Founder's
Journal

When I told someone, three months before the program, that I was going to run it,

they said: Only three months left?? Can you really fill it?? Why not do a practice run first — a “Season 0”???

I think they were worried for me. I think they said it so that I wouldn’t fail. Having people like that around is something to be truly grateful for.

But what does failure even mean? Not enough people showing up? The people who come being disappointed? Bad reviews from participants?

Recently I was talking with the dear Mikako Yusa, one of our speakers, and she said something that stayed with me: “Work is something like a prayer.”

No matter how lovingly and earnestly you make something, you can’t control how it will be received. So you do what you can, and then all you can do is pray.

When you keep making the things you believe the world needs — this is what the world needs!! — and putting them out there, telling people about them, there are plenty of times it doesn’t land at all, and just as many where you think, wait, this is what lands??

But isn’t this something many people experience, not just entrepreneurs? The piece you were sure was a masterpiece goes unread. Your post gets no likes. Your kids won’t touch the meal you worked so hard on. (Back in my Accenture days, I worked as a private chef in about a hundred homes with children, and learned to cook nutritious food that kids would actually eat — an answer for all the moms worried their kids wouldn’t eat vegetables. Kids are honest; they won’t eat what doesn’t taste good, so having them eat it was a real joy.)

So all you can do is try from every angle. How do I get this across to people, to the world? How can society get even a little better? Is this a form I myself can enjoy? Would I still do it if I were to die tomorrow? Why don’t I feel like doing it? You feel all of it, think it through, and simply try.

What am I doing, really? There is no success and no failure. I am simply living.

Still — the words of people who express themselves and share something with the world, starting with Mii-chan (Mikako Yusa), have a sparkle and a beauty to them. They carry weight and lightness at once, and they stay with you.

Now, back to where we started: three months before the program. The ideal floating hazily in my head still wasn’t in words. Three months to go, and so much still unsettled. No wonder people were worried.

Among my entrepreneur friends is a superwoman who can do everything herself. “I built the website myself!” “The product’s a subscription, so it sells without much effort.” “Bought a company in cash.” “Bought a house.” And so on. I, on the other hand, was born under a hopeless star: there’s so much I’m bad at, I often stall, and there’s a lot I simply can’t do alone. I had people I could turn to for encouragement and advice, but at the time no one who would roll up their sleeves and work alongside me. I knew that’s what I needed.

That’s when someone told me: once you have teammates, I’ll invest.

As I talked with all kinds of people and looked for sponsors, someone told me they’d invest once I had teammates.

“Apparently when Jobs pitched to investors, he was told they’d invest if he brought on someone who could handle marketing and logistics. Wako-chan, your idea is wonderful, but it’s vast — not something one person can make happen alone. Rather than gathering investors right now, why not gather teammates first? Once you have people to carry it out, I’ll invest.”

Speakers and supporters began telling me the same thing: the vision is wonderful, but to realize a vision that big, you need teammates. Not advisors, but people who could walk the path with me. I knew it already. But my supporters were all senior to me, and it was hard to ask them to commit. With a new venture in its launch phase, I couldn’t offer attractive terms. I might be able to hire one person, but unless they intuitively grasped this hard-to-verbalize worldview and could run with it, I had no capacity to train them. I’d never before found someone — pro bono or contractor — I could rely on like a partner, so asking people for help had come to feel like a burden. I think my own stance was part of the problem, too.

When I shared all this, they said: “People who want money probably won’t help you. But there must be people who resonate with the vision and want to do it with you. And if you can’t find them, you’ll end up doing only what one person can do, on a small scale — and then realizing that vision will be hard. Wako-chan, you have the ‘all-alone’ mental model, so that’s your theme.”

They were right. What I want isn’t a comfortable, carefree life for myself alone. It’s to help build the kind of society I wish existed. Money alone won’t make that happen. I need teammates who resonate with it and will give it shape alongside me. Of all the advice I received from so many people, this was among the most meaningful and loving.

From there, a few young women in their twenties came to mind. Of the four I spoke with, three either lived abroad or had grown up overseas. They shared my concerns about Japan as seen from the outside, and agreed to help with the work.

The fourth had never lived abroad, and it didn’t quite click for her. And that makes sense: without experience overseas, you never really feel the gap between Japan and elsewhere on things like gender diversity, so it’s hard for it to click.

I too lived in Hawaii only as a small child, and every time I met my American relatives or visited their homes, I sensed that all sorts of things were different. But the world I saw truly began to change three years ago, in 2023. There’s still plenty more, but back then it struck me like lightning how fixed I had been in Japanese values my whole life.

I began spending my life with a Western partner who has friends all over the world, and on my own I spend several months a year traveling to countries I care about — the Nordics, South America, Asia, nations that lead in happiness, places of deep spirituality — and connecting with people. Along the way I was shocked by how differently women are treated abroad compared with Japan. At the same time, I was appalled at myself for having tried to fit into this environment, for having settled for the treatment I’d received. I came to feel a real sadness at the Japanese social norms reflected in the little turns of phrase people use. If someone were benefiting, change might be hard. But no one benefits from the lack of gender diversity, from connections thinned by hierarchy, from a society in which young people can’t find hope.

Japan ranks 118th of 148 countries on the Global Gender Gap Index, among the lowest of the developed nations, especially in economic participation (the workplace) and politics. At the world’s top universities, women make up about 50% of students (Harvard 50%, Stanford 52%); at the University of Tokyo, 20%. Women hold 12% of management positions, versus 40% in the U.S. and Europe — 130th of 146, last in the OECD. (Sources: World Economic Forum, Global Gender Gap Report 2025 / Harvard University Fact Book, Stanford Common Data Set, official University of Tokyo data)

People who have come to Japan from abroad understand this better than the Japanese do — not just as numbers, but as lived experience. Those who have moved here from overseas are acutely aware of the problem. You could see it at an English-language workshop on gender diversity I attended recently: about 90% of the participants were foreigners. It is our own country, and yet you can’t see it without looking from the outside.

If this stays as it is, I will end up disliking Japan. And not only me. I grew alarmed: at this rate, the women who notice the diversity gap between Japan and the world — the most mobile ones, which is to say young, talented women with options — will increasingly choose to leave. Companies that cling to Japan’s domestic social norms will find it ever harder to hire talented people, and Japan’s beautiful culture and industries will steadily wither.

Whether Japanese or not, people who are entirely domestic and people with an international outlook are worlds apart. But Japan is an island nation, with a language barrier so steep it’s known as the developed country where English is least understood. There are few chances to encounter information from abroad, and an international outlook is hard to come by. In fact, two of the three women in their twenties who had joined the work were, at that very moment, suffering the kind of harm that Japan’s particular social norms so often produce — and soon after, both left the companies they worked for.

Last night I released the four dialogues we’d hastily lined up for the run-up to TBJ, which starts tomorrow, went to bed — and this morning overslept my 8:30 a.m. meeting. My second time oversleeping this week.

It was only a meeting with my own team, but I don’t usually oversleep (or so I believe — apologies if I actually do it a lot). With ten days left before TBJ begins, in this final stretch that comes down to stamina, I decided that now of all times I needed to look after my body as I always do. So this morning I went to a yoga studio a little farther from home, in Futako-Tamagawa.

Even while traveling I do yoga or Pilates three or four times a week, but on weekdays in Tokyo I can’t spare much time, so I usually go to studios in the city center within thirty minutes door to door of my central Tokyo home, and never get a moment away from the bustle. On Sundays a teacher I love holds a yoga class in Futako-Tamagawa, so I did morning yoga and am now writing this on the wide lawns there. Soaking up the sun among adorable dogs, tiny babies and children, families everywhere, I can feel how precious life is — just being here makes me happy. Then several children came over, shook my hand and said, “Good luck with your work.” Thank you. What a rich place Futako-Tamagawa is.

Right now, the person supporting TBJ most closely, wholeheartedly, is Emi, who lives in Canada. With a thirteen-hour time difference from Japan, and the goal of doing everything we possibly can before the program begins, we’re meeting basically every day, at 8:30 a.m. and 9:30 p.m. Almost none of this could I ever do alone, so I’m truly grateful to Emi for not running from the last-minute scramble before the festival and seeing it through. She’s clearly someone who has lived in a world where you finish what you start, and I find her deeply reassuring.

Emi has lived in Canada for about ten years, since university, and her husband is from Mali, in Africa. With people of many nationalities living around her, it seems that simply going about her days lets her feel the breadth of the world. She has both the ability to pick up, without words, what someone is trying to convey, and the ability to put it into words. And she doesn’t just protect her own pace — even in an emergency like now, when we absolutely have to get it done, she fights alongside me. She is someone you can truly count on. I’m tempted to share her — if you’re struggling to put ideas into words or to execute them, do talk to Emi! — but for now, I’m keeping her all to myself.

People like Emi are what I called, yesterday, “highly mobile talent”: people with the option to work anywhere in the world. Yet she has chosen, out of a wish to be a bridge between Japan and the world, to work on services that brighten the future of Japan, and especially of young people. I want to say: thank you for working for Japan.

Five years after founding my company, it took Emi’s arrival to finally teach me what a teammate really is.

I dislike being managed, and I dislike managing. I’m the type who thinks everyone should be free to do what they want. By “what they want,” though, I mean while sensing that we live within an ecosystem. If what you want breaks something — harms nature, society or people, or ignores what you’ve been given — I think it’s hard to feel true abundance within the flow of that ecosystem.

In Japan, and especially in Tokyo, it’s hard to feel that you’re part of an ecosystem. Politics, education and many other factors have entrenched a passive stance; the structure mass-produces people who wait. So it’s easy to take everything we receive for granted. Being a founder or an entrepreneur doesn’t automatically mean you aren’t waiting, either. I myself notice, again and again, the passive self ingrained in me by a life lived inside Japan’s social norms.

Even when I haven’t asked her to do something, Emi weighs the priorities, comes to me to discuss, prepares what’s needed, thinks through with me every single word we want to treasure — and keeps getting things done with a just-ship-it stance, like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “Done is better than perfect” (which I only recently learned of, hearing Kathy Matsui quote it). She calmly moves forward on everything she can, so that I never have to think about anything extra — “I’m the leader, so…”, “I need to give instructions…” — and can quietly focus on my own work. She doesn’t live in a world with borders like employer and employee, manager and subordinate. This, I realized, is the world I had longed for when people create something together.

What makes a teammate? I’ve been asking that the whole time I’ve been building things of my own, and at last I can see a light. All I can say is: thank you, God, for such a lovely gift.

Pricing is always a headache when you build a service. Today I want to write about how TBJ arrived at its prices.

One distinctive thing about TBJ is that I set aside, for the moment, whether the program would break even on its own, and started by asking what kind of space I wanted to create. The big theme, one I’d always felt, was “to create a diverse space for people who feel the world in front of them is narrow and confining.” This time the program was, for now, for Japanese participants, so there would be no diversity of nationality — so I decided to secure diversity across generations instead, and began designing it so that people of many ages could take part. In the end we were joined by people spread fairly evenly from their teens to their sixties. The funding needed for a sustainable structure was something I deliberately thought about only after deciding what we wanted to be.

I’ve taken part in many programs and consulting engagements ranging from tens of thousands to millions of yen, and have offered programs and consulting in that range myself, to individuals and companies alike, all the while searching for pricing that feels good. Founders’ communities, academic programs, offerings with no price on the website that you buy after attending a seminar, ones that funnel you into a one-on-one meeting — there are so many ways to market, I thought. And there were a few spaces I wanted to learn from: it would be lovely to gather people like these, or, I’d love participants to experience this kind of connection.

The closest to “I want a space that gathers people like these” was the Regenerative Futures Camp (RFC), a program run by Tomohiro Hamakawa of Earth Company.

In the programs and communities I’d joined until then, the participants were mainly adults in their forties and up. In Japan, learning has become a luxury for grown-ups, and I assumed young people simply found it hard to make time and money for it. But Tomo-san’s RFC was different. The pricing, the themes, and above all the atmosphere Tomo-san creates — I realized this was why young people were gathering there. About half the participants were younger than me. It had been a long time since I’d been among young people with such bright eyes, and it made me very happy. Their anxieties and hopes about the future reminded me, fondly, of my own younger self, so full of worries — and the experience reminded me how keenly young people can sense the purity of an adult’s energy.

For “I’d love participants to experience this kind of connection,” eumo was the first thing that came to mind. The adults there seemed set free, as if they’d gone back to being students, remembering how to play and reclaiming themselves. It struck me as a place that had become a home for people who had lost themselves in adapting to society — a source of salvation for grown-ups, creating so many smiles. There was much I wanted to learn from it. In particular, the person leading it, Nao-san (Naoki Iwanami), is a stamina monster, a machine that radiates energy. His energy spreads, and everyone around him seems to light up. I was deeply inspired by how he is, and by the way his energy is contagious.

I first encountered eumo in 2023, through Kozo Takei (Take-chan), whom I deeply admire. I met Take-chan in 2016, when I was a university student, so we’ve been friends for ten years now. Back then I had just started my corporate business, and when I was struggling I wanted to consult an adult with a clear heart, so I remembered Take-chan and reached out. He introduced me to eumo and said, “Why don’t you take the eumo Academy? It’s a bit pricey, but I’ll help with the cost. I always support interesting young people.” And he did. My business had only just started and I had no financial room at all, so it helped enormously. I still can’t forget being touched by Take-chan’s big heart and warmth — his unconditional giving. Carrying with me something invisible I received from him, something more than money, I wanted to create a scholarship-like system for the young generation who will shape the future. That is how today’s pricing was designed.

The standard price is ¥350,000. With a referral, students up to university level pay ¥30,000 — less than a tenth; those 35 and under pay ¥120,000, roughly a third; and those 36 and over pay ¥320,000. Several of our guests run programs themselves, so I consulted them, and we considered whether to tier by income or by age, whether to create free invitation slots, and so on. Raising the funds to keep these prices going, and whether adults could really deepen their learning alongside students from junior high through university as a participant experience — this time, everything is an experiment. That said, having run all kinds of programs for companies and individuals, and having joined so many spaces myself, today’s TBJ is the fullest version, at this moment, of the space I can picture and say: this is what I always wanted!

To keep offering these prices, we need to secure funding elsewhere. I’ve been reaching out to owners of small and mid-sized companies who are open to learning and new things — “Why not make your environment more diverse? Why not offer learning to your young employees?” — and some of these presidents have started saying they want to take part themselves. Right now I have a real sense that if I keep patiently reaching out to open-minded leaders, this can spread through society in a sustainable way.

I always notice that the people who put their faith in a service just getting off the ground are, almost always, founding presidents or second-generation presidents who turned a company around — people who know how hard it is to build something. I am truly grateful to everyone who has joined us or supported us.

And now, TBJ Season 1 begins tomorrow. We’re in the final push, and thanks to our guests, supporters and ambassadors sharing the word, we’ve been receiving last-minute applications almost every day this past week. If you’re on the fence, come join us on this journey in Season 1 ^^