No.00 First part

“I really feel that we’re at a kind of turning point in time.” I really feel that the last two or three years have been a kind of turning point in time. But I don’t feel that there has been particularly strong messaging about what needs to be changed and how. Rather, the feel I get from society is that we’ve done things like this up until now, so we may as well continue. Those who don’t want to change the status quo might outnumber those who do. My personal way of thinking, after having been involved in running small and medium businesses, is that every company thinks it will be difficult to continue doing business under their existing business model. So they’re scrambling to set up new businesses. But as much as they want to start new businesses, they can’t invest in them. This is the odd thing about Japan. The banks are endlessly willing to lend businesses all the capital they need for equipment investment in their existing businesses, but when it comes to something new, they say “how much risk is there? Is the business viable?” If that’s the attitude of the financiers carrying our economy, this country is doomed. I want to say to them “So you’re just going to sit there taking no risks while the Japanese economy falls to pieces?” By no means do I think finance is the only place where you see this. I’d say this issue is also the reason why no real new movements have started in Japan. Everyone feels the same way but no one says anything. And because no one speaks up and says it out loud, nothing changes and we just end up with more of the same. Certainly change takes time. But lately I’ve been wondering a lot about what would happen if someone said what we’ve all been thinking. For the sake of their business, for the sake of their future, for the sake of their children’s future…there are so many things to think about. But first and foremost, if we’re all going to be feeling stuck and exhausting ourselves every day, we may as well come over to the side that cries out and sets change in motion. Surely we ought to have this motivation at least. “Those who stay silent and expect things to change organically are the ones who are left behind in every era.” My company, NITTO ELECHEMIC, was originally a plating company but then entered the cosmetics with the brand OSAJI and now also has a tableware brand called HEGE. My great-grandfather started NITTO ELECHEMIC, but if you look back, the company has made big changes every 30 years or so. My grandfather began handling parts for home appliances and lighting and my father began producing parts for vehicle engines. This was almost exactly 30 years ago. And 30 years later, it was time for another change. What has been said recently about changing the way companies work is self-contradictory, wouldn’t you say? Companies tell workers that they can’t work more than 42 hours of overtime per month anymore but then tell them to make up the loss of income with a second job. This system was brought in with employees’ health in mind but since second jobs are still permitted, this appears to increasing, not decreasing, the risk of employees being worked to death. It’s difficult to understand. We no longer live in an age where employees will endure anything to pay the bills, and it is nonsensical to even try to distinguish between what constitutes working to live and what constitutes living to work. Overtime is supposed to be something people do because they want to, not because anyone is forcing them to. If we change working practices to forbid employees to work more than 42 hours of overtime per month, ultimately the company is placing constraints on the hours that employees work and ignoring individuals’ judgments. What’s happening here is a failure to understand people’s motivation to work. But you can’t say that. Moreover, people don’t think talking about it will change anything. I am struck by how incredibly pointless this all is. I’d say that those who stay silent and expect things to change organically are the ones who are left behind in every era. I don’t want that to happen to me so I want to make a point of speaking up and saying what I’m thinking. Not theorizing about solutions; something at a vaguer level, all kinds of people coming together and sharing thoughts that we can all relate to. I’m sure you’ve heard of the World Economic Forum in Davos. The world’s most prominent politicians and business leaders meet in Switzerland and discuss a wide range of topics. My ideal is to create a forum like that on this site. When we speak up, there may be people who agree with us and say they’ve noticed the same thing. And if we all shake hands and join forces, we might be powerful enough together to change the world, even if it takes time. That wave is the ultimate goal, but let’s start with sharing our ideals with each other. That was the starting point of this site. I think our ideals and dreams, these ideas that seem like works of fiction, are our reason for doing something each day. “Being told that something I made saved someone filled my heart with joy.” The OSAJI cosmetics brand is frequently mentioned as a success story of a small or medium business entering a new industry where they’re starting from square one. When we decided to enter that industry, the only thing I had to say was the slogan “create an active sales model”. Small and medium businesses that center on B to B are effectively subcontractors, and the majority of their sales are passive. I really hated that. When the Global Financial Crisis hit and we weren’t getting orders anymore, I hated the way the company just accepted it and said “vehicle manufacturers are all selling less so lower figures are inevitable for us too.” Same with the Great East Japan Earthquake; the attitude was just “if parts procurement is stagnating and production of cars has stopped, it’s inevitable that our sales will fall.” Every time I heard discussions like that, I was flabbergasted and wanted to ask these people what they were on about. Whether vehicle manufacturers’ sales fall and whether your own figures stagnate are two different conversations. I think what we really need to do is set targets and actively decide how we should do business and what initiatives we should take to accomplish them. That is the same whether you’re in B to B or B to C. But, and this may be more pronounced in the area of engine parts than anywhere else in a vehicle’s supply chain, processes do not change easily so the risk of losing orders is extremely low. As a result, we tend to fall into a conservative mindset. That way of doing things was entrenched at my company, and at first when I talked about new businesses, my father said “Go ahead!” and supported me. But new businesses cost a lot of money. My father was understanding at first, but balked at the big investment that was needed. In the end he’d say “we don’t need to go to such lengths to do something new,” while I got more and more frustrated. That went on for quite a while. But I just couldn’t give up. Why? One reason was face and pride. To my generation, the most successful person in their class was the one who was richest and drove the best car, and I probably still carried some of that mindset. The other reason was because the things we create make people happy. That might have been the bigger reason. When someone who bought OSAJI told me that something I had made saved them, it filled my heart with joy. “One thing I can say for sure about creation is that it comes from good limitations.” While I also do things like cooking, I’m not an artist, so I can’t just get an inspiration and make something from nothing. I’m just not cut out for that. Before I did this job, I worked in music, and I think this is why I didn’t last there. I didn’t have the ability to get inspiration out of nowhere and churn out one song after another. So why did I get into music? The reason comes back to what I said just now: I wanted the people in front of me to enjoy hearing my music. I think it was purely about that. It’s the same with the cosmetics and tableware I’m involved in now: it all starts with wanting to make the people in front of me happy. I felt almost no discouragement when I gave up on music. The only thing that really made me feel discouraged was that I had saved every yen I could from my part time job to buy expensive instruments and equipment because I believed that you needed good instruments to make good music, and then I found out that there were people making cooler songs than mine on a single sequencer that cost about 30,000 yen (about US$200). That was the biggest reason why I didn’t have the confidence to keep making songs. In the end, the people who make cool things aren’t spending a lot on their creations. To get to where I am now, I had to have realizations like that and go through so many setbacks, but the experience solidified my thoughts about creation: it comes from good limitations. For example, if you tell someone to make whatever they want, using ingredients they like, they’ll ultimately draw on their memories and make something like what they remember from the past. That’s not a creation, that’s an homage. But if, for example, you tell someone to make something with only the ingredients they have in their fridge right now, they don’t have any memories to draw on, and it forces them to think in order to make something. That is at the root of what I consider to be creation. To continue with the fridge analogy, my family had times when we were flush and times when we had almost no money at all. At one point my father was forced out of his position as director and I became a stand-in husband for my mother. Even in those times, my parents tried to live as if things weren’t as grim as they were. They always had nice things like home-made miso or soy sauce, and they always stocked up on condiments like capers, which were considered fancy back then. We even had a full range of seasonings; I think their reasoning was that even if we didn’t have a lot of ingredients, there was always room to get creative. That’s what I mean by “good limitations”. Rather than high-end creations and art, I am drawn more strongly to those that come from someone off the street who is clawing their way up. This is in large part because I myself have experienced those circumstances. So I don’t by any means think that having a lot of luxury ingredients is a good condition for creation. Coco Chanel once said “Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.” I think she’s spot on. Ultimately, what Chanel was trying to do amounted to fake jewelry in a way. But if we consider that true creation is about how elegant you can make cheap materials look, I think that is far more difficult, and more worthwhile, than making luxury items look more luxurious. In my case, I clearly did not have the knowledge necessary to make cosmetics. I had dropped out of college and had never learned chemistry. And I’d never worked in a cosmetic company’s laboratory. So my knowledge about making cosmetics was extremely limited. When I showed what I had created to someone more experienced who had worked on research and development for cosmetics, they were shocked and said “I’ve never seen a formula like that before.” My products certainly went against the grain. Obviously I might have been able to make something more complicated if I knew a lot. But it just came down to trying again and again with the scant knowledge I had. That’s the truth of the matter. But by simply thinking about what I wanted the products to be like and earnestly pursued it, learning what I needed to learn in order to bring it to life and sparing no effort to finally make something. I think the limitation created by my lack of knowledge is why the OSAJI brand has come as far as it has. If I were to describe what kind of brand OSAJI is, I’d say it’s a brand that helps people who have concerns about their skin. The first person who came to mind was my mother, who became ill and could not use any cosmetics because her skin would not tolerate it. So I think that gave me clear guidelines about what the products should and should not contain. After I got married, I thought about my wife—I wanted her to have cosmetics that would be safe for her when she got pregnant. When our children were born, I wanted products that they could use. I am proud that I ultimately did not need to do any market research to make these cosmetics—I simply thought of the people close to me. Text：Masahiro Kamijyo