Global Expansion
Building the group outside Japan — the United States, Southeast Asia, and the practicalities of operating across borders.
Articles on this topic
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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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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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Barry and Brian — My Teachers Were Friends, Not Classrooms
What saved me in Canada was not a classroom. It was Barry and Brian, two local friends in Saskatoon. Honestly, I barely attended school — I just spent every day with them.
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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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To the Boy Who Never Knew How to Study
I read without understanding; I failed at arithmetic. Looking back, I wasn't unintelligent — I had never been taught how to learn. So I poured myself into sports, where effort visibly converted into results.
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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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Six Job Offers in One Month — Turning Gratitude into Action
My parents paid dearly for my four years and eight months in Canada. So the moment I returned, I started job-hunting — no break, no "finding myself." In one month, I had six offers. I had no academic credentials to boast of.
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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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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 Meaning Behind the Name INSTINCT
Our company name, INSTINCT, means exactly that — instinct. I leapt to Canada on a "Why not!"; I began working with my partner the day after our first dinner; our CFO, hearing about human stem cells for the first time, said "it clicked instantly" and bet the final chapter of his global finance career on us. It is the answer your entire accumulated experience produces in a single instant — faster than reasoning, but not without grounds.
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Does Believing You Can Change Actually Change You? — On Mindset
Does believing "I can change" actually help? Educational psychology holds a famous lineage of research: children with a growth mindset — believing ability can be developed — were reported to persist at hard tasks, learn from failure, and improve over time. The size of the effect remains under active scrutiny, but one point recurs: the interpretation of failure determines the next action.
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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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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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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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