Japan Life Stories

Fariza Abidova shares a great story, from moving to Japan from her home country in Uzbekistan to bootstrapping 50 businesses in 3 years, being a panelist alongside Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, and writing for the Nikkei, one of Japan's biggest newspapers. Fariza speaks 7 languages, is an expert in cross-cultural communication and her background is an inspiration for entrepreneurship and self-empowerment.

Tyas Sosen is a Belgium Tea Ceremony Master from Kyoto. Tyas trained in an impressive number of traditional arts like calligraphy, kendo or flower arrangement before eventually joining a famous lineage of tea masters. During the next hour, we'll discuss tea, of course, but also Buddhism, Taoism, mindfulness, martial arts and the underlying principles of the tea ceremony.

Alessandro de Bellegarde is an American videographer living in beautiful Kyoto. After a first career as a chef and directing his first movie, he created his own production company with a key mission: to archive Kyoto's cultural landmarks through virtual reality and high definition 3D videos. He has since been able to cover events such as the Gion Matsuri and be an ambassador for Kyoto at the famous Grammy Awards ceremony. In this interview, Alessandro discusses his love for Kyoto, his challenges working with its most traditional institutions, temples and shrines as well as the responsibility of being a foreign resident in a city as impacted by mass tourism as Kyoto can be.

Alex Knight is Australian and has been living in Tokyo for 5 years, currently working as a UX designer at bitcoin.com. While living in Tokyo, Alex rediscovered his passion for photography. He now spends his nights exploring Tokyo's hidden streets, creating stunning images in a style defined as cyberpunk. If you like Blade Runner and Stranger things, you'll love rediscovering Tokyo through his camera.

Hirisha Mehta came from India 10 years ago to study design in Tokyo. She is now the Head of Design at the Kyoto Journal, an award-winning magazine sharing artistic and cultural insights all across Asia. Hirisha's background includes experiences designing for the Harry Potter or the Minions franchises at Universal Studios Japan, a very popular attraction park located in Osaka. Fun fact, she also created her own Japanese typeface, called Indo-Wa, mixing Japanese and Indian characters. If you know a bit about font design, creating a full typeface is a massive amount of work and is really really impressive. In this very rich episode, we discuss typography, scripts, Japanese design, the city of Kyoto as a creative & cultural hub, architecture and local dialects like Osaka-ben.

Nathan Hoernig is the founder of Humble Bunny, a design and marketing agency based in Tokyo now collaborating with famous international companies such as Bose or Ralph Lauren. Expatriate in Japan since 2007, Nate explains how failing the JET program exams and creating a simple logo for a music band kickstarted his entrepreneurial adventure. He also shares his views on the marketing industry in Japan, how valuable networking is and his challenges in building a great corporate culture while finding good talents (hint: he is actively hiring!)

We recently had a chance to exchange with Tao Romera Martinez on his strategies to reach fluency in any language. Based on this conversation, we thought you might enjoy a few more tips to help you radically improve your Japanese level.

Tao Romera Martinez has been living in Japan for 15 years and transitioned from a corporate job at Fujitsu to becoming in 2013 the co-founder of Tadaku, a startup in the travel industry. After years of growth and successfully selling his company, Tao is now working on rescuing Japan's primary sector, ie the agricultural market, at Pocket Marche. In this episode, we discussed startups, acquisition VS venture money, identifying your strength and passion as well as how the aging population impacts the agricultural production. Tao also shared his killer technique to radically improve in Japanese or any other language. This is pure gold coming from someone fluent in 5 languages.

Adrian Leon Morris works at Tokyo Otaku Mode, an e-commerce and news platform dedicated to the Japanese Pop culture (anime, manga, games...). He is also the co-host of a podcast dedicated to video games and was kind enough to discuss with us the job opportunities laying in the Japanese gaming industry. Adrian previously worked in a much more conservative environment and also shares his experience learning Japanese, feeling comfortable in his daily life and going through interviews.

Lina Boudier shares with us her memories on her first few years in Japan, the challenges in creating a business here and in teaching english while being non-native. She also explains her conception of a "glorified freelancer" and how to move past this stage.