Leadership
Management philosophy, team building, and the responsibilities of leading a listed group across several countries.
Articles on this topic
Last updated:
CEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO 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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
"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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
"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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
At 19, He Filled an Event with 500 People
Another favorite chapter from our Senior Managing Director's story: age nineteen. Having left university, he and his friends launched a fashion event. In his words: "We thought about nothing difficult.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
The Road to Trainer for the National Team
As a young working adult, he spent two years walking the rails — excited only by nights out. Then a magazine article: a judo-therapist serving as an Olympic trainer. I could do that — no, I absolutely will." He saw the article in late July; by early September he had joined that trainer's clinic group, a newcomer among twenty apprentices.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
Repaying Kindness with Results
Now an executive officer at thirty-one, he states his engine plainly: "I want to repay the debt of being raised here — not with words, but with results." Everyone speaks of repaying kindness; he restricted it to "with results," and that restriction contains his whole growth. Verbal gratitude ends on the spot; deciding to repay with results converts gratitude into long-term fuel — with every product finished and every junior raised, you keep asking, "Have I returned a little more?" Better never to finish repaying: the repaying itself builds you. And he knows the direction too: "What the chairman did for me, I will now do for the generation below — raising not one successor but many." Kindness is not only returned upward; it is passed downward.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
The Brain Cannot Leave a Question Alone — Why This Series Ends the Same Way
Let me reveal why every installment ends with the same question. Psychology reports that the unfinished stays in memory: completed tasks are forgotten, while interrupted tasks and unanswered questions linger — the classic observation known as the Zeigarnik effect. Studies also suggest that being asked a question makes people begin observing themselves along its lines, sometimes changing behavior itself.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
We Become Whom We Watch — Mirror Neurons and Leading by Back
That showing beats telling is not mere folk wisdom; it is partly a matter of how the brain is built. Neuroscience has reported neurons that respond while watching another's action much as they do when performing it — the mirror neuron system. Its scope is debated, but the direction, that people trace inwardly what they see, is supported by much research and by daily experience.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
ReadCEO Essays·
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.
Read