Being Well in the Land of Wa

Why this year’s Osaka expo is the perfect place to learn mindfulness.

With millions of visitors expected and exhibitors competing to show off exciting new innovations, enticing destinations, and even a rock from the moon, Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai may not seem like the ideal venue to learn about mindfulness and well-being. But improving human lives and society is what all world expositions have been about, and this year’s edition—with the theme Designing Future Society for Our Lives—has been designed as a “living lab” to share solutions for cocreating a better world.

This raises the question: What is a happy way of life?

The American Chamber of Commerce in Japan (ACCJ), under the subtheme Empowering Lives, will attempt to answer this question by hosting a special event at the expo on June 2 in the Women’s Pavilion in Collaboration with Cartier. The focus will be on practical solutions for embedding well-being practices into the workplace.

An Unmet Need

Societies need productive workers, and wellness in the workplace has come into sharper focus. Only a quarter of workers in economies such as those of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are happy, according to research by Indeed. Problems include technological change, information overload, the post-Covid surge in remote work, and always-on connectivity.

“This drains employees’ mental, physical, and emotional reserves, taking productivity down with them,” said Olesia Kyrylchuk, senior director and head of people for Asia-Pacific at EPAM Systems, Inc. and co-chair of the ACCJ Women in Business Forum.

One way to fight this burnout is mindfulness. Studies have shown that focusing on one’s body and mind can improve well-being, ease depression and anxiety, and boost motivation to improve other areas of daily life, such as exercise, eating, and sleeping habits. 

At the Osaka expo, Kyrylchuk and others will talk about how mindfulness can address these challenges.

The panel discussion will share physical and mental well-being practices for the workplace, and will include a workshop focusing on empowering individuals to build success through holistic, personal, and spiritual development. The mindfulness session is tailored to the Japanese cultural context with content that is immediately applicable to participants’ lives and can be easily integrated into daily practices.

The event, hosted by the ACCJ–Kansai Diversity and Inclusion Committee and the ACCJ Women in Business Forum, will be moderated by Mie Kitano, Japan representative of Synfiny Advisors and co-chair of the Kansai Diversity and Inclusion Committee. 

“Workplace well-being is more critical than ever in today’s VUCA world,” said Kitano, referring to an environment that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. “Global crises, shifting economic conditions, and evolving work structures demand that companies prioritize the well-being of employees to ensure resilience, adaptability, and sustained success. In this fast-changing, uncertain world, we are constantly facing stress and need to find better solutions to cope and overcome the challenges.”

Turning “Weakness” into Strength

Examples on a personal level are compelling. One is that of speaker Sarah Suyom, founder and chief visionary officer of Becoming. Suyom explained that she was a “high-achieving, over-functioning woman who ran on caffeine, adrenaline, and people-pleasing.” But she was restless inside and had endless thoughts racing in her head. 

She realized she had adult ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which limits the ability to focus. She developed a heart problem at 21, fainting at the office multiple times and bleeding for a full month. Her first attempts at meditation failed and she couldn’t get through a five-minute practice. Change came when she started working with an emotional healing coach, who guided her back in touch with herself and her feelings. 

By the time the pandemic hit, taking an enormous toll on the mental health of her family and friends, Suyom had become an accredited facilitator. She decided to use her skills and knowledge to help others, and so she began an online meditation group, which quickly grew. 

Since then, she has spoken to audiences of thousands about her journey as well as topics such as mindfulness, subconscious reprogramming, and energy-healing to create transformative experiences.

“That’s what led me here. It’s personal. And, I suppose, spiritual, too,” said Suyom. “Mindfulness isn’t just meditation on a cushion. It can be a pause before replying to an email, a breath after a difficult client call, or a choice not to schedule back-to-back meetings all day. I’d like to emphasize that it’s not about never getting upset, but more about having the awareness and capacity to respond, not just react. That’s something we can train for, and I’ll share some surprisingly simple tools for it.”

Leading by Example

Panelist Yuri Ichihashi, head of APAC for Amazon Hub pickup and return points, said mindfulness and well-being are especially important for workers in Japan, where hierarchical structures are emphasized and individual needs are subservient to seniority and collective harmony, or wa. 

“Therefore, meaningful change in workplace well-being must start with senior leadership,” she explained. “When senior leaders actively practice and prioritize well-being—whether by maintaining reasonable working hours, taking proper breaks, or openly discussing mental health—they create a powerful chain effect. Their example not only benefits their own health but also gives younger employees implicit permission to prioritize their own well-being without fear of career consequences.”

Another important part of being well at work is the ability to share concerns and fears about one’s own performance, something that can often be seen as weakness.

“For those from Japanese backgrounds, there’s often intense pressure to be perfect,” Ichihashi noted. “Sometimes, having the courage to be imperfect and accept support from others can be a powerful demonstration of the very workplace well-being principles we’re discussing.”

Making a Case for Businesses

Mindfulness can have far-reaching benefits beyond feeling good on an individual level, and many major brands have launched comprehensive employee well-being plans. According to The McKinsey Health Institute, the global economy could expand by as much as $11.7 trillion if companies invested in employee well-being. Through her experience developing workplace well-being programs, Kyrylchuk has witnessed the benefits of mindfulness not only for workers but also businesses.

“Well-being is not just an HR program,” she explained. “It is a pillar of lasting productivity. Today’s workforce—especially younger entrants—will not sacrifice their lives for a work-only existence. Businesses that weave well-being into their core strategy gain a clear competitive edge.”

State of Mind

How artificial intelligence is helping identify mental health concerns for better treatment

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For millions of people around the world who were already struggling with mental health issues, the past two-and-a-half years of the coronavirus pandemic have been a further trial. Isolation, a sudden shortage of opportunities to interact with friends or family in person, additional stresses in the workplace or the home, new financial worries, and difficulty in accessing appropriate mental healthcare have taken their toll, experts in the field told The ACCJ Journal.

However, in the battle against mental health complaints, this time of adversity has also served to fast-track development and adoption of a new tool: artificial intelligence (AI). While the technology may be relatively new to the sector, the potential is huge, according to companies that are applying it to assist physicians with diagnosis and treatment.

A Tool for Our Time

AI has come a very long way since the first chatbots appeared back in the 1990s, and early mental health monitoring apps became available, explained Vickie Skorji, Lifeline services director at the Tokyo-based TELL Lifeline and counseling service. And it is urgently needed, she added.

“When we have something such as Covid-19 come along on a global scale, there is inevitably a sharp increase in anxiety, stress, and depression. The mental healthcare systems that were in place were simply flooded,” she said.

“A lot of companies were already playing around in the area of AI and mental healthcare, but the pandemic has really pushed these opportunities to the forefront,” she explained. “If, for example, a physician is not able to meet a client in person, there are now ways to get around that, and there has been an explosion in those options.”

Not every purported tool is effective, she cautions, and there are going to be questions around client confidentiality and keeping data current. The clinician must also become sufficiently adept at interpreting a client’s genuine state of mind, which might be different from the feelings that are communicated through the technology. On the whole, however, Skorji sees AI as an extremely useful weapon in the clinician’s armory.

Voice Matters

One of the most innovative solutions has recently been launched by Kintsugi, a collaboration between Grace Chang and Rima Seiilova-Olson, engineers who met at the 2019 OpenAI Hackathon in San Francisco. In just a couple of years, the company has gone from a startup to being named in the Forbes list of North America’s top 50 AI companies.

Kintsugi has developed an application programming interface called Kintsugi Voice which can be integrated into clinical call centers, telehealth platforms, and remote patient monitoring applications. It enables a provider who is not a mental health expert to support someone whose speech indicates they may require assistance.

Instead of using natural language processing (NLP), Kintsugi’s unique machine learning models focus on signals from voice biomarkers that are indicative of symptoms of clinical depression and anxiety. Producing speech involves the coordination of various cognitive and motor processes, which can be used to provide insight into the state of a person’s physical and mental health.

In the view of Prentice Tom, chief medical officer of the Berkeley, California-based company, passive signals derived from voice biomarkers in clinical calls can greatly improve speed to triage, enhance behavioral health metadata capture, and benefit the patient.

“Real-time data that augments the clinician’s ability to improve care—and that can be easily embedded in current clinical workflows, such as Kintsugi’s voice biomarker tool—is a critical component necessary for us to move to a more efficient, quality-driven, value-based healthcare system,” he explained. The technology is already in use in the United States, and Japan is on the waiting list for expansion in the near future.

Chang, the company’s chief executive officer, is confident that they are just scratching the surface of what is possible with AI, with one estimate suggesting that AI could help reduce the time between the appearance of initial symptoms and intervention by as much as 10 years.

“Our work in voice biomarkers to detect signs of clinical depression and anxiety from short clips of speech is just the beginning,” she said. “Our team is looking forward to a future where we can look back and say, ‘Wow, I can’t believe there was a time when we couldn’t get people access to mental healthcare and deliver help to people at their time of need.’

“My dream and goal as the CEO of Kintsugi is that we can create opportunities for everyone to access mental health in an equitable way that is both timely and transformational,” she added.

The Power of Data

Maria Liakata, a professor of NLP at Queen Mary University of London, is also the joint lead on NLP and data science for mental health groups at the UK’s Alan Turing Institute. She has studied the use and effectiveness of AI in communicating with the public during a pandemic.

Liakata’s own work has focused on developing NLP methods to automatically capture changes in individuals’ mood and cognition over time, as manifested through their language and other digital content. This information can be used to construct new monitoring tools for clinicians and individuals.

But, she said, a couple of other projects have caught her eye.

One is Ieso Digital Health, a UK-based company that offers online cognitive behavioral therapy for the National Health Service, utilizing NLP technology to analyze sessions and provide data to physicians. And last October, US-based mental and behavioral health company SonderMind Inc. acquired Qntfy, which builds tools powered by AI and machine learning that analyze online behavioral data to help people find the most appropriate mental health treatment.

“There has definitely been a boom over the past few years in terms of the development of AI solutions for mental health,” Liakata said. “The availability of large fora in the past 10 years where individuals share experiences about mental health-related issues has certainly helped in this respect. The first work that came to my attention and sparked my interest in this domain was a paper in 2011 by the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. It was about constructing a corpus of suicide notes for use in training machine learning models.”

Yet, as is the case during the early stages of any technology being implemented, there are issues that need to be ironed out.

“One big hurdle is the availability of good quality data, especially data over time,” she continued. “Such datasets are hard to collect and annotate. Another hurdle is the personalization of AI models and transferring across domains. What works well, let’s say, for identifying a low mood for one person may not work as well for other people. And there is also the challenge of moving across different domains and platforms, such as Reddit versus Twitter.

“I think there is also some reluctance on the part of clinicians to adopt solutions, and this is why it is very important that AI solutions are created in consultation with clinical experts.”

Over the longer term, however, the outlook is positive, and Liakata anticipates the deployment of AI-based tools to help with the early diagnosis of a range of mental health and neurological conditions, including depression, schizophrenia, and dementia. These tools would also be able to justify and provide evidence for their diagnosis, she suggested.

To Assist, Not Replace

Elsewhere, AI tools will be deployed to monitor the progression of mental health conditions, summarize these with appropriate evidence, and suggest interventions likely to be of benefit. These would be used by both individuals, to self-manage their conditions, and clinicians.

Despite all the potential positives, Skorji emphasizes that AI needs to be applied in conjunction with in-person treatment for mental health complaints, rather than as a replacement.

“The biggest problem we are seeing around the world at the moment is loneliness,” she said. “Technology is useful, but it does not give people access to people. How we deal with problems, what the causes of our stress are, how can we have healthy relationships with other people—we are not going to get that from AI. We need to be there as well.”