Who Drives Discontinuous Growth? Four Turning Points for Japanese Companies to Take Risk at the Next Level [SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026]

Hello, this is Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.

"Not taking risk is the biggest risk." When three speakers repeated this phrase in unison during a session at SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, the room fell into a quiet, charged silence. As someone running TIMEWELL under the banner of "democratizing challenge," I made it my top priority to attend this session. It turned out to be a 90-minute exchange of the unfiltered voices of Japanese executives that far exceeded my expectations, and I want to organize what I heard from a management standpoint.

The session was titled "Going Global Through Discontinuous Growth — Risk Taking by Japanese Companies." Genichi Tamatsuka, CEO of Lotte Holdings; Yosuke Tsuji, CEO of Money Forward; and Yugo Ishiguro, Director at Pegasus Tech Ventures, debated the topic in Japanese. Topics like "the organizational challenges of Japanese companies" tend to stay abstract in English-language sessions, but here they were discussed vividly, backed by numbers, failure stories, and concrete strategies.

In this article, I have reorganized the discussion into four turning points that Japanese companies need to take risk at the next level. I hope it serves as a hint for anyone in new business development or corporate strategy who wants to elevate the quality of tomorrow's decisions.

What made this session different from the typical "Japan needs to globalize" talk was its specificity. Each speaker brought concrete numbers, named the failures, and traced the exact moments when their organizations either accelerated or hesitated. As someone who has sat through dozens of similar panels at conferences in Tokyo, Singapore, and San Francisco, I can say that this level of openness is rare in Japanese corporate culture, and even rarer when the executives involved are still in their seats. The fact that they were willing to be this candid suggests that the urgency around discontinuous growth has finally crossed a threshold inside Japanese boardrooms.

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SusHi Tech Became the Stage for "Global Challenge from Japan"

SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, held at Tokyo Big Sight from April 27 to 29, 2026, is one of Asia's largest global innovation conferences. A record 770 startups, overseas VCs, large enterprises, and city leaders gathered to debate AI, robotics, resilience, and entertainment.

Within that program, the significance of staging a session debating Japanese companies' global strategy in Japanese should not be underestimated. The 300-seat room was packed beyond capacity with standing-room-only attendees, and visitors clearly were not looking for case-study summaries — they were searching for clues on how to change tomorrow's decisions. Numbers, failure stories, and strategy poured out of three executives at the same time. It was a rare moment.

Tamatsuka of Lotte — The Reality of 400 Billion Yen in Japan vs. 7 Trillion Yen in Korea

I was honestly stunned by the numbers Tamatsuka presented at the start. Lotte's confectionery business in Japan is around 400 billion yen in annual revenue, while its Korean business is roughly 7 trillion yen. Under the same "Lotte" brand, the Japanese parent company and the Korean operations differ in scale by a factor of about 20. Tamatsuka spoke candidly about the difficulty of running such a group.

Tamatsuka previously served as president of Fast Retailing (Uniqlo) and then president of Lawson before becoming CEO of Lotte Holdings. Among Japanese executives in the consumer goods and retail industry, he is one of the few who has directly experienced the front lines of global expansion. That background gave his remarks unusual weight that day.

I was particularly intrigued by his deep dive into the differences in decision-making culture between Japan and Korea. "Korea is top-down and fast, but execution can be rough. Japan is bottom-up — failure rates are low but timing is often missed. Add the two and divide by two, and you get something just right." That kind of grounded insight only comes from a CEO who has shuttled between Japan and Korea for years.

Lotte is currently pivoting from basic chemicals to high-value-added bio and fine chemicals. As Chinese oversupply is destroying the basic chemicals market, the Korean side reportedly made a swift decision to invest at scale in the biopharmaceutical domain. This pivot is a textbook example of "discontinuous growth" in action.

What I found especially instructive is the implicit message that a single corporate group can house multiple decision-making cultures and use them strategically. The Japanese side's strength is precision and detail; the Korean side's strength is speed and scale. Rather than forcing one to copy the other, Tamatsuka seems to be designing the group so that each side's strength is preserved while the boundary between them is made permeable enough to share the upside. For mid-size and large Japanese groups with overseas operations, this is a pragmatic blueprint to study.

The Failure Story: Uniqlo London Shrinking to Five Stores

During the session, Tamatsuka also touched on Uniqlo's failed entry into London. Back in 1998, Uniqlo had revenues of about 70 billion yen and a market cap of around 30 billion yen. The company opened 30 stores in London in one wave, but sales collapsed and they had to scale back to just five stores at one point. From there, they took on the challenge again and reached today's 2.5 trillion yen global revenue and over 20 trillion yen market cap (third largest in Japan).

What is striking about this story is that it does not follow the cliché narrative of "they failed, therefore they succeeded." Instead it boils down to a colder question: did they have the financial headroom and the will to keep challenging even after failure? Many Japanese companies retreat after a single failure. Uniqlo persisted and tried again. That difference is what separates global companies from purely domestic ones.

There is also a quieter lesson buried in this story: the importance of designing the company's balance sheet so that one geographic failure does not threaten the survival of the whole enterprise. Uniqlo's London setback hurt, but it did not put the parent company at risk. That is a function of how the executive team had structured exposure, reserves, and the pace of expansion. When Japanese companies talk about "global expansion," they often jump to product strategy and team composition, but the unsexy work of treasury and capital structure is what determines whether a company can survive the second, third, or fourth attempt at a new market.

Tsuji of Money Forward — A Three-Stage Globalization Strategy

Tsuji's explanation was beautifully organized as a framework. Money Forward is pursuing overseas expansion in three stages: "globalization of capital → globalization of people → globalization of business."

Here is where they are today: More than half of shareholders are overseas institutional investors. More than 60% of engineers are non-Japanese. They are expanding the business on top of this capital and talent foundation. Among Japanese SaaS companies, almost no one else has built an organization this internationalized.

A particularly interesting point was the "side door strategy" Tsuji described. The U.S. IT space is dominated by giants tens of times Money Forward's size. A head-on fight is impossible. So Tsuji chose a different approach: acquire an accounting firm in the U.S. and infuse AI into it. Rather than entering the existing red-ocean SaaS market, the idea is to transform the operations of incumbent players from the back end using AI.

Another concept Tsuji emphasized was the "forward engineer." Engineers embed directly with customers in the field and shorten 50-hour tasks down to 5 minutes — improvement cases of more than 100x productivity have actually been delivered. This rewrites the conventional wisdom of SaaS at the foundation. The shift is from the traditional "sell a generic product at scale" model to a "redesign the customer's operations together" model.

A personal anecdote from Tsuji also struck me. He sent his 11-year-old daughter to a boarding school overseas. It is not just business risk taking; he is practicing discontinuity in his own family choices. The intensity of an executive whose words and actions match was on full display.

This kind of personal alignment matters more than it might seem. Employees, especially younger ones, are highly sensitive to whether the executive team's stated values match their lived choices. If a CEO preaches risk-taking but never relocates, never invests personally in unfamiliar markets, and never puts their own career on the line, the message lands hollow. Tsuji is not asking his organization to do anything he is not willing to do himself, and that fact alone changes how his words are received internally.

Tsuji's Take — AI is a "Once-in-a-Decade Opportunity"

In the second half of the session, Tsuji repeated this message: "AI is a platform shift — a once-in-a-decade opportunity. AI multiplied by something else is what works." I think this is an extremely practical management compass.

The era of introducing AI as a standalone technology is over. We are entering a phase where you can draw a discontinuous growth curve only through the multiplication of "existing business x AI." Money Forward's accounting x AI, Lotte's food x AI, automakers' autonomous driving x AI. In every case, "X x AI" is what changes the order of magnitude.

Ishiguro of Pegasus Tech Ventures — Access to SpaceX and OpenAI

Pegasus Tech Ventures, which Ishiguro represented, is not very well known in Japan but holds an extremely unique position globally. It is a VC that selects and introduces U.S. startups to large Japanese companies.

Their portfolio is extraordinary. Reportedly 30 billion yen invested in SpaceX, plus stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. They embed deeply in the U.S. inner circle and deliver that deal flow to large Japanese corporations. It is nearly impossible for Japanese institutional investors or operating companies to participate directly in top Silicon Valley deals, but Pegasus has built that "bridge."

Ishiguro's commentary on the speed gap between Japan and the U.S. cut deeply. "Japan is consensus-driven and slow in decision-making, while the U.S. assumes failure as a given and iterates rapidly." The gap between how Google or OpenAI run small teams through fast PoCs and the layered approval processes of large Japanese companies translates directly into a gap in competitiveness.

He also pointed out that the cost of "missed deals" is almost never measured in Japanese corporate accounting. A Japanese conglomerate that takes six months to decide on a 10 billion yen investment is not penalized in any visible line item when a faster competitor wins the round. Yet the cumulative effect over a decade — missed access to category-defining startups, missed learning opportunities for the team, missed brand-building inside the global VC community — is enormous. Pegasus, in some sense, exists to compress that decision cycle by pre-curating deals so that Japanese boards can act on a much shorter clock.

Four Turning Points for Japanese Companies to Take Risk at the Next Level

From here, this is my synthesis. Based on the three speakers' remarks, the structural walls blocking discontinuous growth in Japanese companies are clear, and the breakthroughs converge into four directions.

Turning Point 1: Reset the Executive Team's Risk Tolerance

First, reset the executive team's risk tolerance. As Tamatsuka's London-retreat-then-comeback story illustrates, the upper bound of any company is determined by whether the executive team has "the will to keep going even after failure." Rather than HR practices that punish failure, organizations need systems that evaluate the "quality of failure and the lessons learned."

Turning Point 2: Secure Investment and Acquisition Budgets in Advance

Second, secure investment and acquisition budgets in advance. Leveraging acquisitions like Tsuji's side door strategy is impossible if every deal must be debated at the board level case by case — timing will be lost. By building an annual "do not need to spend it all" budget envelope, you create the structure to act the moment a deal materializes. This is exactly the institutional design needed to close the speed gap between Japan and the U.S. that Ishiguro highlighted.

Turning Point 3: Make KPI Design for New Businesses Independent

Third, make KPI design for new businesses independent. If you measure new businesses with the KPIs of the existing business (revenue, profit margin, market share), every new business will be killed early. New businesses need independent KPIs such as "speed of learning," "number of hypothesis-validation cycles," and "quality of customer touchpoints," and they need to be held for 3 to 5 years at a minimum.

Turning Point 4: Institutionalize the Use of External Talent

Fourth, institutionalize the use of external talent. The fact that more than 60% of Money Forward's engineers are non-Japanese is not just a diversity initiative — it is a workforce composition that serves as the source of competitiveness. For Japanese companies to attract experienced executives, engineers, and scientists from outside, they need to overhaul compensation systems, contract structures, and career paths from the ground up.

In practice, this means accepting that a senior AI researcher hired from outside may earn more than a board member who has been with the company for thirty years, and that this is not a failure of fairness but a reflection of the market for that specific skill set. It also means redesigning onboarding, promotion criteria, and English-language operations so that experienced outsiders can actually deliver impact within their first 90 days, not get worn down by the friction of a system that was never meant to host them.

How to Mine the "Untapped Innovation Resources" Sleeping in Large Companies

What I resonated with most in this session was the argument that "large companies' R&D divisions hold abundant innovation that should be put to work."

In my Panasonic days, I supported internal entrepreneurs, and there were truly countless technology assets, patents, and know-how lying dormant inside the company. The reason they were not commercialized was not a lack of technology. It was the absence of an infrastructure for taking on challenges. Internal hurdles, conflicts of interest with existing businesses, misaligned evaluation systems — these kill challenge.

Both Tamatsuka and Tsuji believed strongly in the latent potential of large companies. Japanese large companies have ample capital. The problem is speed and decision-making structure. The approach the three speakers suggested for solving this was: executives gain a sense of the front line (micro view), grasp the macro environment (changes across industry and society), and set the right hypotheses through the back-and-forth between the two.

This "micro-macro round trip" is essentially the same framework TIMEWELL provides daily to new business leaders. The value of people who act like a startup while inside a large company — internal entrepreneurs — will only grow.

The Essence of the Side Door Strategy — The Courage Not to Attack Head-On

Tsuji's side door strategy is, I believe, a universally applicable strategy across Japanese new business development. Rather than attacking a red ocean from the front, transform the operations of incumbent players from the back end.

The discussion also touched on Indian companies pursuing a "sell at one tenth the price" strategy in the U.S. market — same idea. The "low labor cost, high quality" model that Japanese companies once leveraged no longer works. Whether or not we can find new side doors will determine the success or failure of Japanese companies' global expansion.

The CEO's Responsibility for Risk Taking — The Status Quo Is the Risk

At the end of the session, all three speakers delivered the same message with intensity. "The CEO is the one who must judge whether to take risk. Maintaining the status quo on existing KPIs will not produce discontinuous growth."

Defending existing-business KPIs may look safe in the short term. But in a shifting market environment, maintaining the status quo is itself the biggest risk. Whether this sense is internalized by the executive team will determine what the company looks like ten years from now.

A Culture That Treats a "Resume of Failures" Positively

During the session break, while exchanging business cards with the speakers, an investor said something interesting. "Japanese entrepreneurs' resumes don't list failures. Only successes line up." On the surface this seems like a virtue, but it actually undermines trust. In Silicon Valley, a resume reading "three startups, two failed" is rated more highly than "one success." The lessons learned from failure become the foundation of the next success.

Across Japanese society, we need to cultivate a culture where the "history of failures" can be told with pride. From school education to corporate hiring interviews to media features on entrepreneurs — at every layer, our view of failure must change.

The "Institutional Safety Net" That Supports Risk Taking

Another important point is the institutional safety net that supports risk taking. The U.S. Chapter 11 bankruptcy law, European social welfare systems, Singapore's entrepreneur visa — all of them are mechanisms that "let you start over after failure."

Japan's bankruptcy procedures are harsh, the practice of personal guarantees is heavy, and starting over after failure is structurally difficult. To build "infrastructure for challenge," we need not only venture-support programs but also safety nets after failure. TIMEWELL also wants to be actively involved in this discussion.

Conclusion — Discontinuous Challenge Will Build Japan's Future

Tamatsuka, Tsuji, Ishiguro — they each run different businesses from different positions, but what they share is the fact that they make discontinuous challenge a real management decision. They do not just talk about it; they do it.

TIMEWELL's mission of "democratizing challenge" aims to make this kind of executive challenge not a special exception, but a feasible option for ordinary people inside organizations. At the SusHi Tech venue, I saw many new business leaders whose eyes were lit up. Building the infrastructure that lets them actually choose to take on challenges — that is our work.

Not taking risk is the risk. Try opening tomorrow's meeting with this line. That alone may shift the quality of the discussion. As Japanese companies enter a phase of true global challenge, this session left a sizable "verbal detonator" in the room.

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• Management Strategy for an AI-Driven Society — Fujitsu CTO Takagi on the Reality of "Human-Centered AI x Corporate Transformation"
• How to Overcome the Innovator's Dilemma at Large Companies — Organizational Conditions for Internal Entrepreneurs to Thrive

A Note from TIMEWELL

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References

[^1]: YouTube. "Going Global Through Discontinuous Growth — Risk Taking by Japanese Companies." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7TazRcfNKE [^2]: Lotte Holdings official site. https://www.lotte.co.jp/ [^3]: Money Forward official site. https://corp.moneyforward.com/ [^4]: Pegasus Tech Ventures. https://www.pegasustechventures.com/