Backing Youthful Enterprise
One Member explains why Japan’s younger generation is key to a revitalized economy.
Ushering me past the gleaming sign in the reception area and into the offices of his recruitment firm, Jeremy Sanderson is clearly delighted with his new premises in Toranomon. The move into the mid-rise office building represents the culmination of 10 years of entrepreneurial determination.
Yet the 54-year-old Club Member is far from complacent. As a chief executive or representative director of three additional businesses, in fields as diverse as LED lighting, serviced offices and motorcycle accessories and parts, he says he is continually setting goals for their development.
Having established his latest enterprise, the Japan arm of a Swedish lighting firm, last year, Sanderson says now is a great time to set up or develop a business in Japan. Not only does the government offer a range of subsidies and guidance to startups, it is also encouraging banks to support businesses through low-interest loans.
“There’s a lot of positive feeling in the market at the moment and I experience that everywhere I go,” explains Sanderson, adding that this optimism is also apparent among his conservative Japanese business contacts.
While he admits that “hunger from mid-career salarymen or business people to leave big corporations and start their own businesses is not particularly apparent” in Tokyo, Sanderson is buoyed by what he calls an “entrepreneurial renaissance,” boosted by a younger generation that experienced neither Japan’s economic bubble excesses of the 1980s nor the austerity that followed it.
“They have never really known the economic hard times that the postwar generation did in Japan, so don’t have the same aversion to risk as their parents or grandparents,” he says. “There’s a huge amount of creativity in the younger generations in Japan, creating the prospect of a more entrepreneurial society.”
According to a 2015 entrepreneurship survey by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, only 3.8 percent of Japan’s working-age population is either a nascent entrepreneur or owner-manager of a new business. This compares with a 2016 figure of 12.6 percent in the United States.
After an exodus of expats—whose diversity created business opportunities and attracted talent—following 2008’s global financial crisis and 2011’s triple disaster, and in the face of a declining population, nurturing business leaders has never been so important.
According to Sanderson, who moved here from Britain in 1998 and set up his first business seven years later, entrepreneurs can help Japan think its way out of its macro issues. For example, robotics, he says, has the potential to boost productivity while dealing with the country’s labor shortage.
Sanderson’s passion for developing young talent extends to his management style at his recruitment firm, where he prefers to educate and steer rather than order. In 2015, he also volunteered as a mentor on the Club-sponsored Japan Market Expansion Competition (JMEC), a program designed to strengthen the skills of up-and-coming executives while assisting foreign companies.
By sharing his own journey, Sanderson hopes to inspire future entrepreneurs. “I’m very much a believer in the concept of paying it forward,” he says.
Words: Kathryn Wortley
Image: Kayo Yamawaki
