain burns hottest not when it has obtained, but while it feels itself closing in. This matches my fifty years of experience exactly — the days running toward our listing were hotter than the listing day itself.
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Smiles Are Contagious — A Leader's Face Is a Corporate Asset
"If I am not smiling, no one around me will smile" — my conviction apparently has scientific backing. Psychology has long studied emotional contagion: people unconsciously mirror the expressions and vocal tones before them, and the mirrored expression moves their own emotions in turn. The facial feedback effect — we don't only smile because we're happy; smiling can nudge happiness — has been studied for decades.
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Writing Orders the Mind — The Science Behind Management by Essay
When our executives wrote their life essays, one said: "I finally organized what my life has been." That sense of writing-as-organizing has a research pedigree. Psychology has long studied the effects of repeatedly writing about one's own significant experiences; a well-known line of studies reports beneficial changes in people who wrote for some minutes daily across several days. Writing gives swirling events the shape of a story — with a beginning and an end — and a shaped experience leaves the whirlpool of rumination and settles onto a shelf.
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Motivation Can Be Managed — My Daily Routine at Forty-Five
To close the first half of Season 1.5, let me publish my own daily brain-maintenance routine — nothing special, everything with a reason. Morning: look at the blueprint of the future and confirm today's work is part of it, igniting the approach state. Order tasks by closeness to the blueprint, not by mood.
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Connection Is Health — The Science of Companions Who Rejoice Together
This half of Season 1.5 closes by grounding our philosophy — "cherish the companions who rejoice together" — in the science of health. A famous research synthesis integrating data on hundreds of thousands of people compared predictors of long-term health and longevity and reported that the richness of social connection was among the strongest, with loneliness argued to rival widely known lifestyle risks. The director of a celebrated decades-long study of adult life concluded that what most determines happiness and health is neither wealth nor fame, but good relationships.
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The Brain Writes While You Sleep — Sleep and Memory
The next ten essays are original pieces in which I retell what brain science has shown in my own language as a manager and a man. Neuroscience reports that memory is consolidated not at the moment of learning but during sleep: the sleeping brain replays the day, moves what matters onto long-term shelves, and discards the rest. Learning does not end at the desk; it is completed in bed.
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Ideas Arrive When You Walk — Movement and the Brain
Good ideas do not arrive at the desk; they arrive while walking — and that is not merely a feeling. The effect of exercise on the brain is among the most active research areas of recent years: aerobic activity is reported to enhance factors supporting the growth and survival of neurons, with benefits for memory-related regions, mood stability and concentration, and experiments have reported broader idea generation while walking. Until I left for Canada at eighteen I was nothing but an athlete; I could not study, but I never stopped moving my body — and perhaps those years built the foundation of my brain.
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One Breath Switches the Body — The Physiology of Tension
Before any big moment I do exactly one thing: exhale slowly and long. Research on the autonomic nervous system shows that inhaling and exhaling shift heart rate and bodily state; a slow, extended exhale is reported to support the calming side of the system. When tension shortens the breath, the body concludes "danger" and thinking narrows; deliberately lengthening the breath sends the opposite signal from body to brain.
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Why the Brain Says "Tomorrow" — The Anatomy of Procrastination
Procrastination is not weak will; it is the natural consequence of how the brain values time. Behavioral economics repeatedly confirms that people steeply discount the future: the same reward feels smaller when distant, while a small pleasure at hand looms large. "Success in three years" loses to "one more drink tonight." The human brain comes fitted with a lens that shrinks whatever is far away.
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We Grow Strong Because We Laugh — Laughter and Stress
When I say we exist to increase the world's total volume of smiles, it is not a sentimental slogan; laughter does measurable work in the body. Studies report lower indicators of stress-related hormones in states of laughter and positive emotion, along with changes in pain perception and immune markers. The magnitude and conditions remain carefully debated, but the direction — that laughter moves bodily state — is widely supported.
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Name the Fear and It Shrinks — On the Amygdala
Becoming the chairman of a listed company does not remove anxiety. Because it does not, I learned how to handle it. Neuroscience reports that attaching verbal labels to emotion is accompanied by reduced activity in the amygdala, the region tied to fear and anxiety — a phenomenon called affect labeling.
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Meaning Over Reward — The Research on Intrinsic Motivation
My answer: raise it, yes — but pay alone is not enough. Psychology has reported that adding external rewards to behavior people already enjoy can reduce the motivation welling up from within, and a widely known framework holds that sustained effort requires a sense of deciding for oneself (autonomy), of getting better (mastery), and of doing something that matters (purpose). I have watched this on the floor for decades: at the same salary, the person who is trusted with a decision grows; at the same task, the person who knows whom it is for endures.
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The Brain Can Change at Any Age — Plasticity as Hope
Season 1.5 closes with the one line I most want to leave: the brain can change at any age. It was once believed that adult brains were fixed. Neuroscience has repeatedly shown otherwise — neuroplasticity, the continual remaking of neural connections through experience and learning.
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