125: How Japan’s Unique Relationship with Robots is About to Make it #1 Again
Japan had been a global leader in robotics for decades, but recently the traditional Japanese...
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Category: Japanese Culture
123: How Japan’s evocative machines are quietly creating new startup unicorns
This is a rather personal episode. We have no guests this time. It’s just you and me. Today,...
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112: Why Artificial Intelligence Is The Key to Fixing Japan’s Rigid Education System
Using artificial intelligence to change the way the education system works seems like a fool’s...
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107: Why Japanese Design Is So Different & What You Should Learn from It
There are a lot of passionate opinions about Japanese design. From the beauty and subtlety of the...
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85: Can This Founder Solve Japan’s Hidden Mental Health Problem? – Hikari Labs
Seeking help for even minor mental health problems still carries a stigma in Japan. This is...
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75: Foreign Tourism is Reinventing Hiking in Japan – Yamap
Hiking, back-country skiing and mountain climbing are not usually the first things associated with...
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61: Will Japan’s Geisha Survive the Digital Age? – Disrupting Japan
You don’t usually think of Japan’s geisha as being an industry, but it is. In fact, strictly...
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51: The Real Reason Uber is Failing in Japan
Uber and Airbnb represent a new very kind of startup, one that could not have existed twenty years ago, and the very thing that make these companies so transformative in the United States ensures they will never succeed in Japan. You see…
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42: Winning When Everyone Tells You to Quit – Yuki Ito
Over the last 25 years, both Zest and Yuki Ito have been through several different incarnations. Interestingly, these incarnations perfectly mirror the changes we have seen in Japan’s startup scene in that time.
Today Zest makes cloud-based, field-service software, which …
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40: Why Gay Rights Are Good Business in Japan – Koki Hayashi
Koki Hayashi of Letibee is walking a difficult path by combining a startup business with social activism, but he just might pull it off. Japan is very rapidly becoming more accepting of those who are openly gay, and 2015 was a year of extremely rapid progress for gay rights.
Letibee has plans to capitalize on this movement…
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39: The Hard Truth Behind Japan’s Cute Robots – Shunsuke Aoki
Japan has a long cultural fascination with human-like robots. Literature, cinema and anime are filled with them, and perhaps not surprisingly, a large number of Japanese startups are focused on making anthropomorphic robots. I have to admit that this fascination never really made sense to me until Shunsuke explained it during this interview.
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34: The Myth of the Successful Startup Failure – Hiroshi Nagashima
Startup culture has crazy and contradictory views about failure. As founders we are told to fail fast, but also to never give up. We are told to follow our vision, but be ready to pivot. Somehow this macho-bullshit culture of “I never really fail and ‘m not afraid of failure.” has become dominant amount founders. But it’s the result of denial. Trivializing failure is a way of not thinking about it’s effects.
The truth is that failure sucks. Failure is painful. Failure …
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