Leading the Future of Japanese Business … How Japan can turn global disruption, distinctive capabilities and a culture of long-term commitment into its next era of growth … embracing the spirit of Yatte Minahare
July 1, 2026
Over the last decade, I have had the privilege of working with a number of Japanese companies and their leaders. Each experience has given me a different perspective on a business culture that is simultaneously deeply rooted and remarkably capable of reinvention.
At Suntory, I encountered a company that could be intensely Japanese and increasingly global at the same time. Its story stretches from the painstaking creation of Japanese whisky to an international portfolio that has included Orangina since 2009, and onwards into health and wellness businesses designed around improving people’s wellbeing.
Yet the thread connecting these seemingly different businesses is less about beverages than mindset. Suntory calls it Yatte Minahare: the entrepreneurial spirit inherited from founder Shinjiro Torii, centred on embracing the unknown, challenging the status quo and refusing to give up on ambitious ideas.
At Sompo, I saw another version of reinvention. What does an insurance company become when it stops defining itself primarily through insurance? Sompo now articulates its purpose as creating “a future of health, wellbeing and financial protection”, explicitly describing an ambition to provide services that go beyond insurance.
Its growing wellbeing activities connect insurance with health and nursing care in response to one of Japan’s defining social challenges: an ageing population.
At NTT, the horizon extends even further. Its IOWN initiative seeks to reinvent information infrastructure around photonics, radically greater capacity and lower energy consumption, with the ultimate ambition of supporting human wellbeing rather than simply faster communications. NTT is now extending this towards AIOWN, an AI-native infrastructure that it intends to expand nationally towards 2030.
Canon offers another perspective: a technology company whose philosophy of kyosei — living and working together for the common good — sits alongside an enduring emphasis on technological differentiation, intellectual property and an enterprising spirit.
And then there are leaders such as Masayoshi Son. Whatever one thinks of individual investment decisions, it is difficult not to marvel at the scale of his time horizon.
SoftBank’s philosophy explicitly considers future generations 300 years from now. Son says his conviction that machines would eventually exceed human intelligence began around half a century ago; today he is positioning SoftBank around artificial superintelligence, AI infrastructure and robotics.
This capacity to imagine far ahead is also visible in physical form at Toyota’s Woven City. First unveiled in 2020 and officially launched in September 2025, Woven City is not simply a smart-city development.
Toyota describes it as a real-world test course for mobility and part of its transformation from an automobile manufacturer towards a mobility company. Residents, companies and researchers can experiment together with new technologies and new ways of living. In 2026, Toyota added new AI technologies and an Inventor Garage designed to accelerate cross-industry co-creation.
Together these experiences have made me wonder whether Japan is entering another pivotal moment in its economic history.
The challenge is not simply to preserve what made Japanese business great. It is to apply those strengths to a world that is becoming fundamentally different.
A culture built for endurance … but now requiring movement
To understand the future of Japanese business, we need to understand something of Japan itself.
Japan often appears contradictory to outsiders. It can be extraordinarily advanced and surprisingly traditional at the same time. It gave the world the Shinkansen, industrial robotics, hybrid vehicles and countless innovations in electronics and materials, yet everyday behaviours can change slowly. Cash is a simple example. Japan’s cashless payment ratio only reached 42.8% in 2024, finally exceeding the government’s 40% target, and the government is now aiming for 80%.
That coexistence of modernity and tradition is not necessarily a weakness. Japanese consumers frequently value reliability, craft, detail, trust and continuity as much as novelty. Japanese companies similarly have traditions, rituals and social relationships that endure far longer than their equivalents in many Western businesses.
There is something of the ekiden in this.
Anyone who has spent time in Japan will recognise the cultural resonance of these long-distance relay races. Ekiden are deeply embedded in Japanese schools, universities and companies. Each runner performs individually but carries a tasukisash that must be passed to the next. Success is not about producing one superstar performance; it depends on every runner fulfilling their responsibility to the team.
It is a compelling metaphor for Japanese business. Responsibility passes between people and generations. Individual excellence matters, but so does continuity. The organisation is bigger than the individual. And if you want to really understand, read one of my favourite books The Way of the Runner by Adharanand Finn.
The danger, however, is that qualities that create extraordinary continuity can also create inertia. Consensus can become caution. Precision can delay experimentation. Loyalty to today’s business can make tomorrow’s business harder to imagine. Long-term thinking is only valuable if it is accompanied by the willingness to make consequential choices today.
Japan therefore faces an intriguing paradox. Many of the qualities that made its businesses successful — patience, quality, engineering depth, relationships, social cohesion and long-term commitment — could become extraordinary advantages in the next decade. But only if they are mobilised around the future rather than used to protect the past.
I see six themes that can help leaders make that transition.
1. Global shifts: seeing the world differently
Strategy starts outside the company.
The six forces I describe in my Megatrends 2036 work — Geopolitical Reorder, Accelerating Intelligence, Generational Remix, Regenerative Futures, Shifting Markets and Humanity Rising — are global. But their intersections have unusually profound implications for Japan.
Consider demographics. An ageing and shrinking population is conventionally described as a problem: fewer workers, greater healthcare and social-care costs, declining domestic demand and greater pressure on public finances. But strategic leaders should turn the telescope around.
What if Japan is not simply ageing first, but learning first how to build a successful longevity economy?
AI, robotics and automation become more urgent when labour is scarce. Healthcare shifts towards prevention and healthy longevity. Financial services must adapt to longer lives. Mobility needs to serve older populations. Homes, cities, food, travel, entertainment and employment all change when people routinely live much longer lives.
Sompo’s expansion beyond insurance towards health, wellbeing and nursing care is one example of turning a demographic challenge into a larger arena for value creation.
This is how leaders should approach megatrends. The biggest opportunities rarely sit within one trend. They emerge between them.
Ageing plus AI creates intelligent care. Labour scarcity plus robotics accelerates automation. Climate pressure plus energy insecurity creates demand for radically more efficient infrastructure. Geopolitical fragmentation plus advanced manufacturing increases the strategic value of Japanese engineering capabilities. AI plus Japan’s sophisticated consumer economy creates opportunities for personalised services at enormous scale.
The question is therefore not “What will happen in 2036?” but “What becomes possible because the world is changing?”
That is the beginning of future growth.
2. Strategic advantage … deciding what will matter most
A changing world also changes the assets that matter.
For much of the industrial era, advantage came from physical scale: factories, distribution, capital equipment and supply chains. These still matter. But tomorrow’s strategic assets increasingly include AI, compute, proprietary data, intellectual property, scarce talent, energy, critical materials, networks, ecosystems, standards and trust.
This matters particularly for Japan because geopolitics is transforming economics.
The Japanese government now talks explicitly about strengthening both strategic autonomy and strategic indispensability. Its economic-security agenda spans generative AI and quantum technologies as well as semiconductors, steel, shipbuilding, space, oceans and energy. In 2026, METI went further by publishing economic-security management guidelines specifically for companies, connecting these issues directly to medium- and long-term corporate value.
For business leaders, however, sovereignty should not primarily mean protectionism. I would frame it as strategic freedom: the ability to shape your own future rather than have it determined by dependencies you cannot control.
Every leadership team should therefore identify the ten assets and capabilities upon which its 2036 business will depend most. Which will become scarcer? Which more valuable? Where are dangerous dependencies emerging? Which capabilities would create disproportionate advantage?
Then comes the strategic choice: own, control, access or partner.
Not everything critical needs to be owned. Indeed, trying to own everything can make a business slower and less innovative. But leaders should know where they are dependent and make those dependencies deliberate.
Japan has extraordinary potential here. Precision manufacturing, robotics, materials science, engineering knowledge, intellectual property, quality, trust and deeply developed supplier ecosystems are not relics of the last industrial era. They are potentially future assets — if combined with software, AI, data and global ecosystems.
Canon illustrates the enduring importance of proprietary technology: its culture explicitly emphasises original technology and intellectual property. The challenge for Japanese industry is to combine such depth with the speed and connectivity of the intelligent economy.
3. Growth opportunities … following economic gravity
Japan’s domestic demographic reality makes the search for external growth even more important. But the opportunity is no longer simply “international expansion”.
Economic gravity is moving.
JETRO’s research provides a revealing picture. Japanese businesses operating in India, Vietnam and other parts of the Global South have benefited from strong domestic demand, while more than 80% of surveyed Japanese companies in Southwest Asia — particularly India — indicated an intention to expand. At the same time, Chinese companies are becoming increasingly formidable competitors not only at home but across markets such as Southeast Asia.
The implication is profound.
For decades, many businesses thought about Asia as a destination: develop products at home, then sell them into rapidly growing Asian markets.
Increasingly, Asia is a source as well as a destination — a source of innovation, talent, capital, business models, brands and competitors.
China has demonstrated this dramatically in EVs, batteries, solar energy, ecommerce and digital services. India combines enormous demographic scale with digital infrastructure, entrepreneurial energy and increasingly sophisticated consumers. Southeast Asia offers rapidly evolving economies and digitally native behaviours. The Gulf is emerging as an important bridge between Asian, African and European capital and innovation.
Japanese companies therefore need to move from exporting into Asia to innovating with Asia.
That means locating innovation closer to customers, partnering with local entrepreneurs, creating regionally relevant business models and being prepared for ideas to flow back into Japan rather than always travelling outwards from Tokyo.
Growth does not disappear. Growth migrates. The strategic skill is learning to see where it is going before your existing market definitions obscure it.
4. Customer value … from products to progress
This brings us to perhaps the most important shift of all.
Japanese companies became globally respected by making exceptional products. But customers do not ultimately want products. They want what those products enable them to achieve.
The distinction sounds subtle, but it can transform a business.
A customer does not fundamentally want an industrial compressor; they want reliable productivity. They do not want an insurance policy; they want security. They do not want healthcare procedures; they want healthier lives. They do not want a car merely as an engineered object; they want mobility, independence, experience and connection.
The evolution is:
Product → Service → Experience → Outcome → Progress.
This is precisely why Sompo’s journey is interesting. The company’s purpose explicitly extends beyond insurance towards health, wellbeing and financial protection. Insurance becomes one mechanism for creating the outcome, rather than the definition of the business.
Suntory provides a different illustration. The journey from whisky and beverages into wellness is not simply portfolio diversification. Suntory says its health and wellness business grew from decades of food science and quality-control research with the goal of improving consumer wellbeing. Capabilities developed for one business become the foundation of another because the company defines a larger human need.
The opportunity for Japanese companies is enormous. Start not with “How can we sell more of what we make?” but with “What progress are our customers trying to make?”
That question expands the addressable market while simultaneously making the company more relevant.
5. Business models … reinventing how value works
Once value is redefined, the business model can be reimagined.
There is a tendency in strategy conversations to talk about moving from products to platforms to outcomes. But these are not equivalent concepts.
Outcome describes what value we create. Platform describes one way we might organise to create it. Subscription, usage and performance contracts describe ways we might capture it.
Keeping those dimensions separate creates far more possibilities.
A company might continue making a physical product while surrounding it with digital services. It might charge for availability rather than ownership. It might create a marketplace connecting third parties. It might build an ecosystem of partners around a larger customer outcome. It might monetise data or intelligence. Increasingly, AI agents might perform activities that previously required whole layers of organisational infrastructure.
Toyota Woven City is fascinating precisely because it demonstrates this widening of the organisational imagination. Toyota is not simply testing another vehicle. It has created a physical platform where companies, researchers and residents can co-create mobility products and services, increasingly supported by AI.
NTT’s IOWN is similarly ecosystem-oriented. NTT’s 2026 strategy explicitly describes collaboration with partners to expand the ecosystem around photonics-electronics convergence as it builds towards national deployment.
The emerging logic is powerful: Larger outcomes require broader capabilities. Broader capabilities encourage ecosystems. Platforms enable ecosystems to connect and scale.
The future business therefore becomes less bounded. Suppliers become partners. Customers become participants. Data becomes a shared asset. AI becomes a collaborator. The organisation increasingly orchestrates capabilities it does not own.
This could suit Japan particularly well. The country already understands long-term supplier relationships, interdependence and collaborative systems. The opportunity is to reinvent these traditions for a more open, digital and globally connected era.
6. Leading reinvention … from leadership to frontiership
Ultimately, none of this is principally a technology problem. It is a leadership problem.
The traditional leader operates predominantly within a known territory. Performance can be measured. Resources can be allocated. Risks can be managed. Plans can be executed.
The emerging leader must increasingly operate at the edge of what is known.
I call this Frontiership.
Frontier leaders look beyond today’s category, customers and capabilities. They explore emerging technologies and distant markets. They connect ideas that previously belonged to different industries. They create options before they need them. They are comfortable experimenting without knowing the answer. And critically, they translate possibility into action.
They must simultaneously manage performance and potential.
- Performance asks: How can we make today’s business better?
- Potential asks: What could this business become?
Japanese organisations often excel at the first question. The opportunity now is to become equally systematic about the second.
Masayoshi Son offers an extreme illustration. His predictions will not all prove correct — nobody’s do — but his willingness to construct strategy over decades rather than quarters is striking. SoftBank’s current ambition to become a leading platform provider for artificial superintelligence is rooted, Son argues, in convictions he has held for decades.
Yet Frontiership does not require every leader to become Masayoshi Son. It requires leaders to create more space for exploration, imagination and experimentation alongside operational excellence.
And perhaps Japan already has a better expression for it.
Yatte Minahare.
Suntory describes the phrase as an invitation to embrace the unknown, question the status quo and pursue bold challenges. There is something wonderfully appropriate about rediscovering that spirit now.
Japan does not need to become Silicon Valley. It does not need to abandon the qualities that make its society and businesses distinctive. Indeed, attempting to imitate somebody else’s model would waste many of its greatest advantages.
Its opportunity is to combine what Japan already does exceptionally well — long-term thinking, technological depth, quality, trust, collaboration, craftsmanship and commitment — with greater speed, experimentation, openness and imagination.
Think of the ekiden again.
The challenge is not to throw away the tasuki. It is to decide where the next runner needs to go.
Japan’s next frontier
For leaders, the journey can therefore be expressed through six deceptively simple questions.
- Global Shifts: What is changing around us?
- Strategic Advantages: What will matter most?
- Growth Opportunities: Where is opportunity moving?
- Customer Value: What will people increasingly value?
- Business Models: How can we create and capture that value differently?
- Leading Reinvention: What must we become?
The questions flow from outside-in and then inside-out. First, see the world differently. Then identify what will matter and where opportunity is emerging. Next, reimagine the value customers seek and the business capable of delivering it. Finally, reinvent the organisation and leadership required to make it happen.
The future of Japanese business will not be secured simply by predicting AI correctly, building more robots, expanding into India or restructuring supply chains. Those things matter, but they are ingredients rather than the recipe.
The deeper challenge is to develop an organisation capable of continually becoming.
Canon’s philosophy looks towards an organisation that can endure for another 100 or even 200 years. SoftBank talks in centuries. Toyota has built a city in which to experiment with possibilities that do not fit neatly inside today’s automobile business. Suntory carries an entrepreneurial phrase coined by its founder more than a century ago into businesses he could never have imagined.
Perhaps that is the distinctive opportunity for Japan.
Long-term thinking should not mean protecting today’s business for longer. It should mean having the courage to start building tomorrow’s business sooner.
The world is shifting. Strategic advantages are being rewritten. Growth is moving. Customer value is changing. Business boundaries are dissolving. Leadership is moving towards the frontier.
The response does not need a new Japanese management philosophy. It may already exist.
Dream bigger. Explore further. Build patiently. Reinvent boldly … Yatte Minahare.
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