Ground Truth
The ACCJ launches its AI Futures Series with a look at infrastructure, energy, and economic security.
The ACCJ launches its AI Futures Series with a look at infrastructure, energy, and economic security.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us. With each passing day, it seems that more of the tools we use are infused with the technology, more people and businesses are relying on it, and demand is forcing rapid reflection on how we work and how we feed AI’s thirst for resources.
American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) members and guests gathered on September 3 at the office of President’s Circle member Cisco Systems G.K. for the first in a series of signature events focused on the technology.
The first session of the AI Futures Series examined the physical and policy foundations that AI requires to scale in Japan.
ACCJ Digital Forum Co-chairs Shuichi Izumo and Ken Haig welcomed attendees and thanked sponsor Aflac and Cisco’s fellow President’s Circle members KKR and Eli Lilly Japan K.K. for their support of the event.
In his opening remarks, ACCJ President Eric John emphasized the importance of the infrastructure behind AI adoption—from semiconductors and data centers to telecommunications and energy.
“The resilience and security of this infrastructure will directly impact Japan’s ability to innovate and compete,” he said.
“The ACCJ strongly supports the Government of Japan’s ambition to make Japan the easiest country in the world for developing and utilizing AI,” he continued. “However, getting the policy balance right will be critical: protecting transparency and security while ensuring that regulation supports, rather than constrains, innovation and the adoption of new technologies.”
Bringing the Pieces Together
The discussion began with a panel moderated by ACCJ Governor Rebecca Green, who is also a partner and APAC technology industry lead at ERM. Offering their perspectives were:
- Nanako Tanaka, country director of government affairs and policy at GE Vernova
- Quint Simon, vice president of public policy for Asia-Pacific at Amazon Web Services
- Junichi Kitamura, director of government affairs and country lead at Micron Memory Japan K.K.
The group represented a range of elements critical to AI infrastructure: semiconductors, the cloud, and power generation. These areas are often discussed in separate rooms, and the goal of the first AI Futures session was to bring them together and highlight how they are interdependent when building a resilient AI supply chain that keeps up with demand and positions Japan as a leader in the field.
“If there is to be a prosperous path forward for AI in Japan, it must be charted by sharing lessons learned, presenting a common industry position, and engaging local governments jointly rather than company by company.”
A Question of Scale
The conversation opened on the sheer size of the moment. Global capital commitments to AI infrastructure now run into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually from hyperscalers alone. Hyperscalers are companies that provide cloud computing resources so businesses can access computing power, storage, and other services on demand.
That astounding investment total does not include outlays for AI labs and colocation providers. According to the panelists, the semiconductor market is on a trajectory that few forecasters anticipated even two years ago, driven in large part by demand for the memory that feeds data-hungry processors. The impact of such demand can be felt by everyday consumers in the rising prices of computers and smartphones caused in part by memory shortages.
Much of this investment has so far been concentrated in the United States. The open question, and the one the panel returned to repeatedly, is how much of the next wave lands internationally, and how much of that share can Japan secure.
The panel was clear that Japan enters this competition with genuine advantages: a strong rule of law, robust intellectual property protection, and a policy environment widely regarded across the region as forward-leaning. These all weigh in its favor, as does the depth of the US–Japan relationship itself. For investors evaluating assets with 15- to 20-year horizons, Japan’s reputation for deliberate, predictable policymaking is an asset rather than a liability.
Where the Friction Lies
But there are challenges. Energy cost and availability surfaced as the single most cited obstacle, followed closely by the state of the grid. Permitting regimes and technical regulations designed for traditional, non-IT facilities add further delay. So does the fragmentation of responsibility for critical infrastructure across prefectures, municipalities, and private utilities, which leaves companies negotiating with multiple parties on questions that elsewhere have a single owner.
Underlying all of it is a mismatch in timescales. Japan has a reputation for being slow-moving. The same deliberateness that reassures long-term investors becomes a liability on project timelines. Industry investment cycles turn over every two to three years, while transmission lines, water infrastructure, and land rezoning move at a pace of five, 10, 15 years or more. The discussion turned to jurisdictions where central government builds enabling infrastructure ahead of committed demand, and contrasted that with a chicken-and-egg dynamic over who takes the first risk.
Talent emerged as a related constraint. Decades of retreat from semiconductor manufacturing have left a generational gap, in engineers and in the professors who train them. This is compounded by shortages in construction labor and specialist trades.
On energy specifically, the discussion converged on two priorities: modernizing the grid, including transmission and interconnection, and expanding the role of nuclear power alongside renewables. Early nuclear power purchase agreements and colocation projects were noted as encouraging signals.
Trust as Infrastructure
Even if all these obstacles can be overcome, winning over everyday people is a must if Japan is to succeed in AI. Community opposition to data centers has become a live political issue in parts of the United States, and while Japan remains comparatively quiet, panelists asserted that social license should be treated as infrastructure in its own right.
Concerns vary sharply from site to site. While energy and water consumption are at the top of the list in news coverage surrounding AI pushback, noise from the construction and operation of data centers, as well as the impact on aesthetics and biodiversity, are also big concerns. The consensus was that industry, not government, must lead here, through transparency, listening, and evidence-based engagement with communities where they wish to operate.
That led to the conclusion: the need for collective action. If there is to be a prosperous path forward for AI in Japan, it must be charted by sharing lessons learned, presenting a common industry position, and engaging local governments jointly rather than company by company. The ACCJ, panelists agreed, offers a natural platform for such work.
In her closing remarks, ACCJ Executive Director Laura Younger expanded on the goals of the chamber’s exploration of AI:
“As we developed the AI Futures Series, we really wanted to look at AI through three different lenses as part of one broader conversation. Tonight we began with the foundations. We looked at infrastructure, energy, and security. In the next session, we are going to start looking at application, what it means for business, and then we are going to broaden the lens even more and to what AI actually means for society, for people—really defining what it means to be human.”
A Night of Stars and Stripes
ACCJ members and partners celebrated 250 years of American independence.
ACCJ members and partners celebrated 250 years of American independence.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) hosted its annual Independence Day celebration on July 1 at Tokyo American Club to mark a huge milestone: the United States’ 250th birthday.
More than 430 members, guests, and partners from the US and Japanese governments gathered for a night of delicious food, inspiring music, and meaningful networking.
After emcee Connor Myers’s opening remarks and Japanese American recording artist Aisha’s rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” ACCJ President Eric John welcomed everyone to the special evening.
“We are fortunate to be living and working in Japan in a period where US–Japan bilateral ties are the strongest they have ever been, and our relationship is also the most important alliance in the world,” said John, a retired US ambassador. “At the same time, our business ties are the healthiest they have been. In part, that is due to the tireless work of the US embassy in collaborating with our chamber and advocating on behalf of our incredible member companies.”
He also noted that the power of the ACCJ comes from its 3,000-plus members, including those who volunteer their time to serve on the Board of Governors and as committee leaders. “Our success is entirely due to the dedication of all of you. Now is the time to rethink and act together on what the business community can do to shape our shared future and strengthen our resilience.”
Minister-Counselor John Breidenstine from the commercial affairs section of the US Embassy, Tokyo gave the Independence Day address.
“Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of extraordinarily troublesome men gathered in Philadelphia and did something the world had never seen before. They argued, they debated, they exasperated one another, and in the end, they changed history,” he said. “America has never been a finished project. It is an ongoing argument, a continuing experiment, a promise being renewed in every generation. Tonight, in the company of friends, allies, and partners, both American and Japanese, we renew it again.”
Breidenstine then raised a glass and led everyone in a celebratory kampai, toasting not only America’s birthday but the bilateral partnerships, friendships, and collaborations represented in the room.
As food service opened up with a classic American barbecue-inspired menu paired with wine from the California Wine Institute, Fender Japan Director of Regional Sales Yasuhiko Yajima introduced the night’s headline performer, legendary American guitarist Marty Friedman. Well known as the lead guitarist of American thrash metal band Megadeth, Friedman moved to Japan in 2004 to pursue his love of the country, language, and a desire to perform with Japanese musicians. He was named an ambassador of Japanese heritage by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2016.
Following a spectacular performance by Friedman and his band, members and guests continued networking in the New York Ballroom and across the way in the RGA Music and Dessert Lounge, where Baskin-Robbins served up a special Fourth of July-themed ice cream sundae.
Also on display in the lounge were limited-edition commemorative Bluetooth speakers created by event partner ELAC exclusively for the ACCJ. Inspired by 250 years of American innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurial spirit and limited to 100 units, the collectible, which combines bold sound, timeless design, and a touch of patriotic flair, was part of the evening’s lucky draw giveaway.
Made possible by the generous support of Aflac, Boeing Japan, and Harley-Davidson, which contributed at the highest level as Stars and Stripes sponsors, along with Liberty Bell sponsors Uber for Business and the National Basketball Association, as well as Red, White, and Blue sponsors Seibu Prince Hotels and Resorts, the evening was a fitting tribute to the enduring nature not only of the United States, but also to the dedication of the ACCJ and its members to ensuring that the country’s relationship with Japan continues to flourish for centuries to come.
Strategic Dialogue
ACCJ leaders visited Washington in June to discuss security, economic, and strategic partnerships.
ACCJ leaders visit Washington to discuss security, economic ties, and shared challenges.
The 2026 ACCJ DC Doorknock delegates gather in front of the US Capitol.
On June 23 and 24, a delegation of nine executives representing the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) visited Washington, DC, for the chamber’s annual DC Doorknock. The trip is an important part of the ACCJ’s advocacy efforts and strengthens US–Japan relations.
ACCJ President Eric John was joined by Chairman Christopher LaFleur, Executive Director Laura Younger, members of the Board of Governors, and Japan-based chief executives and country heads of US corporations.
As the voice of global business in Japan, the ACCJ provided strategic recommendations to address critical issues impacting US companies and outlined measures to expand the strong US–Japan economic alliance.
The delegation met with members of Congress and the administration for discussions on a range of topics, including the bilateral trade agreement, Japan’s $550 billion investment pledge, and ways to shape trade and economic policy outcomes in both the United States and Japan.
While welcoming progress under the 2025 US–Japan trade agreements to expand market access, the delegation emphasized that persistent nontariff barriers continue
to impede growth and innovation. The chamber reaffirmed its support for reducing these barriers, boosting investment, and enhancing regulatory transparency to strengthen bilateral trade and create shared economic benefits.
Over two days they met with Senators Bill Hagerty and Tammy Duckworth, Representative Joaquin Castro, and officials from key US government agencies, including the Department of Commerce, the Office of the US Trade Representative, the Department of State, and others.
The ACCJ’s recommendations target six critical sectors shaping the US–Japan economic alliance: healthcare, digital economy, aerospace and defense, financial services, energy, and automotive. The ACCJ urges both governments to address remaining trade barriers in these industries to strengthen a bilateral partnership that supported $324 billion in goods and services traded in 2025.
“This year’s DC Doorknock highlighted the continued strength and momentum of the US–Japan economic partnership and provided an important opportunity for the ACCJ to advance key priorities across our advocacy focus sectors,” said John. “We were encouraged by the strong recognition throughout the US government of the strategic importance of the US–Japan relationship and by the continued progress being made to deepen investment, strengthen economic ties, and address shared challenges.”
For more about the meetings, read the official press release in English or Japanese.
Beyond the Answer
As AI becomes both coder and tutor, teachers ask what students still need to learn and what role they should play.
As AI becomes both coder and tutor, teachers ask what students still need to learn and what role they should play.
According to Satya Nadella, artificial intelligence (AI) writes 20 to 30 percent of the code in Microsoft’s repositories, with some already passing the halfway point. Sundar Pichai puts Google’s figure at roughly a quarter to a third. At my own startup with 15 engineers, no one handwrites code anymore. Two years ago, any of these claims would have sounded like science fiction.
Linus Torvalds, who created Linux, the operating system that powers every Android phone and most of the world’s servers, has pointed out that compilers write 100 percent of everyone’s code and nobody boasts about that. He is right that this has happened before. The difference is that a compiler is reliably correct, and a large language model is not.
If professional software is increasingly written by machines, what do schools have left to teach?
I put that question to four people from very different disciplines who do this for a living: in schools, in coding boot camps, in research, and in the creation of Japanese school textbooks. Surprisingly, there was a good deal of consensus.
That Which Survives
Simon Guest, a computer science educator and former chief technology officer of Code.org, the nonprofit behind the Hour of Code and the largest provider of free computer science curriculum in US schools, teaches AI at both the high school and undergraduate levels. He explains what he thinks endures using house construction as a metaphor.
“The student could ask an AI to ‘build me a house’ in one shot and simply accept whatever it produces,” he said. “Or they could design the house first, deciding on the structure and what each room needs to accomplish, and then use AI to help build each part. Using the second approach, AI may still do much of the construction, but the student is the ‘builder’ of the system.”
Stefania Druga holds a PhD in AI tools for creative coding, created the Cognimates platform, and is currently a staff research scientist at Sakana AI in Tokyo. She arrived at the same place after a decade of studying children learning alongside these tools. When agents write more of the code, she said, “knowing how to decompose a problem, specify what you want, and evaluate what comes back matters more, not less.”
Kani Munidasa cofounded Code Chrysalis in Tokyo in 2017, initially helping people transition into software engineering, and today works primarily with companies to develop their in-house software development and organizational capabilities. He put it in the language of hiring.
“As building software becomes faster and cheaper, the scarce capability is increasingly not simply, ‘Can you code?’ but ‘Can you decide what to build, and can you build it effectively as a team?’ That’s an organizational capability,” he said.
This is not new. I have hired senior engineers for 15 years by asking why they built the thing they are describing—what prompted the migration, who decided, and whether they understood the reasoning. If somebody simply told them to do it, the interview is largely over. What’s new is that I now ask the same of juniors. The judgment that used to earn a promotion is becoming the price of entry.
AI as Teacher
Let’s do a little philosophical exercise. AI could be the perfect teacher. It is infinitely patient. It never tires of the same question asked a fourth time. It explains at whatever level you need, in whatever language you speak, and it will do it at two in the morning.
Munidasa does not hedge: “I think AI will eventually do a lot of what we traditionally think of as teaching, and probably do some of it better than we can,” he said. “It can already explain concepts, answer questions endlessly, adapt to the individual, review code, generate exercises, and give immediate feedback. We shouldn’t pretend those capabilities are somehow protected from AI.”
Of the years Code Chrysalis spent running consumer boot camps, he said: “People weren’t paying us for access to information. Even when we started, you could learn JavaScript, algorithms, databases, or almost anything else online for free. What they were paying for was an environment designed to transform how they learned and worked.”
The evidence for that predates AI. When Harvard put CS50, its introductory computer science course, online for free, 150,349 people registered in the first year. Just 1,388 of them finished. On campus that same year, 703 of 706 students completed the identical course, taught by the same instructor from the same material.
Guest does not think the difference is pedagogical.
“When a student signs up for an in-person course, they’re accountable to another person,” he said. “If they don’t show up or complete the work, there’s a teacher or professor who notices.” Online, most of that disappears. Anyone who has joined a gym in January and stopped going by spring already knows how that story ends.
“I am much more optimistic about AI as a ‘teaching assistant’ rather than a teacher—an AI that can provide immediate, personalized help, while a human teacher remains responsible for the relationship, motivation, and accountability,” he said.
“AI may become an extraordinary teacher, but education still has to develop the human being.”
Who It Fails
“The people who can benefit most from self-directed AI learning are often the people who have already learned how to learn without it,” Munidasa noted.
“The danger,” he said, “is when you don’t yet know what you don’t know. AI can give you an answer that feels complete, and even produce something that works, without you understanding why it works.”
Druga explained it this way: “An answer machine optimizes time to answer. A teaching tool optimizes what you can do after it leaves the room.”
In her most recent study, North American participants already had AI at home, while several from other regions had never used it. “The tool amplifies whatever head start a child already has,” she said. “That is why access has to be designed, not assumed.”
The Adult in the Room
Japan has already tested whether access on its own is enough. In 2018, Japanese students spent less classroom time on digital devices than students in any other country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The government’s response, announced the following December, was the Global and Innovation Gateway for All, or GIGA, School Program, which put a networked device in the hands of every public school student, with 1,769 local governments, or 97.6 percent, having completed planned delivery by the end of March 2021.
Distribution was never the hard part.
The education ministry’s own reviews now describe uneven use between regions and between schools.
The constraint is the adult at the front of the room. A survey by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) for FY2022 found that 23 percent of junior high school teachers responsible for technology were teaching under a temporary license or an out-of-field arrangement.
That is easy to read as a competence problem, but I do not think it is one. “The gap is teacher confidence, and tools built for learning rather than for answers,” Druga said.
Ayana Murakami, who works on the digital content in Japan’s authorized junior high school textbooks and is a software engineer and PhD candidate at Ochanomizu University, describes a second structural problem. “The national curriculum is revised roughly once a decade, and junior high school textbooks follow a four-year cycle, while AI can change dramatically within months.”
The ministry appears to agree. Its budget documents describe a new junior high subject under consideration, provisionally called Information and Technology, and say work on teaching materials will begin without waiting for the next curriculum revision to take effect.
Murakami is not pessimistic about schools. Asked whether compulsory education is better placed than self-directed learning to help students understand the potential, risks, and use of AI, she said: “AI makes it easier to learn on your own, but it can still be hard to study things you are not interested in. Schools provide a common foundation by giving students a structured learning environment.”
What’s Left
Having granted AI that much, Munidasa draws a conclusion that runs against his own interest. “But if that’s all a boot camp does, then yes, I think AI should replace it.”
What survives is the part that was never about information. “You don’t learn teamwork by reading about teamwork. You learn it by having to build something with another human being when you don’t agree.”
Asked what she would fund in Japan if she could fund one thing, Druga did not name a tool for learners. She chose “AI tools that assume a teacher is present and make her better.” Every person I spoke to for this piece said a version of the same thing.
A country where every child has a device, a teacher, and a teacher confident with both would be the first of its kind. Japan already has two of those three.
The third is the hardest. Teachers need confidence with these tools, as well as AI built for learning rather than for answers. Current AI products will not do that out of the box. They are built to answer. So tools that enhance and support the learning process have to be built.
MEXT is reconsidering the curriculum now, and the obvious move is to add AI to the syllabus. But nothing in a syllabus reaches a student except through a teacher. What we do know is that accountability matters more than it did, and that what is worth teaching is the reasoning rather than the result. As Munidasa put it: “AI may become an extraordinary teacher, but education still has to develop the human being.”
AI in the Workplace
As artificial intelligence gets its own desk in the office, workers and leaders weigh its risks and rewards—and whether age shapes their view.
As artificial intelligence gets its own desk in the office, workers and leaders weigh its risks and rewards—and whether age shapes their view.
A client question nobody has an answer for leads to a stalemate in the middle of a meeting. One colleague takes the old-school approach and books another meeting for next week, spending the days between sketching notes. The other opens an artificial intelligence (AI) tool and has a workable plan within the hour.
That contrast, said Roy Tomizawa, chief executive officer of Reinventing Asia, is the story of AI in the workplace: it is changing the distance between thinking and acting.
“So much organizational time is spent waiting and procrastinating,” Tomizawa said. Unread emails and slow-to-schedule meetings are a kind of quiet tax that most companies never measure. “Half of what was discussed could have been thought through, drafted, or prototyped beforehand by the person who leveraged the available AI tools on his or her own.”
How businesses close the gap between thinking and acting is dividing opinion, forcing leaders to decide what AI should handle and what it shouldn’t, while young professionals are discovering that the skills worth building are shifting day to day.
The Age of the Generalist
Tomizawa explained that the shift goes beyond speed. AI is dissolving the old dependency on specialists. An employee who knows how to assemble credible first versions of a website or a video will have an advantage. Tomizawa called this “the age of the generalist.”
But that doesn’t flatten the value of expertise, he said.
“It actually raises the price of real expertise, since shallow, surface-level work is now cheap and abundant.” Someone still has to know when an AI’s answer is actually good, he added. Without that, the same tools that make people efficient just make them “efficient masters of AI slop.”
Sludge, Slop, and Everything in Between
Not everyone sees the acceleration in such rosy terms. Dr. Greg Story, president of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo, compared the effect of AI on communication to that of social media. Both are technologies that can make people more insular, offering contact with or through a machine as a substitute for real contact with each other.
Story, who has written nine books and recorded thousands of podcast episodes, said listeners can identify his writing by ear. Hand that same task to AI by default, he argued, and you never develop a personal voice.
“If you’re ever going to have a distinctive style, and you keep outsourcing it to AI, then you’ll never achieve that and you’ll be part of the sludge,” he said. “There’s no discrimination between one piece of sludge and the other.”
For most professionals, the risk, he argued, is that AI tends to default to generic text unless given deliberate direction. That caution shows up in how he runs his own training business. Dale Carnegie has built its own AI system, trained only on its own material, to keep answers on brand rather than generic. But Story keeps it confined to prework and follow-up, away from the live instruction that’s actually being sold.
In sales, he explained, AI becomes a genuine research tool for those who ask the right questions, provided someone checks it for hallucinations—the tendency for AI to make up information when it doesn’t have an answer.
“The human dimension is being reduced,” he said, “so we have to hold on to it as much as we can to counterbalance the swing to impersonal communication.”
“AI is dissolving the old dependency on specialists. An employee who knows how to assemble credible first versions of a website or a video will have an advantage.”
Finding a Voice with AI
Ted Katagi, CEO of Kenja K.K., builds tools based on retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, that draw only on a company’s own material rather than the open internet, including the system behind Dale Carnegie’s own AI tool. Katagi makes a distinction between content and style.
“We have to separate things—the voicing of it, which to me is the style, versus the content,” he said. The content has improved with AI use, he said, but the style “will tend to aggregate” as writers rely on it. Part of that, he argued, is simply that AI eliminates bad writing—which raises its own question. “If we get rid of the bad writing, isn’t that going to make you a little bit more similar in a sense?”
Preserving an individual voice, he said, takes deliberate work. “I wouldn’t just say, ‘Here, AI, write like me.’ I would say, ‘Here are all my papers. How do you think I write?’” Skip that step, he warned, and a personal voice doesn’t get replaced so much as quietly forgotten.
Katagi’s advice to young professionals is to treat AI more as a “sparring partner” than a first-drafter.
“Ask always: What did it do that was smart that I need to learn?” Katagi advised. “What did it do that was bad that I need to check on?” For those who genuinely engage with AI, it “can seem like they gain 10 years of experience.”
“It will get you where you want to go and it will help you finish the last mile,” he said. But human judgment and intuition are still needed. He cited as an example a recruiting-industry deployment that builds an editor directly into the workflow rather than letting AI hand off a polished document unchecked.
Differentiating from Sameness
Meghan Barstow, president and representative director of ACCJ Corporate Sustaining Member Edelman Japan K.K., has watched two prior technology shifts reshape her industry: the internet and mobile phones.
“I experienced the advent of the internet and mobile phones,” she said, “both of which transformed how we create, communicate, and connect.” She expects AI to do the same, viewing it as a tool that “aids and amplifies human creativity rather than replaces it.”
Her concern is closer to what Story called sludge. Barstow called it “sameness.”
“AI is incredibly good at producing something plausible. But plausible isn’t necessarily interesting, original, or culturally meaningful,” Barstow said, adding that her worry is more about the behavior it enables.
“If we all use the same tools, trained on much of the same material, and accept the first answer they give us, there is a real risk that we will create more content but with less creativity.”
As an executive, Barstow, who is also an ACCJ vice president, described adopting AI as “quite fun,” but said the stakes reach into business models themselves, with real winners and losers ahead. Organizations that treat AI as additive to their core value rather than a replacement for it will succeed, she predicts.
For young professionals, she offered this advice: “Raise your hand. Get involved. Be curious. Learn, learn, learn. Use the new tools, absolutely, but don’t do so at the expense of learning the fundamentals or having experiences that develop your judgment and perspective.”
She also viewed the generational exchange as a two-way street. Edelman brought interns back this year for the first time since the pandemic, several through the ACCJ’s own internship portal, and Barstow credited them with making the organization sharper.
“The more opportunities we create for generations to learn from one another, the better all of us—and our organizations—will be,” she said.
What Leaders Need to Know
Digital fluency doesn’t mean becoming a technologist, Tomizawa said. It means understanding how value is created and decisions are made. He said three mindsets matter most:
- Treating information as a strategic asset
- Measuring outcomes, not activity
- Introducing AI deliberately
By treating information as a strategic asset, Tomizawa means that it is important to know where critical data sits, who owns it, and whether it’s reaching the people making decisions. Once that is in place, the value of the technology must be assessed. “High usage of an AI tool, for example, tells leaders little about whether people are saving time, making better decisions, improving customer outcomes, increasing revenue, or reducing risk,” he said. When preparing to implement AI tools, leaders should start by looking at the work itself to find the bottlenecks and errors before choosing the technology. Finally, they should define exactly what AI should recommend and where human approval stays mandatory.
Story said that leaders rarely had time to check employees’ work before AI, and they have even less reason to start now. His solution is to train people on privacy and instill in them a healthy skepticism.
Cybersecurity is another area to be mindful of.
Katagi said a clash between cybersecurity’s oldest principle and AI’s newest capabilities exists, pointing to “zero trust,” the model he said most cybersecurity experts rely on now.
“Zero trust means you say you’re Chris and it looks like it, but I’m not going to trust it until I see some irrefutable proof that you are who you say you are,” he explained. Agentic AI, a system trusted to act on a user’s behalf that Katagi said is at the center of AI right now, asks for the opposite. “Basically, what it’s allowing you to do is say, ‘Okay, trust me and I’ll do the thing.’ But that’s going directly against all the cybersecurity frameworks that people have.”
“The professionals who thrive will be the ones who know when to trust it, when to challenge it, and when to think differently.”
A Youthful Approach
Among young professionals, thoughts on AI lean more toward the opportunities the technology brings.
“AI is one of the most significant shifts I have seen in how we work, and I think young professionals have a real opportunity to shape how it is adopted,” said Fatim Diallo, a director at FGS Global and vice-chair of the ACCJ Young Professionals Forum (YPF). “Used well, it frees up time for the kind of creative thinking and relationship-building that transforms careers.”
The shift has made her more curious about where she can add value than anxious about what AI might replace. At a company dealing with multiple markets, AI has “meaningfully reduced the friction of working across linguistic and cultural contexts,” she said.
Her main concern is what she dubs a “meat proxy”—people who pass AI output straight through without reviewing or questioning it.
“The professionals who thrive will be the ones who know when to trust it, when to challenge it, and when to think differently.”
Kelly Langley, CEO of Gemini Group K.K. and co-chair of the YPF, noted a similar shift in what makes someone valuable. AI increasingly handles the “first 80 percent” of a task, he said, freeing people to spend more time exercising judgment on the final 20 percent.
“That makes me more interested in capabilities that are difficult to replicate: judgment, trust, persuasion, relationship-building, improvisation in moments of crisis, and understanding what motivates people.”
Langley pushed back on the idea that there is a generational divide among AI adopters.
“The bigger distinction is between people who are relentless learners and early adopters and those who remain comfortable with established ways of working.”
Progress in the Age of AI
The next wave of AI innovation isn’t going to come from the massive, companywide rollouts most large organizations are currently betting on, Katagi said.
“People think the big projects are the thing. I think the next innovation is going to occur in agile projects at the middle level,” he said, predicting smaller teams and narrower budgets focused on solving one specific problem well rather than applying a general-purpose tool everywhere at once.
Story said that “at the end of the day, most business problems are people walking around on two legs talking to each other. That doesn’t go away, but the skill sets are going away in a sense, as people become more isolated.”
But he sees an opportunity ahead in the people using the tools themselves.
“As we’re moving away from voice and body language, we are getting to a stage where AI is just going to accelerate that process,” he said. “If you have the ability to communicate, you’re going to stand out head and shoulders above everyone else. You’ll be clear, empathetic. I think that’s an opportunity rather than a threat.”
Tomizawa argued that most companies are still years from redesigning how work actually gets done around AI, rather than just using it to make things faster.
“The more capable AI becomes, the more important human judgment becomes in deciding what problem deserves attention, what ‘good’ looks like, and which trade-offs are acceptable,” he said.
Five years from now, he added, the people with the greatest value will be the ones who know how to combine machine capability with sound human judgment.
At the Center of the Game
ACCJ President Eric John shares thoughts on the chamber’s role in the bilateral relationship during a milestone year.
ACCJ President Eric John shares thoughts on the chamber’s role in the bilateral relationship during a milestone year.
Photos Antony Tran/LIFE.14
Earlier this year, The ACCJ Journal sat down with Eric John as he took the helm of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ). Halfway through a busy year of outreach and activity, we check in with the Boeing Japan K.K. president about how he sees the chamber in a time of rapid change, uncertainty, and new challenges facing the US–Japan partnership.
You took office with a focus on policy creation and advocacy. How are those goals progressing?
We set out to strengthen the ACCJ’s committee-driven policy advocacy and accelerate our engagement with the Japanese and US governments. As a result, we have built a stronger foundation, improved cross-committee collaboration, and are now better prepared to act quickly and effectively in order to remain relevant in advocacy.
In Japan, we have proactively met with cabinet ministers, Diet members, and other key leaders in both business and government. On the business side, we met with leaders at Keidanren (the Japanese Business Federation) and Keizai Doyukai (the Japan Association of Corporate Executives) to discuss our priorities and deepen our understanding of their focus and goals. When meeting with government officials and politicians, we shared our views in a straightforward manner, and I believe we have built closer relationships through which we can exchange views more openly.
In June, we visited Washington for our annual DC Doorknock, where we met with key administration officials and a number of congressional members, as well as Japanese Ambassador [Shigeo] Yamada. As the voice of global business in Japan, we provided strategic recommendations to address critical issues affecting US companies and outlined measures to further strengthen the US–Japan economic alliance.
This year’s DC Doorknock highlighted the continued strength and momentum of the US–Japan economic partnership and provided an important opportunity for the ACCJ to advance key priorities across our advocacy focus sectors. We were encouraged by the palpable recognition throughout the US government of the strategic importance of the US–Japan relationship and by the continued progress being made to deepen investment, strengthen economic ties, and address shared challenges.
We are seeing progress in policy development and advocacy, and this will continue to be our focus for the remainder of the year.
Because the ACCJ is committee-driven, our policy work depends heavily on the time and insight of member volunteers, and I am grateful for that effort. We have also worked to strengthen coordination across committees and between the board and committee leaders, including through in-person Leadership Forum meetings and closer liaison support.
A strong example of this approach came in 2025, when we were able to gather committee input quickly and provide a coordinated response on a major policy issue. That experience reinforced the importance of having a clear policy foundation and being able to act quickly when opportunities arise.
Looking ahead, we need to stay agile. Both the US and Japanese governments like to move fast, and the ACCJ must be ready to do the same if we want to remain an effective voice for our members.
Another goal was to continue growing the chamber. How is that going?
I am glad to see the progress we have made. We added a third member to the President’s Circle and six new Corporate Sustaining Members. This contributes to our bottom line, but more importantly, it contributes to our influence.
Where do you see the bilateral relationship—and its role on the regional and global stages—as the United States marks its 250th birthday?
The US–Japan relationship is marked by significant progress, including the 2025 trade agreements and Japan’s substantial $550 billion investment commitment in the US economy. Japan remains the United States’ largest foreign investor, and overall bilateral trade in goods and services reached $324 billion in 2025, with the US maintaining a strong $12.6 billion surplus in services.
At the same time, US companies continue to face persistent trade challenges. The ACCJ encourages the Government of Japan to address nontariff barriers, promote further investment, and enhance regulatory transparency to strengthen bilateral trade. As a business organization, we are focused on improving ties that serve the interests of both our stakeholders and our members. We also appreciate that the US and Japan are pursuing what they believe to be in their best economic interests.
This year is also a special one for the United States as we continue to mark the 250th anniversary of our founding. While celebrating America’s development and the strong US–Japan relationship, I am excited by how the ACCJ has worked so far this year to build on recent successes, shape our shared future, and strengthen our resilience. I also thought that A Night of Stars and Stripes, our Independence Day event on July 1, was a perfect celebration of our nation’s birthday and bilateral relations.
ACCJ President Eric John speaks at A Night of Stars and Stripes, the chamber’s Independence Day celebration, on July 1, 2026, at Tokyo American Club.
How do the chamber and the US embassy collaborate? How critical is the support from each side?
I, and many others, regularly meet with Ambassador [George] Glass. In addition, the board and embassy leaders meet monthly. We coordinate on our top priorities and exchange information and views about the evolving economic relationship and planned joint tactics.
Speaking for the chamber, I know that the embassy’s role has been essential for us to achieve many of our policy goals. I would also like to think that the initiatives of the ACCJ help the embassy team achieve their goals in their relationships.
How was this year’s DC Doorknock?
As mentioned, this year’s visit to Washington was very positive and reinforced the continued strength and momentum of the US–Japan economic partnership. A key takeaway was the strong recognition throughout the US government of the strategic importance of the relationship, as well as the continued progress being made to deepen investment, strengthen economic ties, and address shared challenges.
At the same time, we emphasized that persistent nontariff barriers still need to be addressed. We also reaffirmed the importance of reducing these barriers, boosting investment, and improving regulatory transparency to support growth and innovation across our key sectors and further strengthen bilateral trade.
What were your goals for March’s roundtable with Japanese media?
Good question. It had been years since the ACCJ had held a media roundtable, and I thought we needed to rebuild that relationship to be able to get our message out to the Japanese public. Our goal, therefore, was to clearly convey our intent and activities and position the ACCJ as a reliable source on the US–Japan economic relationship. This set a strong foundation for future engagements with the media.
The US and Japan are indispensable economic and strategic partners, and our bilateral alliance—grounded in shared values and common interests—supports peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region. The ACCJ believes it is important to continuously and proactively communicate the value of this relationship to Japanese media and to help them gain a deeper understanding of the importance of a healthy economic relationship for both countries.
What do you see as the biggest challenges that lie ahead?
I see this to be coordinating the chamber’s six key focus sectors, as well as our business priorities, with Prime Minister Takaichi’s 17 strategic growth priorities. To tackle that specific challenge, we established a growth strategies task force earlier this year, and we are also focusing on this in our committees.
What else would you like to say to members?
Simply, thank you. This is a huge volunteer effort to create policy, advocate, and move the business of the chamber forward. It’s been the product of so many people. I think we should all appreciate how much our members contribute to the success of the chamber.
Creative Cures
Twelve innovators share their solutions at the ACCJ’s Healthcare x Digital Pitch Day Event.
Twelve innovators share their solutions at the ACCJ’s Healthcare x Digital Pitch Day Event.
Startups convened once again in Osaka on February 13 for a chance to get Japan’s healthcare research to the people who need it through the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) Healthcare x Digital (HxD) initiative. Now in its sixth year, the program spearheaded by the ACCJ Kansai chapter connects startups, academics, corporations, and government to develop ideas for community healthcare and individual patient care.
The 2026 HxD Pitch Event took place at Osaka’s Nakanoshima Qross and featured a panel discussion followed by two rounds of pitches from healthcare startups competing for five awards.
The event was cohosted by Nakanoshima Qross and supported by the US Commercial Service, part of the US Consulate General Osaka-Kobe. The top prize was a complimentary trip to the 2026 SelectUSA Investment Summit, a US Department of Commerce program that has generated more than $250 billion in new investment to date. This year’s summit ran May 3–6 in National Harbor, Maryland.
“The startups pitching today represent the best of Japan’s healthcare innovation,” Consul General Richard N. Larsen told the room at the opening of the event. “Your solutions address real challenges, and your willingness to compete on this stage demonstrates the entrepreneurial spirit driving progress in this sector.”
Hirokazu Shimoda, senior director at the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), previously worked at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Japan External Trade Organization’s San Francisco office. Leading the pre-event roundtable, he said that working groups are now operating across 17 fields to determine where Japan should concentrate its resources.
At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference earlier this year, US investors kept asking him the same question: how AMED’s own subsidies could be used to coinvest in Japanese companies. He also pointed to Japan’s supporting industries—manufacturing, materials, robotics—as a real strength once paired with artificial intelligence (AI) and Japanese data, later noting that AMED’s funding is now extending to top-tier venture capital as well.
Japanese Healthcare: A Future Up for Debate
A panel discussion, moderated by Zimmer Biomet Director of Government Affairs Makoto Kawai, brought together Yasuhiko Iida, then of ACCJ President’s Circle member Eli Lilly Japan K.K., Dr. Okechi Oduori of Nakanoshima Qross, and Marisa Watanabe of the University of New South Wales, who joined remotely from Australia.
The conversation fell within HxD’s three standing focus areas: overcoming Japan’s urban–rural healthcare divide, reimagining the hospital of the future, and empowering patients to own their healthcare. As the discussion progressed, the topic turned to whether Japanese healthcare technology has to prove itself abroad before Japan’s own system will accept it.
Japan has strong basic research, Oduori said, but it isn’t as “gifted when it comes to social implementation,” which he described as getting high-quality research to the patients themselves.
Watanabe described a validation trap: Japanese corporate partners want proof of value before investing in technologies that first of all need investment to be tested.
“A lot of technologies worldwide are being lost because we just can’t get over that initial hurdle,” she said. One advantage, she noted, is already available: Australia’s approval process aligns closely with that of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), giving startups a faster on-ramp than the US process alone.
Japan’s acceptable margin of risk, Kawai argued, is effectively zero, which is why he told startups to prove themselves in other markets first.
Watanabe raised a second fix of her own for lower-risk categories. “[We need] a sandbox system where we can actually try to speed up approval processes for certain types of technologies that are less [of a] health risk,” she said, as an example pointing to fall-prevention technology that could be validated safely, given available countermeasures if something goes wrong, and processed faster as a result.
Oduori differed slightly, arguing that startups should work with regulators from day one. “There is always an opportunity that we can work closely with the regulatory authorities at the very beginning, incorporating them as you do your studies,” he said.
Kawai added: “It’s just easier for people to go outside, prove it, and come back with that proof. To get Japanese to jump off the boat, you tell them that everybody already has jumped off.”
The conversation ranged further, with L.E.K. Consulting Partner Christian Boettcher raising the long-standing tension between Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry over how fast to move on approvals. Eli Lilly Japan’s Iida argued that patients increasingly want quality of life rather than a fix for a disease, pointing to Asics as an example of a wellness-adjacent company with few avenues for talking to doctors or pharmaceutical companies.
A question from the floor turned to whether Japanese universities still favor publishing research over patenting it. Oduori said the situation has improved, with more universities now advising on intellectual property, but that patents held inside university walls still complicate industry collaboration.
By the end of the discussion, when an audience member asked who should actually guide a startup from concept to market, Oduori said that getting a startup to commercialization takes the same kind of cooperation that your fingers require when you eat with chopsticks.
“Know who is more important than know-how,” Kawai said, closing the panel.
ACCJ–Kansai Governor Kevin Yamaga-Karns, associate vice president of legal affairs at Eli Lilly Japan, then presented the panelists with certificates of appreciation.
Let the Games Begin
The pitch competition’s 12 healthcare startups presented their solutions to an expert panel of judges: Mari Ogihara of AstraZeneca K.K., Yasuhiko Iida of Eli Lilly Japan, Dr. Robert Brand of EY, Dr. Yu Moriguchi of Osaka University and Nakanoshima Qross, Akira Omae of The Kobe Shimbun and Anchor Kobe, and L.E.K. Consulting’s Boettcher. Competing this year were:
- SalivaTech Co., Ltd.
- Nonat Inc.
- I.W.G. Inc.
- PurinoScience
- Craif, Inc.
- MIG Inc.
- Heliex Inc.
- Quadlytics Inc.
- Ekei Labs
- Aman Wellness Solutions (AWS LLC)
- VisionPath
- Xupra
SalivaTech’s SalivaChecker, an AI-powered saliva test that screens for six cancers from a single sample, already serves more than 110,000 users. Chief Executive Officer Dr. Makoto Sunamura, a pancreatic surgeon at Tohoku University Hospital, framed the product as screening rather than diagnosis, with the company’s US launch built around CLIA-certified labs ahead of full FDA approval.
According to World Health Organization data cited by Nonat Inc., just 18 percent of high-risk pregnant women worldwide receive proper treatment. With that in mind, the company pitched a wearable device and an AI system for remote pregnancy monitoring.
I.W.G. Inc., founded by a team that previously scaled a medical AI startup to unicorn status—meaning a valuation of more than $1 billion—pitched two products: AI Referral, which standardizes referral and discharge data across formats, and DOCloud, a workflow and communications platform that the company said has already cut client data transfer time from four days to 40 seconds, alongside a 90 percent drop in human error. I.W.G. said it has been selected by the Mayo Clinic as the first and only Japanese company in that ecosystem.
No approved drug exists anywhere for sarcopenia, the natural loss of muscle tissue due to age, according to PurinoScience Chief Executive Officer Kotaro Hisamoto. He pitched an oral combination therapy built on a repurposed gout medication that Japanese research already links to lower sarcopenia rates combined with a marketed adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. According to cofounder Ken Okamoto, of the University of Tokyo, the precursor restores muscle energy through the body’s own purine salvage pathway.
Craif, Inc. brought a related pitch built on an already-proven distribution network: its urine-microRNA platform serves more than 50,000 users through some 2,000 clinics and 4,000 pharmacies, and its new product, miSignal Age, estimates biological age and cardiometabolic risk from the same single sample.
Half the people in their forties and fifties, MIG Inc. President and Chief Executive Officer Hidetaka Kai told judges, already show the first brain-cell changes of Alzheimer’s disease, with no symptoms at all. The startup’s solution to this is a six- to eight-minute virtual reality test. The results, Kai said, correlate closely with p-tau181, a blood biomarker for the disease. New Alzheimer’s drugs from companies such as Eisai, Biogen, and Eli Lilly exist, but patients often arrive at the hospital too late to use them, he said.
Heliex Inc., based in Akita Prefecture, pitched “health intelligence” based on CT scans for personal trainers and nutritionists.
Quadlytics Inc. built its pitch around the fact that an epilepsy diagnosis in Japan often means immediate loss of a driver’s license. The company’s development, the Epilepsy Alarm, is a wearable that reads heart-rate variability to predict a seizure one to 20 minutes before it occurs. The company cited more than $10 billion in annual US emergency costs tied to epilepsy hospitalizations.
Ekei Labs, based at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, pitched epigenetics chemistry paired with AI to predict drug trial success before a trial runs, claiming a 30 percent cut in trial costs, a 50 percent cut in trial failures, and 55 times more data per dollar spent than conventional methods.
Aman Wellness Solutions pitched a cross-border second-opinion platform connecting Japanese and US medical care. Founder Sahiora Nurujai was candid about a barrier few others mentioned, saying many Japanese hospitals are running deficits and so remain reluctant to devote domestic resources to foreign patients.
VisionPath Chief Executive Officer Jake Smith, a first-year student at Ritsumeikan University, pitched a smart walker inspired by his grandmother’s difficulty crossing a room for a glass of water. The company has not yet incorporated, but it has already secured a spring clinical trial with the city of Minoh.
Xupra closed the pitches with a foundational AI model built for pharmaceutical data, pitched through the story of a fictional drug rep, Yamada-san, coached before doctor visits and corrected after them. The company said it already runs a paid pilot with more than 400 users at a major pharmaceutical company.
And the Winners Are …
After deliberation, the judges announced five awards:
- SelectUSA Investment Summit Award: SalivaTech Co., Ltd.
- Anchor Kobe Award (Kobe City): Aman Wellness Solutions
- Nakanoshima Qross Award: PurinoScience
- Osaka Bio Headquarters Award (Osaka Prefecture): Quadlytics Inc.
- Osaka LifeScience Nexus Award: VisionPath
SalivaTech’s win secured its trip to the SelectUSA Investment Summit, following the path of past HxD winners such as Anaut Inc. and AMI Inc., both of which used their trips to Maryland to build connections with US investors and partners.
An Ongoing Effort
“This is not the last event,” Boettcher told the startups after announcing the results. “We had companies in the past that reapplied and then won. So, thank you for everybody’s efforts today, and congratulations to the winners.”
The next HxD event—Connected by Data, Powered by AI, Enabled by Technology: Reimagining People-Centered Care—is scheduled for October 30 at Nakanoshima Qross.
Go Big or Go Home
How Takaichi’s ruthless capitalism and Takanomics have Japan poised for resurgence in a changing world.
How Takaichi’s ruthless capitalism and Takanomics have Japan poised for resurgence in a changing world.
The combination of disruption accelerated by artificial intelligence (AI) and geoeconomic uncertainty dramatically raises the bar for public policy leaders. As private sector leaders realize that business as usual is not an option, and weigh the threats and opportunities, the more the government does to provide committed direction, the easier it will be for chief executive officers and their boards to commit new capital for growth.
The post-AI economic and social system is already emerging and, in my view, the Japanese government under Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is global best in class. Takaichi’s unprecedentedly ambitious industrial policy plan is leading the charge to strengthen Japan’s post-AI resilience and sustainability by creating high-trust public–private partnerships. She is rebuilding Team Japan Inc.
The key strategic realities of Takaichi’s economic policy speak for themselves.
1. Unprecedented size of resource mobilization
The proposed ¥370 trillion in public–private partnership investment is just above 60 percent of today’s gross domestic product (GDP). This is three times bigger than the last multiyear industrial policy initiative launched by Japan. In 1973, then Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka’s “Remodeling of the Japanese Archipelago” was less than 20 percent of GDP at the start. Takaichi’s philosophy has always been “go big or go home.”
2. Duration of public policy commitment
Before Takaichi, there were basically only two areas in the national budget in which funding was guaranteed for more than one year: public education (three years) and national defense (five years). Everything else was subject to annual budget fights and required lobbying the Ministry of Finance to secure continued commitment for either the main budget or a supplementary budget. Rightly, Takaichi wants to get away from Japan’s budget ad hocism and replace it with strategic, high-trust, long-duration funding via public–private partnerships, with 17 focus sectors and eight cross-sector target areas committed to through 2040.
3. Focus on public–private partnership funding and “crowding in” of private risk capital
Importantly, the ¥370 trillion is not simply deficit financing but investment through public–private partnerships. I expect about 10 percent to come from on-balance-sheet national government debt; 60 percent from private corporations, asset owners, and investment managers; and 30 percent coordinated and syndicated by off-balance-sheet public policy financing firms such as the Development Bank of Japan and the Japan Investment Corporation.
Clearspeak: Takaichi is rebuilding Team Japan Inc., which means that fears of unfunded government overspend are likely unwarranted.
If I am right, one of the key implications will be a dramatic shift in corporate governance focus, away from turning “lazy balance sheets” into higher dividends or share buybacks to raise debt and equity capital to fund the private sector’s contribution to the ambitious investment-for-growth push.
Clearspeak: Japan’s cost of capital is poised to rise, which in turn will speed up industrial consolidation and corporate restructuring.
4. Conviction that technocrats’ guidance and top-down industrial policy are essential to mobilize and guide the flow of Japan’s private-sector savings into investment
Over the past 30 years, Japan’s industrial policy prioritized deregulation, privatization, and financialization. Meanwhile, fiscal policy prioritized tactical support packages for zombie companies, protection of vested-interest players from the disruption forced by deregulation and technological progress, as well as an ever-growing expenditure drain from rising entitlement claims in general and surging medical and pension costs in particular.
Specifically, the government “consumed” and supported the weak, while the strong and well capitalized part of the private sector was left to invest on its own terms. The result was an ever-growing proportion of Japanese savings channeled into overseas rather than domestic investments. Between 1995 and 2025, the share of total profits generated by listed companies from overseas sales surged from less than 20 percent to more than 60 percent—a smart and rational rise in Japan’s return on investment engineered by strong company CEOs realizing that genuine laissez-faire growth investment opportunities abroad were a better bet than the vested-interest-entangled laissez-faire cosplay offered in Japan. To wit: Japan’s two richest men—Fast Retailing’s Tadashi Yanai and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son—made their fortunes from overseas investments, predominantly in China and the United States, rather than from their domestic production strategies.
“Takanomics is a commitment to create domestic winners with a long-duration, domestically focused industrial policy and a high-trust, stable financing strategy. ”
Team Takaichi is convinced this can and must be reversed by refocusing CEOs’ minds on Japan’s pre-1990s high-trust public–private partnership investment-for-growth model. Takanomics is a commitment to create domestic winners with a long-duration, domestically focused industrial policy and a high-trust, stable financing strategy. Takaichi’s goals are neither tactical nor cyclical; they are structural, urgent, long-term, and openly nationalistic.
Importantly, the fact that there are 17 strategic areas does not indicate a lack of focus by Team Takaichi, but presents each and every company with an opportunity to join Team Japan. No Japanese CEO, whether they lead an industrial, commercial, services, consumer, high-tech, low-tech, or financial company in literally any sector, can fail to find a strategy for growth that aligns with their company’s and Takaichi’s priorities. Something for everybody, no one excluded, no excuses. Come join Team Japan.
In the coming months, I shall not be surprised to see Team Takaichi start publicly shaming CEOs who will not participate and commit to her new national agenda, just as the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) started to threaten to shame CEOs who refuse to present concrete strategies to raise capital efficiency and shareholder value above at least 1x book value (the Yamaji Initiative, launched by the TSE under then president and CEO Hiromi Yamaji in March 2023, just before he became CEO of the Japan Exchange Group).
5. Commitment to promote holistic and balanced economic development, with a strong focus on human capital development, social resilience, and regional diversification
Takaichi’s vision is not that of a winner-take-all, socially divisive, tech-will-solve-all-our-problems utopia. Rather, it is clearly focused on creating a new human-centric economic structure. Her team is dead set on wanting to avoid the extreme lopsidedness of recent growth dynamics in both the United States and China. AI and the infrastructure it requires are important parts of Takanomics, but AI is by no means the only or primary focus. Regional diversification and the empowerment of local public policy decision-makers are, for example, core elements of the implementation strategy.
6. Last but not least, a future-positive cockiness
Team Takaichi’s ambitious plan sends a strong message to private sector leaders. No, Japan is not constrained by demographics, a lack of natural resources, or a lack of domestic capital. Instead, it is perfectly capable of pushing the production possibility frontier and creating economic abundance, prosperity, and, yes, greater self-sufficiency.
In a remarkable shift in leadership style, Takaichi’s economic policy is not stuck in a vague and high-minded discussion group looking for a New Capitalism à la Fumio Kishida. In fact, she much prefers to decide and act rather than discuss and build consensus. Her capitalism is ruthlessly focused on creating a united Team Japan, where public–private partnerships inspire a new future-positive can-do leadership mindset committed to forcing the next evolution of Japan’s economic, industrial, and social structure.
This is good for Japan, and fantastic news for global companies looking to become an integrated partner in the new Japan that is poised to emerge.
Healthy Momentum
As Lilly marks its sesquicentennial, the ACCJ President’s Circle member focuses on what comes next for Japan.
As Lilly marks its sesquicentennial, the ACCJ President’s Circle member focuses on what comes next for Japan.
It has been 150 years since American pharmacist, chemist, and businessman Eli Lilly founded Eli Lilly and Company in 1876. It was just over a decade after the end of the Civil War that the former Union Army officer turned his attention to creating innovative medicines of the highest quality. A century and a half later, the company that started in Indianapolis has become one of the world’s leaders.
In Japan, where ACCJ President’s Circle member Eli Lilly Japan K.K. has operated for more than half a century, the milestone is being treated as a responsibility to shape what comes next. The country is one of Lilly’s most important markets, thanks to its world-class scientific capabilities, highly skilled healthcare professionals, and exceptionally high standards of patient care.
The next chapter for Lilly in Japan starts with building the manufacturing muscle and partnerships with government, academia, and the tech world to close the gaps in diagnosis and access to ensure that medicines get to the patients who need them most.
That also means putting technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to work to accelerate scientific discovery and improve how medicines are developed, manufactured, and delivered.
The ambition is to become the most trusted and impactful medicine company in Japan by 2030.
“Our success will be measured not only by business growth, but by the lasting difference we make for patients, the healthcare system, and society,” the company told The ACCJ Journal. “Our legacy is what we do next.”
Bridging Leadership
That next chapter arrives alongside a change at the top. In July 2026, Karla Alcazar became president and representative director of Lilly Japan, succeeding Simone Thomsen, who had led the organization since 2019.
Thomsen described Japan’s healthcare sector as having reached an important turning point during her tenure. The country’s strengths remain considerable, she said, including universal healthcare coverage, highly skilled professionals, strong scientific institutions, and a deep commitment to quality. All this comes as the healthcare environment has grown more complex with an aging population and a growing burden of chronic disease, which have raised the need for innovation.
While Lilly’s mission remains to bring innovative medicines to Japanese patients, continued uncertainty around pricing and reimbursement policies makes it increasingly challenging to sustain investment, accelerate innovation, and ensure timely patient access, she added. Going forward, a more predictable policy environment will be essential to support both innovation and long-term healthcare sustainability.
For Thomsen, that means integrating Japan into global development, strengthening the company’s manufacturing network and supply resilience, raising awareness in areas such as obesity disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and building partnerships that help patients move from awareness to diagnosis and appropriate care.
She was especially proud to see Lilly Japan’s role extend beyond medicines, working with local governments, medical societies, and patient organizations to promote earlier diagnosis and build more connected care pathways.
“The progress achieved over these years was not the work of one leader,” Thomsen stressed. “It was created together by our employees and partners, and that shared journey is what I value most.”
Alcazar arrives in Kobe after nearly 20 years with Lilly. With most of those spent in Latin America and the United States, she brings with her a perspective shaped by very different markets.
What stands out to her in Japan is the strength of its universal healthcare system, the scientific rigor of its medical community, the emphasis on quality and safety, and the discipline with which organizations execute.
Set against a rapidly aging population, issues such as healthy longevity, chronic disease management, sustainable access, and earlier intervention have become especially urgent.
“My experience has taught me that sustainable progress requires both strong execution and collaboration across the healthcare ecosystem,” Alcazar explained. “I come to Japan with curiosity and humility.”
She said that the greatest opportunity is to expand early and consistent access to innovation for more people in Japan.
Through deeper collaboration and responsible use of data and technology, Japan can further improve early diagnosis, personalize care, strengthen treatment pathways, and continue to play an important role in global medical innovation, she added.
The harder task, in Alcazar’s view, is that scientific innovation alone does not automatically lead to better outcomes.
Patients can still face stigma, limited disease awareness, uneven access, and complex care pathways. The system needs a predictable, sustainable environment that recognizes the long-term value of innovation.
“We must work across sectors to remove barriers, strengthen the patient voice, and build an ecosystem in which advances in science can translate into meaningful improvements in people’s lives,” she said.
Confronting Obesity Disease
Nowhere is that approach more visible than in Lilly’s push on obesity disease, a chronic, progressive condition shaped by biology, genetics, psychology, the environment, and social circumstances.
The disease is linked to more than 200 serious complications, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, sleep apnea, and liver disease.
Despite this, the condition remains widely misunderstood as simply a matter of personal responsibility or willpower. This misconception often creates stigma that can keep people from recognizing it or seeking care at all.
Japan’s aging population and its barriers to diagnosis and treatment make the country a particular focus for Lilly. Its role extends beyond developing medicines, the company said, to working with medical societies, healthcare providers, and policymakers to strengthen disease understanding, treatment pathways, and evidence generation, so that people can move from awareness to appropriate action.
Digital healthcare is central to that effort. The company argued that the biggest challenge is not simply access to treatment, since many people living with obesity disease never reach the point of seeking medical care in the first place. Earlier recognition can encourage people to seek professional advice before the disease leads to more serious complications.
Online medical consultations can help reduce psychological barriers to seeking care and improve access to appropriate healthcare. Lilly recognizes the potential of digital health solutions to enhance patient access to care and support better health outcomes.
Digital tools can also narrow regional gaps in access. They can connect patients, regardless of location, to appropriate care, since specialists and experienced providers are not evenly distributed across the country.
Looking beyond individual medicines, the next frontier is a more personalized approach with integrated treatment decisions reflecting disease severity, related conditions, patient needs and preferences, as well as old-fashioned clinical judgment.
Earlier recognition, stronger disease awareness, reduced stigma, and better-coordinated care across the healthcare ecosystem, the company argued, all matter as much as the medicines themselves in improving long-term outcomes.
The goal is to ensure people living with obesity disease can recognize the disease earlier, seek help without fear of stigma, and access the right care at the right time.
Lilly said Japan has an opportunity to build a more patient-centered ecosystem for obesity disease care that combines in-person care, digital health services, disease awareness programs, and community-based support. No single organization can achieve this alone.
Collaboration among healthcare professionals, policymakers, patient communities, academia, and industry, the company said, will be essential to enable earlier diagnosis, smoother referral pathways, and equitable access to evidence-based care.
Applied Intelligence
The other pillar of Lilly’s forward-looking push is the ever-growing field of AI, which is becoming a foundational capability across the full medicine value chain for the company rather than a standalone technology initiative.
In early discovery, AI allows scientists to analyze complex biology and chemistry at a scale and speed that were previously impossible. Its reach extends well beyond early discovery, supporting clinical-trial design, regulatory-document preparation, manufacturing quality, supply-chain resilience, and more precise patient engagement.
That integration was reinforced recently with the launch of a Co-Innovation AI Lab alongside Nvidia, pairing Lilly’s drug-development know-how with Nvidia’s computing horsepower.
The goal is to reinvent how scientific discovery happens by pairing AI-driven computational research with real lab experimentation so hypotheses get generated, tested, and refined in a continuous loop, far faster than before.
Ultimately, the company said, the purpose of the collaboration is to help address some of the most difficult challenges in medicine and accelerate scientific breakthroughs that can improve patients’ lives around the world.
AI will be a powerful accelerator of drug discovery and healthcare, according to the company. But it’s ultimately people who make the breakthroughs that improve patients’ lives. Curiosity, scientific judgment, creativity, and accountability remain fundamentally human traits.
As the company put it, AI does not replace scientists but, rather, augments human expertise. Scientists remain at the center of every decision, while AI helps analyze complex biology, generate insights, and explore possibilities at a scale that was previously impossible.
Over the long term, Lilly expects the greatest impact to come from connecting AI across a medicine’s entire life cycle: better trial design and patient selection in development, improved quality control and planning in manufacturing and supply, and, in research, a far wider exploration of biological and chemical possibilities.
For patients, the company noted, the ultimate value will not be the technology itself but what it enables: better scientific decisions, a greater probability of successful development, faster learning, and more reliable supply.
For organizations using AI, the company said that those who empower their people to use it responsibly and effectively will create the greatest value.
The Value of a Network
Lilly credits its ACCJ President’s Circle membership with a distinct role in supporting its work. The company described it as an important platform for dialogue, partnership, and shared learning across industries, one that allows it to engage with business leaders, policymakers, and the US Embassy,
Tokyo on issues touching both healthcare and the broader US–Japan economic relationship.
That matters, Lilly said, because many of today’s healthcare challenges cannot be solved by the pharmaceutical industry alone. Through the ACCJ, the company contributes its expertise to policy discussions, learns from other sectors, and helps develop collaborative initiatives spanning healthcare innovation, digital transformation, sustainability, inclusion, and women’s empowerment.
The premium membership also gives Lilly’s employees a chance to broaden their professional networks and engage with initiatives beyond the pharmaceutical sector.
“Ultimately,” the company said, “the ACCJ helps us strengthen trust and collaboration and advance our goal of creating a healthier, more innovative, and sustainable future in Japan.”
Human Edge
As AI reshapes education and business, Minerva’s World Wise Executive Leadership Program builds leaders no algorithm can replicate.
As AI reshapes education and business, Minerva’s World Wise Executive Leadership Program builds leaders no algorithm can replicate.
Spend any time in a global boardroom or on an international call where the conversation keeps sliding past each side, and the same friction surfaces: technically skilled, strategically sharp leaders struggle to read the room, align perspectives, and build trust.
This is the cultural fluency gap that influences how leaders confront uncertainty, interpret differences, and define their own role in a complex world where the role of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing rapidly. More than a soft skill, cultural fluency is the difference between influence and irrelevance for today’s executives.
Developed with support from the Nippon Foundation, Minerva University’s World Wise Executive Leadership Program is designed for mid- to senior-level professionals who want to lead with confidence across cultures, regions, and global environments. The inaugural cohort of World Wise Executives kicked off in Tokyo this summer, bringing together 20 professionals from eight countries.
For World Wise participant and NGO professional Ayako Tamura, the Tokyo kickoff challenged long-held assumptions and offered “a refreshing sense of intellectual disruption in the best possible way.”
The Cultural Fluency Gap
As organizations expand across borders, leadership effectiveness increasingly depends on the ability to adapt. Culture shapes trust, decision-making, hierarchy, and communication, and leaders who understand this operate at a fundamentally different level from those who don’t. Without cultural understanding, misalignment persists, trust erodes, and performance suffers. World Wise is built on the premise that cross-cultural leadership is a learnable skill developed through structured, immersive experience.
Practice-Based Approach
Built on Minerva’s active learning model of no lectures ever, the program delivers every session as an interactive, discussion-based experience. Over six months, participants engage in weekly classes focused on leading teams across borders, developing adaptive communication techniques, and making high-stakes decisions in complex, interdependent systems. The program blends live virtual seminars with a diverse regional cohort, in-person leadership accelerators in international cities, and real-world simulations. Participants are challenged to navigate ambiguity, test their assumptions, and refine their thinking alongside peers from around the world.
For Satrio Wicaksono, a conservation leader working across Asia and a member of the inaugural cohort, this emphasis on practical application is what distinguishes World Wise: “I was looking for an executive program that zeroes in on systems thinking, AI-assisted decision-making, and impactful leadership, and the World Wise curriculum fits that bill perfectly.” Familiar with Minerva’s reputation from his time at Brown and Wesleyan, Satrio was especially drawn to Minerva’s active, lecture-free approach.
Leadership in the Age of AI
As AI reshapes education, business, and society, leadership capability is becoming more human, not less. AI can analyze markets and draft strategies, but it cannot read a room, build trust across cultures, or make judgment calls where values collide. As machines absorb routine analytical work, the premium shifts decisively to the human side of leadership. Cultural fluency is the edge no algorithm can replicate.
Visit the Minerva University website for full details on eligibility, curriculum, and application requirements.
University Briefings
Through custom sessions, the chamber helps professors and students navigate the US–Japan business landscape.
Through custom sessions, the chamber helps professors and students navigate the US–Japan business landscape.
A delegation from the University of Michigan–Flint
Through tailored sessions, the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) gives emerging US business leaders a direct view of Japan’s economy and the US–Japan commercial relationship.
For US students preparing for careers in global business, the ACCJ University Briefings program offers an executive-level perspective on Japan’s business environment and the bilateral relationship. The sessions examine the opportunities and challenges companies face in Japan and the role of the business community in strengthening economic ties between the two countries.
ACCJ Executive Director Laura Younger personally leads each briefing and tailors the discussion to the needs of the visiting group. The sessions connect Japan’s business environment to the wider bilateral agenda. Discussions have covered Japan’s regulatory and business environment, US–Japan economic relations, technology and artificial intelligence policy, demographic and workforce challenges, healthcare, and the importance of professional networks and long-term relationships in Japanese business.
To date, the ACCJ has conducted 50 briefings and reached more than 1,400 students from US universities. The program gives these emerging leaders an opportunity to test their classroom learning against practical perspectives from the ACCJ’s executive director.
The program also contributes to the wider US–Japan relationship. Educational exchange is an important form of soft diplomacy because it gives future US leaders a more informed understanding of Japan and encourages sustained bilateral engagement. By giving US students a more nuanced understanding of Japan’s economy, institutions, and business environment, the briefings prepare them to engage more effectively with Japan throughout their careers and strengthen the human foundations of bilateral commercial and policy cooperation.
Selahattin Imrohoroglu, a professor of finance and business economics at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, is among the educators who have brought their students to the ACCJ University Briefings program.
“Visiting the ACCJ was an excellent experience that gave our group a deeper appreciation of Japan’s business environment, professional culture, and the important role of international organizations in connecting business leaders, policymakers, and students,” he explained. “The briefing helped us better understand Japan’s current economic and demographic challenges, the opportunities for foreign companies, and the importance of cross-cultural communication and long-term relationship building in doing business in Japan.”
“The briefing helped us better understand Japan’s current economic and demographic challenges, the opportunities for foreign companies, and the importance of cross-cultural communication and long-term relationship building in doing business in Japan.”
The University of Arizona’s Justin Jarvis brought his executive MBA candidates to the ACCJ to learn how international companies navigate regulatory, cultural, and market differences. “I also hoped they would see how organizations like the ACCJ play a role in shaping dialogue between the private sector and government,” said the director of the school’s master’s studies. “The experience exceeded expectations. One of the biggest takeaways for me was just how different Japanese business culture is from that in the United States. While both countries are highly developed economies, the business environment, as well as the interpersonal and social dynamics of doing business, are meaningfully different.”
For Greg Laurence, 2026 marked the seventh time he has led a study-abroad group to Japan. As a professor of organizational behavior and human resources management, as well as chair of the University of Michigan-Flint Department of Management and Marketing, Laurence teaches a course on design thinking, namely, how organizations and the people in them solve problems.
“Many of our site visits are with very focused organizations,” he explained. “We wanted students to get a broad picture of business in Japan and how it relates to them in the United States. Japan can feel very far away. When visiting with boutique ceramics makers in Bizen [Okayama Prefecture], it is easy to lose sight of the US–Japan relationship, which matters to boutique ceramics makers in Bizen even if they don’t talk about it. The goal was to get that 10,000-meter view and to think about central design-thinking questions: Why does the ACCJ exist? What problems does it aim to solve and how?”
At least one student from each of Laurence’s past trips has made the move to Japan. “I think that is a pretty impressive testament to their experience there. Japan opens our students’ eyes to what is possible for them.”
Professor Arup Varma of Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan School of Business has been leading students on trips to various parts of the world for the past two decades. “In 2026, the students were keen on visiting Japan, and I must say we had an absolutely outstanding trip,” he explained. “We visited both Tokyo and Kyoto. One of the highlights was the initial visit to the ACCJ, which helped set the framework and the context. I was very excited because [chambers] typically have deep experience in a country, and their breadth of knowledge of the intricacies of doing business in that country helps set the stage for subsequent visits.”
Quinlan student Przemek Thomas Krydka said the visit gave him confidence that, should he ever seek to establish a business presence in Japan, the ACCJ would be an invaluable resource and trusted partner. “I came away from our meeting with a strong impression that the ACCJ can provide American businesses with the relationships, knowledge, and support needed to successfully establish a foothold in the Japanese market.”
Students from Baylor University’s McBride Worldwide program visit the ACCJ
Another student who found the University Briefing inspiring is Rhiannon Noel, who visited as part of Lynn University’s undergraduate delegation. Apart from business insights, she found her post-university vision energized. “Seeing interns who came from backgrounds other than Japanese gave me peace of mind that I would fit in if I decided to come back and also do an internship,” she said.
Since returning to Florida, Noel has given presentations and worked on projects related to Japan’s need for immigration, discussing topics such as the declining birth rate, the Highly Skilled Professional program, and the Specified Skilled Worker program, which is designed to address labor shortages in key sectors. “Japan remains one of my favorite places I’ve traveled to, and I am still planning to come and do an internship eventually after the conclusion of my degree.”
Baylor University undergraduate Max Fuller said he came to the University Briefing hoping to learn more about how businesses from outside Japan are able to succeed and adapt to Japan’s different culture.
“After meeting with Executive Director Laura Younger, I actually understand that it is not easy due to tax laws and regulations, and also how people interact,” he explained. “Laura used real-world examples. Through visiting the ACCJ, I have been able to hear firsthand experiences that you usually wouldn’t in a normal classroom setting.”
Younger’s deep experience and insights were also appreciated by Shizuka Modica, a lecturer at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Modica brought a delegation of MBA students to the ACCJ University Briefing as part of the school’s course titled Japan: Where Tradition Meets Innovation.
“Laura introduced ACCJ’s role in strengthening the US–Japan business environment and offered grounded, practical perspectives on how business is conducted in Japan,” she said. “Her lively, highly interactive presentation wove together economic and regulatory data with firsthand stories about pain points American executives commonly encounter and how the ACCJ helps them navigate those challenges. This brief but rich visit helped students process their new experiences and articulate deeper insights into Japan’s political, economic, and social challenges. We are deeply grateful to Laura and the ACCJ for their generosity and impact on our students’ learning.”
Walk of Ages
The Chubu Walkathon’s 35th anniversary event raised the bar for community support.
The Chubu Walkathon’s 35th anniversary event raised the bar for community support.
“It’s a beautiful day to make a change. Gonna lace up my shoes and be on my way. We’ll gather at Meijo Park, alright. And be home before the stars light up the night.”
Those are the opening words of the Chubu Walkathon 35th anniversary song, written by James Havens, and they perfectly sum up an event that has been making a difference in the local community for three and a half decades.
What began in 1992 as a small, collaborative effort between US businesses and local partners has grown into the region’s most visible international charity event—uniting thousands each year for a day of walking, food, entertainment, and community support. The annual event, cohosted by Nagoya International School (NIS), is supported or endorsed by the Aichi Prefectural Government, the City of Nagoya, the Nagoya City Board of Education, the Aichi America-Japan Society, and the Greater Nagoya Initiative Center.
Cofounder Robert Roche, now American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) vice president–Chubu and executive chairman of Oak Lawn Marketing, Inc., still remembers the first event. “Large corporations were coming to Nagoya saying, ‘It’s our culture in America to give back to the local community.’ They were the ones who showed us how to do business the right way. Their guidance in those early years gave us a solid foundation, and the relationships we built—with orphanages, schools, and local charities, as well as sponsors like Kondo Sanko—are the reason the Walkathon is still going strong 35 years later.”
Since then, the Walkathon has contributed more than ¥200 million to organizations across the Chubu region, supporting children in foster care, individuals with illnesses or disabilities, families affected by domestic violence, Tohoku earthquake and tsunami relief, and many others. Money is raised through corporate sponsorships, individual donations, and ticket sales for activities on the day of the event.
ACCJ members and the wider community descended on Nagoya’s Meijo Park on May 24 for a day of music, dance, international food, and nearly two dozen activities for kids and adults. After an opening ceremony featuring the Imperial Sound marching band and Cherry Blooming baton twirlers, walkers set out on a winding course through the park. Student volunteers greeted them at each of the nine way stations. Back at the stage, attendees enjoyed performances by NIS preschool and kindergarten students, the NIS high school choir, and more.
Over the years, the Walkathon has weathered many challenges—the Lehman shock of 2008, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011, and Covid-19. During the pandemic that saw everyone huddled at home, organizers found a way to keep an event defined by in-person interaction going through creative thinking and hybrid approaches that incorporated virtual participation. Over the five years from 2019 to 2023, donations averaged more than ¥5 million per year.
This year’s 35th anniversary Walkathon marked not only a milestone in longevity but also a notable increase in the amount of money raised, making it the most successful outing since 2016’s astounding ¥25 million result that helped set the stage for the creation of the Chubu Children’s Fund.
“On behalf of the Chubu Walkathon Committee, we would like to sincerely thank you all for your continued support and invaluable contributions to this year’s event,” said Nao Geisler, chair of the ACCJ–Chubu Community Service Committee. “The 35th anniversary celebration was a tremendous success. We were delighted to welcome an increased number of participants, enjoy perfect weather, and showcase many charitable organizations and outstanding performances on stage. None of this would have been possible without your dedication and partnership.”
Vice-chair Bryce Conlan extended his gratitude to everyone who committed their time, energy, and resources. “Your generous support helps us make a meaningful impact in the lives of many individuals through the local charity organizations we support. We are deeply grateful for your commitment to this cause.”
On October 27, ¥7.7 million in proceeds from this year’s event will be presented at a ceremony hosted by Grade 10 Japanese language and literature students from NIS in the school’s 247-seat auditorium. The money will be distributed among 14 charitable organizations supported by the Walkathon, including ¥500,000 for International School Projects in Tokyo, Kansai, and Nagoya.
“Thank you once again for being part of this milestone event,” said Geisler. “We look forward to your continued support and hope to work together again for the 36th Chubu Walkathon!”
As we look ahead to another year of this enduring signature event, anniversary song composer Havens calls on everyone to continue their support: “Walkathon is here to stay. Sure was good to see you out here today! Let’s walk under the sun. Every step we take is for everyone!”
Two-Way Street
Young Professionals Forum events connect people across chambers and generations.
Young Professionals Forum events connect people across chambers and generations.
For young professionals, institutions such as the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) can sometimes feel difficult to access. Walking into a room of seasoned executives and established business leaders can be daunting, particularly early in a career when it is easy to wonder: “What do I have to offer?”
Helping lower that barrier is an important part of the ACCJ Young Professionals Forum (YPF) mission.
The YPF provides a platform for professionals aged 35 and under, including a growing number of student members, to engage through networking, information sharing, advocacy, mentorship, and peer-led programming. In Japan, where business remains deeply rooted in relationships and trust, those connections can be particularly valuable.
The YPF continues to build on two of its flagship programs. Speed Networking will soon enter its fourth iteration, while plans are also taking shape for a third Reverse Mentoring session with the ACCJ CEO Forum. The formats are different, but both are built around the same idea of lowering the barriers that can keep people, perspectives, and opportunities apart.
Making Networking Less Intimidating
The YPF Speed Networking event began in 2023 with a simple idea: Could we take the familiar format of speed networking and use it to create a more approachable, lower-barrier way for young professionals to connect?
Rather than asking young professionals to navigate a room and find their own way into conversations, the structured format gives everyone a reason to start talking. It makes that first introduction easier and creates space for the conversation to develop naturally.
That approach has shaped the event ever since.
Now beginning its fourth version, Speed Networking has grown into one of the YPF’s most anticipated and well-attended events. Last year, nearly a dozen international chambers of commerce joined the ACCJ as cohosts, bringing together young professionals from across Tokyo’s global business community. That level of cross-chamber collaboration is relatively rare and has helped make the event a unique opportunity to build connections well beyond any single chamber or professional circle.
Skyler Scofield, client services director at Covue Japan and a YPF vice-chair, remembers the inaugural event: “I was surprised, in the best way, to see so many young professionals gathered in one place. Beyond making business connections, I met people I connected with personally, some of whom I still keep in touch with today.”
Melynie Yoneda, sales director of Crimtan and a YPF co-chair, has led the event’s development and execution from the start. “It has been incredibly rewarding to see the event grow into a true representation of the YPF mission—to connect young professionals from different backgrounds and industries,” she said. “Each year brings together new people and new chambers, creating new connections that might never otherwise happen.”
Community in the Age of AI
That hunger for connection has only grown as more of our lives move online and become intertwined with artificial intelligence (AI).
“There’s a lot of talk about what AI means for the future of work,” said Fatim Diallo, a YPF vice-chair and a director at communications and public affairs advisory FGS Global. “Young professionals are already living that change, experimenting with new tools and sharing what actually works with each other. And yet, the more connected we are online, the more people seem to crave a room full of real people. That’s where the best conversations still happen.”
Reversing the Conversation
If Speed Networking is about lowering barriers among peers, our other returning flagship event addresses a different kind of distance: the gap that can exist between generations and levels of seniority within an organization.
Reverse Mentoring, co-created by the YPF and the CEO Forum, turns the traditional model on its head. CEOs and business leaders come prepared not primarily to advise but to ask questions and listen.
What makes these conversations compelling is how practical the questions often are. How should a manager give difficult feedback to someone who is earlier in their career? Is it better to save feedback for a formal review, or address a matter when it is most relevant? When young professionals choose between employers, how do they weigh compensation against purpose, flexibility, benefits, or opportunities for development?
Others have focused on navigating Japan’s high-context workplace. How can someone newly arriving in Japan understand what colleagues are really thinking? How can companies encourage employees to say what they might otherwise leave unsaid? What role does visible leadership play in normalizing parental leave, flexibility, or other workplace practices?
Jarrod Trusler, president of Dow Chemical Japan, Ltd. and co-chair of the CEO Forum, reflected on what he took away from the event: “The experience was a powerful reminder that younger professionals often see emerging workplace expectations and cultural shifts earlier than senior leaders. If we take the time to listen, these perspectives can challenge our assumptions and help us lead more effectively.”
The third Reverse Mentoring session is now being developed with the CEO Forum, with details to be announced soon.
What Should CEOs Know?
Perhaps that is the broader opportunity. Not only should young professionals be asking how they can gain access to senior leaders, organizations should also be asking how senior leaders gain access to the perspectives of their next generation of employees, customers, and leaders.
As we look ahead, we also want to take that conversation beyond the people who happen to be in the room. Ahead of the next session, we plan to ask our wider community one simple question: What is one thing you wish CEOs and senior executives understood about young professionals today? We hope to crowdsource those perspectives and bring them directly into the discussion.
Speed Networking creates opportunities for connections that might otherwise never happen. Reverse Mentoring creates space for perspectives that might otherwise go unheard. The formats are different, but the ambition is the same. We want to make it easier for people to meet, exchange ideas, and learn from one another across industries, chambers, and generations.
The next connection, idea, or opportunity may begin with a single introduction. We hope to see you there.
Unexpected Liabilities?
Grant Thornton explains upcoming changes to how Japan calculates minimum income tax and what to be aware of if you expect large capital gains in 2027.
Beware of changes to the minimum income tax rules in 2027.
Japan’s minimum income tax rules will expand in scope from January 1, 2027, and both residents and nonresidents contemplating company share sales or large real estate sales should be aware of how these changes may impact them. Those who have inherited property overseas may also be affected. Careful planning is required to prevent a higher-than-expected tax bill.
The Need for a Minimum Tax
Higher income is usually caused by capital gains on shares or real estate sales rather than salary. These gains are taxed separately and at a flat rate—15 percent national tax plus 5 percent local tax—while salary is subject to progressive rates of 5–45 percent national tax plus 10 percent local tax. This means that the greater the share of a taxpayer’s income that comes from capital gains, the lower their overall effective tax rate may be.
To correct this and ensure fairness, the Japanese government introduced the current rules (applicable from 2025) to impose a minimum tax calculation on individuals with income over ¥330 million. If the calculated tax is greater than the regular liability, additional tax is imposed.
From 2027, the scope will expand and the rate will increase. The threshold above which the tax is calculated will drop to ¥165 million and the minimum tax rate will rise to 30 percent from 22.5 percent. These changes will result in more taxpayers falling within the scope of the additional tax, in particular those with one-off capital gains or real estate sales.
The effects are shown in the following example calculation. For an individual with ¥50 million in salary and a ¥400 million capital gain, the regular tax liability would be approximately ¥79 million. The national tax (not including local tax) under the minimum calculation would be:
In addition, although local taxes are outside the scope of the calculation, the earthquake reconstruction surcharge (and defense surcharge for 2027) must be included.
Who May Be Affected?
The increased rate and reduced threshold will likely drag more taxpayers into the minimum tax regime, both individuals with high incomes who are prepared for the changes and others to whom the additional tax liability may come as a surprise.
Nonresidents with Japan real estate investments should be aware of the potential tax hike and consider accelerating plans to sell the property before the expansion of the minimum tax. Residents with large stock portfolios within special tax-advantaged accounts, executives with equity compensation, or business owners thinking of selling their companies should also seek advice on how the increased scope affects them.
With the new lower threshold, people who have inherited overseas houses should pay attention. In these cases, the individuals also take over the original purchase cost from the person who passed away. If this cost is unknown, they must use 5 percent of the current market value as the purchase cost for Japan income tax purposes. These values can give rise to considerable gains, particularly when the property was purchased many years ago. Typically, inherited houses are sold within a couple of years of inheritance, but if there is a large inheritance or estate tax bill to pay, it may be necessary to sell sooner, triggering a larger than expected income tax liability.
Takeaway
Although ostensibly aimed at individuals with high incomes, the threshold reduction and increased rate will cause more taxpayers to fall within the net of this additional tax, including those who may not have been aware of the tax or thought it did not apply to them. Taxpayers considering transactions that would trigger large gains should reassess the timing to minimize the impact. Seek professional advice before making any decisions.
For more information, please contact Grant Thornton Japan at info@jp.gt.com or visit www.grantthornton.jp/en
Young Professionals to Watch: Chase Rehder
The Kwansei Gakuin MBA candidate shares how the ACCJ’s student membership has advanced his career goals.
The Kwansei Gakuin MBA candidate shares how the ACCJ’s student membership has advanced his career goals.
The Young Professionals Forum (YPF) serves as a platform to connect working professionals aged 35 and under within the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ). This includes a growing number of student members. Through networking, information sharing, and other peer-led programs, members can enhance their professional and personal development while building valuable connections.
An option for those in graduate school or under 30 was added in 2025. Young professionals can join the chamber for just ¥24,000 per year, with the one-time entrance fee waived. In this installment of our Young Professionals to Watch series, we talk to Chase Rehder, an MBA student at Kwansei Gakuin University (KGU), about how he has made the most of his membership.
How did you find out about the ACCJ?
Funnily enough, I originally found out about the ACCJ through ChatGPT when I was wrapping up my first year at Kwansei Gakuin University. I told ChatGPT that I was searching for a professional community to meet like-minded people.
I understood the importance of networking and social capital, as that was how I received the opportunity to study in Japan. I just happened to meet the right people who knew of the right opportunity for me. I always knew that the next step after graduation wasn’t going to appear out of thin air, and that I had to put in the work and make the right connections. Joining the ACCJ felt like the right move.
How has the ACCJ helped you as a student?
Joining the ACCJ has tremendously benefited my studies. At KGU, I am in an MBA program with a concentration in finance. My graduate research thesis examines how real land asset prices are affected by infrastructure development—specifically, the effects of shinkansen (bullet train) development on land prices in regional cities. Using historical data, I am building a regression model to forecast residential land prices in Nakatsugawa, a city in Gifu Prefecture.
The project was actually kicked off by a chance encounter at an ACCJ event in Nagoya, where I met a man who had a personal stake in Nakatsugawa. Although he was not particularly interested in the potential capital gains, as his reasons for buying land were more personal, I immediately thought there must be some kind of investment opportunity.
That encounter took my research in a completely unexpected direction and ultimately served as the catalyst for a project that not only I have become genuinely excited about, but my professor has as well.
Do you have a memorable moment from a YPF or ACCJ event?
A Night of Stars & Stripes is the best event I’ve attended thus far. Prior to that, I really enjoyed the Kansai shinnenkai and Leading Growth: Global Strategy and Personal Leadership with Fusako Znaiden. The Kansai shinnenkai was just a great first experience at an ACCJ event, and Leading Growth was my first event in Tokyo. All events have become unforgettable experiences that have led to many great connections with peers and mentors.
Are there any standout members you’ve met?
One YPF member I connected with is Alex Wise. I have long-term goals and dreams that involve my ties to both the United States and Japan, but up until that day, I had only seen people who were already at or nearly at their finish lines. Meeting Alex was really what showed me that this dream I have is possible. Alex was the first person I met who was at that next step, the one I couldn’t quite see yet. In a way, his existence alone showed me that the path I imagine is actually possible.
I’ve been incredibly grateful for his willingness to lend a hand, share his experiences, and help me think more clearly about my own career path.
What are your expectations for the YPF and the ACCJ?
I wonder if more people like me—students looking to meet real professionals—will join the ACCJ and the YPF. Although I’ve only been a member for roughly nine months, I have already seen substantial growth in the Kansai chapter’s YPF. I hope for and am actively trying to support the continued success of the ACCJ and the YPF. I’m grateful to be a part of this organization and am excited for its future.
June and July 2026 Event Highlights
View a collection of photos from the ACCJ’s June and July 2026 events.
ACCJ leaders met with Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President & CEO Mary Daly on August 5 .
The American Chamber of Commerce in Japan hosted a wide variety of events in June and July. Among these were:
- Navigating Labor Regulations and Evolving HR Practices
- Kansai International Meishi Exchange
- Earning Attention: Marketing Strategy in the Age of AI
- The Business of Creativity: How Art Shapes Space, Brand, and Experience in Japan
- How AI and Geopolitics Are Changing M&A
- Japan Tourism Trends and Challenges
- What’s Next for Japanese Stocks in 2026?
- A Night of Stars and Stripes: A Fourth of July Celebration
- Women in Business Open Forum and Networking
- Exploring Japan's Startup Ecosystem: Founder Pitches and Policy Perspectives
- The Science of Sports: Data, Performance, and the Future of Athlete Optimization
- Governing AI: A Global Conversation with KPMG’s Dean Grandy
Here are some of our favorite highlights.
Happy Independence Day 2026!
My sincere thanks to the ACCJ board and all the member companies for your vital work to energize the US–Japan economic partnership and infuse it with our American spirit of possibility.
A special message for ACCJ members from US Ambassador to Japan George Glass
Last July, President Trump made a pledge. Speaking in Iowa to launch a year of celebrations to mark the 250th birthday of the United States, he promised to make the semiquincentennial “the single greatest year in the history of our country.”
Those celebrations are not limited to our 50 states, either. As United States ambassador, I took up the president’s challenge to commemorate our nation’s momentous milestone with a series of memorable events and initiatives across Japan.
Thanks to the generous support of so many American and Japanese corporate partners, we kicked off our impressive lineup of festivities with an event in January, which included a video message from President Trump that paid tribute to the “unbreakable bond” between the United States and Japan.
Since the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the United States has been an inspirational symbol of freedom, democracy, and opportunity for people and countries around the world.
At the same time, our partnerships with nations that also embrace our values have been key to so much of America’s enduring success. And there is, arguably, no greater partnership than the one between the United States and Japan. Over more than 70 years, our alliance has brought security and prosperity to the Indo-Pacific region and leadership to multiple fields of human discovery and industrial innovation.
In recognizing the extraordinary legacy of the Declaration of Independence this year, we are also acknowledging the remarkable contributions of the US–Japan partnership to both the American story and our nation’s achievements. This is very much a shared celebration, which is why we have taken the “America 250” party on the road, from Hokkaido in the north to Okinawa in the south.
In May, I visited Shimoda, the birthplace of the US–Japan relationship, for the city’s annual Black Ship Festival. The weekend reinforced for me just how far our partnership has progressed since Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan and the subsequent first treaties between our countries in the 1850s.
“My sincere thanks to the ACCJ board and all the member companies for your vital work to energize the US–Japan economic partnership and infuse it with our American spirit of possibility.”
The United States and Japan are now the largest investors in each other’s economies, with Japanese companies employing more than 1 million Americans. Since the ACCJ was established in 1948, American companies have been pivotal partners in Japan’s development and emergence as an economic powerhouse. And now American companies are helping accelerate Japan’s digital transformation and ensuring the US–Japan partnership remains at the forefront of the most consequential period in modern history.
Today, thanks to President Trump’s leadership, the US–Japan partnership has never been stronger or more ambitious. Last year’s trade and investment deal—which includes Japan’s $550 billion US investment commitment and cooperation agreements in advanced technologies, energy, critical minerals, and shipbuilding—recalibrated our bilateral economic relationship and unleashed its enormous potential.
Together, we are reviving manufacturing industries, investing in the sectors of tomorrow, and securing our technological dominance by building reliable and resilient supply chains. Already, we are seeing the fruits of this reinvigorated economic belief. Japanese companies are investing in America—and in American workers—at record levels, while US companies in areas like advanced technologies and pharmaceuticals are expanding their presence and sharing their expertise in Japan.
At last year’s ACCJ Independence Day celebration, I said that the US–Japan partnership needed “the determination and urgency to seize the moment.” One year later, emboldened by the vision of President Trump and Prime Minister Takaichi, our partnership is doing exactly that.
As I told a group of Liberal Democratic Party members in May, if 2025 was the US–Japan partnership’s year of agreement, 2026 is our year of action. We have the road map, the resources, and the resolve. And our world-class American companies are fundamental to this mission, as they have been for nearly 80 years.
My sincere thanks to the ACCJ board and all the member companies for your vital work to energize the US–Japan economic partnership and infuse it with our American spirit of possibility. I look forward to working with you all in the months and years ahead to take that partnership to new, glorious heights. Happy Independence Day!
April and May 2026 Event Highlights
View a collection of photos from the ACCJ’s April and May 2026 events.
Masai Takako, member of the board of directors and chairperson of the Research Institute Board at the SBI Financial and Economic Research Institute (second right) with (from left) ACCJ Alternative and Foreign Direct Investment Committee (AFDIC) Vice-chair Jason Topaz, CEO Forum Co-chair Sarah Bader, Executive Director Laura Younger; and Alternative and Foreign Direct Investment Committee Chair Paul Lee at an AFDIC event on May 19 at Tokyo American Club.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Japan hosted a wide variety of events in April and May. Among these were:
- Spring Meet and Greet at the Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo
- Legal Services and IP Committee Networking: An April Fools’ Special! No Joke!
- A Day in the Life: Tourism and Hospitality
- Trends in Venture Capital in Japan and the United States
- Destination Management Best Practices
- Fireside Chat with Takako Masai, former Bank of Japan Board Member
- Now You Know Your GHIs
- The 35th ACCJ/NIS Chubu Walkathon
- Women’s Health in the Workplace: How Life-Stage Understanding Drives Performance, Career, and Culture
Here are some memorable moments from these events …
Dive into Kansai’s Economic Core
ACCJ members got a unique inside look at the country’s most important financial institution on March 24 as the ACCJ–Kansai Business Programs Committee hosted an event titled Dive into Kansai’s Economic Core.
The Bank of Japan welcomed ACCJ members for a behind-the-scenes look at its historic Kobe branch.
Members of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ) got a unique look into the country’s most important financial institution, the Bank of Japan (BOJ), and a rare glimpse at its office building, on March 24 as the ACCJ–Kansai Business Programs Committee hosted an event titled Dive into Kansai’s Economic Core.
Following a short video explaining the BOJ’s functions and Japan’s current banknotes, which went into circulation with a new design in July 2024, attendees toured the Kobe branch. The visit included a peek inside the old vault with its display representing ¥4 billion (about $25 million) in ¥10,000 notes.
The BOJ’s Kobe branch, which celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2027, played a critical role in the immediate aftermath of the January 1995 Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, including the replacement of banknotes that were burned or damaged by water and mud. There were also temporary branches of commercial banks quickly set up in the BOJ building to help survivors access their accounts and begin the recovery process.
Masaki Bessho, general manager of the BOJ’s Kobe branch, discussed the Kansai economic outlook and monetary policy in a presentation at the Kobe Bankers’ Association Building. After an active Q&A session, the event concluded with a networking reception for Bessho and fellow attendees, including:
- British Consul-General Michael Blyth
- Philippine Consul-General Donna Rodriguez
- Thai Acting Consul-General Pakprapai Kumbunlue
- Hungarian Consul and Head of Mission Andras Kerekes
- German Head of Economic Affairs Johannes Schweizer
“The event provided a really useful insight into the role Central Bank branches in Japan continue to play and a great discussion on the Japanese economy,” said Blyth.
Bessho remarked: “I am absolutely delighted that we could successfully host the guided exploration of the Bank of Japan Kobe Branch and the subsequent briefing on the Kansai economic outlook for the ACCJ–Kansai chapter. During the site visit, it was deeply encouraging to receive such warm words of praise regarding the Bank’s tireless efforts during the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.”
The questions raised during the briefing, Bessho noted, were exceptionally sharp and insightful, making the dialogue both stimulating and genuinely enjoyable. “Furthermore, the networking session provided a valuable window into the diverse activities of global corporations operating right here in Kansai. This event served as an outstanding opportunity to strengthen our ties with foreign business leaders and diplomats based in the region. I truly look forward to deepening our engagement with the ACCJ and continuing this meaningful collaboration in the years to come.”
ACCJ–Kansai Lead Aiko Baba added: “I am grateful for the interaction we had. My hope is to foster deeper friendships that will serve as a foundation for new opportunities and growth for our beloved Kansai.”
Leading across Borders
Minerva University’s new World Wise Executive Leadership Program is designed to help mid- to senior-level professionals build global fluency and lead with confidence across cultures, regions, and global environments.
Minerva University and Nippon Foundation Launch World Wise Executive Leadership Program.
Spend any time in a global boardroom, or on an international call where the conversation keeps sliding past each side, and the same friction surfaces: technically skilled, strategically sharp leaders who struggle to read the room, align perspectives, and build trust.
This is the cultural fluency gap that influences how leaders confront uncertainty, interpret differences, and define their own role in a complex world. More than a soft skill, global fluency is the difference between influence and irrelevance for today’s executives.
Minerva University’s new World Wise Executive Leadership Program is designed to address this gap. Launched in partnership with the Nippon Foundation, World Wise is a six-month program for mid- to senior-level professionals who want to lead with confidence across cultures, regions, and global environments.
The need is acute. As organizations expand across borders and teams become more distributed, multicultural, and matrixed, leadership effectiveness increasingly depends on the ability to adapt. Culture shapes trust, decision-making, hierarchy, and communication, and leaders who understand this operate at a fundamentally different level than those who don’t.
World Wise is built on the premise that cross-cultural leadership is a learnable skill, one that can be developed through structured, immersive experience.
Practice-Based Approach
Studying abroad, working overseas, or enrolling in elite graduate schools all require significant time and financial resources. However, the World Wise Executive Leadership Program is opening that door to many more leaders.
Built on Minerva’s active learning model of no lectures ever, World Wise delivers every session as an interactive, discussion-based experience. Over six months, participants known as World Wise Executives will work through the practical mechanics of global leadership. This includes engaging in weekly classes focused on leading teams across borders, developing adaptive communication techniques, and making high-stakes decisions in complex, interdependent systems.
The program blends live virtual seminars with a diverse regional cohort, in-person leadership accelerators in international cities, and real-world simulations, going beyond studying global leadership to practicing it. Participants are challenged to navigate ambiguity, test their assumptions, and refine their thinking alongside peers from different cultures, industries, and perspectives, allowing them to expand their own leadership lens and deepen their collective insight in ways a traditional classroom can’t replicate.
“At both the graduate and undergraduate levels, Minerva has developed leaders from more than 100 countries who thrive in complex, rapidly changing global environments,” explained Minerva University President Mike Magee. “This expansion into executive leadership programs builds on our mission to develop globally adaptive, ethically grounded leaders at pivotal career moments.”
Why Cultural Fluency? Why Now?
Without cultural understanding, misalignment persists, trust erodes, and performance suffers. Cultural fluency is the ability to engage, work, and communicate effectively with people across visible and invisible dimensions of difference, such as geography, generation, gender, and worldview.
As global workplaces grow more interconnected, leaders who can navigate complexity across those dimensions are more effective and essential. For many leaders, bridging cultural gaps can feel daunting, especially without clear frameworks or practice. This is exactly the gap World Wise is designed to address.
Supported by the Nippon Foundation
“In Japan, developing leaders who can address complex challenges across sectors and organizational boundaries is increasingly important,” said Jumpei Sasakawa, president of the Nippon Foundation. “Minerva University’s practice-based, dialogue-driven approach offers valuable insights for developing the next generation of leaders in Japan and across Asia.”
Thanks to significant sponsorship from the Nippon Foundation, participants in the inaugural East Asia cohort will receive a deeply discounted tuition rate compared with future offerings. This creates a rare opportunity to access a world-class program while helping shape its evolution.
Who Is It For? World Wise is ideal for managers and directors preparing for international responsibility, leaders managing distributed or multicultural teams, and high-potential professionals identified for leadership growth. It is particularly well suited for professionals operating in markets where effectiveness depends on navigating cultural nuance, hierarchy, and cross-border collaboration.
The inaugural cohort focuses on East Asia and kicks off with an in-person accelerator in Tokyo in June 2026. Future cohorts will expand to additional regions. If you lead across borders—or expect to—this program was designed for you.
Beyond the Program
For those looking to build cross-cultural leadership skills and stronger analytical and decision-making capabilities, Minerva University’s graduate programs offer a complementary path. The master of science in decision-making and applied analytics (MDA) and certificate in decision-making and applied analytics (CDA) are designed for early- to mid-career professionals seeking to sharpen how they interpret complexity, evaluate information, and make decisions in high-stakes environments.
Together, World Wise and Minerva’s graduate programs reflect a shared focus on developing leaders who can think critically, adapt across contexts, and make high-stakes decisions with confidence.
Applications are now open, with the World Wise deadline on May 15 and MDA applications due by June 10.
Exclusive Offer
ACCJ members can enroll at a discounted rate for the inaugural World Wise Executive Leadership Program.
Offer valid through May 15, 2026