Writing
Essays on selling into Japan and Southeast Asia, GTM strategy, and running executive operations across the US, Japan, and APAC.
NVIDIA, Fujitsu, SoftBank, NEC, Sony, Honda. When a market assembles its AI infrastructure by consortium, a foreign vendor is not competing on product. It is competing for a slot.
METI is not only funding Rapidus. It is manufacturing the demand side. For a foreign deep-tech company, that changes what public money actually is.
The amended Payment Services Act took operational effect on 13 June. It is the clearest example I know of regulation functioning as a channel strategy.
Transportation equipment makers are at 80%. Wholesale is at 94% with no plans at all. Averaging those two produces a number that describes nobody.
Japan's financial regulator has spent the last year building the on-ramp foreign fintechs always said they wanted. The response so far has been close to silence.
METI just committed to capturing 30% of the global physical AI market by 2040. The buying logic underneath that target is not the one in your ROI deck.
Rapidus just raised ¥267.6 billion from the government and thirty-two companies. If you think of that as a funding round, you will misread the entire market.
In November, MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho were granted the first FSA-approved framework for a joint stablecoin proof-of-concept. That is not an experiment. It is a distribution strategy.
Japan's convenience stores are quietly changing what business they are in. If you're still selling to the store-systems buyer, you're selling to a function that is losing budget.
Japan's retail labour crisis made it the most attractive automation market on earth. It also gave the incumbents three years to pick their partners before you arrived.