Entrepreneurship
Starting things: the founding years, early failures, and the decisions that shaped the group.
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CEO Essays·
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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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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"There's Someone I'd Like You to Meet"
Around the time I decided to go independent, a friend from my trading company days said casually: "There's someone I'd like you to meet." That one remark decided my business life. From the day after our first dinner, that man and I began working together — and for more than ten years since, we have worked side by side, morning to night. Introductions carry a strange power: a trusted person often sees a compatibility that neither party has noticed.
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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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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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Couldn't Ignore 'I Love Art'
He studied computers at a vocational school, felt it wasn't him, even took a job once — but could not ignore the voice that had always been there: "I love art." He let go of stability and re-enrolled, this time at a commercial art school in Osaka. A working adult returning to studenthood takes courage. That one step became the foundation of everything: design in Hiroshima spanning graphics to hotel interiors, then Tokyo — department stores, catalogs, photo direction — then independence at thirty.
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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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We Are Not a Cosmetics Company
A sentence from our Senior Managing Director's essay deserves to stand as our company's definition: "Cosmetics may be our foundation today, but neither the chairman nor I have ever thought of this as a cosmetics company. What we operate is a company that increases the total amount of smiles in the world — unchanged since the day we met." Define a company by what it sells, and its meaning gets lost the moment the product changes. Define it by why it exists, and no change of product can shake it.
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Who Were the Friends Who Saved You?
Mine has been a life continually saved by friends. Barry and Brian in Saskatoon saved an eighteen-year-old with zero English; a trading-company friend introduced me to my lifelong partner; that partner climbed with me out of the bottom. The man named "to bring joy to friends" has, it turns out, lived a life of receiving joy from them.
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Memory of That First Bus Step – First Courage
Nearing this series' close, let me speak of first courage. I once wrote of an executive's oldest memory: a young boy's first solo bus ride — the timetable peeled away, no certainty the bus would come or was the right one, no courage to ask, sweat on his nose. I will quote this story forever, because every challenge in life is a repetition of that first bus.
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Konosuke Matsushita — The Man Who Turned Three "Withouts" Into Blessings
Konosuke Matsushita, revered as the god of Japanese management, described his origins through three "withouts": born without wealth, without education, without health. Leaving school at nine for an apprenticeship, he founded what became Panasonic at twenty-three and built a global enterprise in one lifetime. The astonishing part: he spoke of the three "withouts" as blessings.
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Soichiro Honda — "Success Is the 1% Supported by 99% Failure"
The son of a Hamamatsu blacksmith apprenticed at an auto repair shop at fifteen, went independent, and challenged piston-ring manufacturing — and failed spectacularly. Hitting the wall of his own technical limits, Soichiro Honda, past thirty and already a company president, enrolled as an auditing student to relearn metallurgy. His true greatness, I believe, was this capacity to bear the embarrassment of relearning: his goal was never his dignity but a better product.
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Ibuka and Morita — A "Delightful Ideal Factory" in the Ashes
Tokyo, 1946, amid the ruins: a small company was born in a corner of a department store — Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, later Sony. Engineer Masaru Ibuka and sales genius Akio Morita wrote into their founding prospectus the goal of "a free, open-minded, and pleasant ideal factory" where earnest engineers could exercise their skills to the fullest. In a defeated nation without goods or money, their first banner was not a sales target but joyful work.
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Eiichi Shibusawa — 500 Companies, Not One Made His Own
Eiichi Shibusawa — now the face of the ten-thousand-yen note — was born a farmer's son, became a shogunal retainer, witnessed European capitalism at the Paris Exposition, served the Meiji government, then plunged into business. His output defies belief: beginning with the First National Bank, he was involved in roughly five hundred companies — banking, paper, spinning, railways, gas, insurance — single-handedly tilling the foundations of modern Japanese industry. But his true greatness is not the number: across five hundred companies, he built no zaibatsu, no family empire, believing a company is a vessel of public good, not private gain.
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Shibasaburo Kitasato — Winning Abroad, Sidelined at Home, Building Anyway
Shibasaburo Kitasato, the face of the new thousand-yen note, lifted Japanese medicine to world level. In Germany he achieved the world's first pure culture of the tetanus bacillus and established serum therapy, a new concept of treatment, becoming a candidate for the first Nobel Prize in medicine — among the first Japanese scientists to compete at the world's summit. Yet on returning home he was frozen out, partly for having contradicted his alma mater's theories; a world-class scientist with no place in his own country.
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Estee Lauder — A Beauty Empire Built Hand to Hand
One of the world's great cosmetics companies, Estée Lauder, was begun literally by hand, by a daughter of immigrants in New York. Her origin was a cream made by her chemist uncle, which she applied directly to women's skin in beauty salons and hotels — not explaining with words but touching with hands, showing the change on the spot. "Touch your customer's skin" was reportedly her lifelong creed.
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Steve Jobs — The Exiled Founder and His Dots
The chapter of Steve Jobs's story I find most important is not success but exile. Founding Apple in a garage at twenty-one and changing the world, he was thrown out of his own company at thirty. From that humiliation he never stopped: he founded NeXT, grew Pixar, changed cinema with Toy Story — and twelve years later returned to a failing Apple to fire off the iMac, iPod, and iPhone.
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Sam Walton — The Learning Genius From a Country Town
The world's largest retailer, Walmart, began as a single variety store in small-town Arkansas; founder Sam Walton opened store number one at forty- four — another late-blooming giant. His weapon was no brilliant invention but an abnormal capacity to learn. He devoted his life to touring competitors' stores, measuring aisle widths with a tape measure, copying price tags, adopting every good idea instantly.
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