I actually found myself for the first time in Japan in 2014. I was working on a project in the southern part of South Korea, a small city called Busan. Actually, not so small by world standards. But, from there I decided that I wanted to take a short trip to Japan. I was working on a project involving smart toilet technology, actually the beginnings of the company that I’ve currently started. And Japan, of course, is well known as a place where there’s a lot of unique and a modern toilets and toilet technology. So, I decided to head out to Fukuoka, which is a city that’s quite close to Busan. It’s about a two hour ferry ride away. What I thought would be a kind of a two or three day trip turned out to become a two month trip where I met all kinds of people, including business people. I made new friends and traveled around the country, all the way from the southern part to the northern tip. It was a fantastic experience for me. I came back to San Francisco highly motivated to learn the language, which I thought it would be very important in order to do any business in Japan and also with motivation to continue some type of relationship with Japan.
When I was traveling there, I had met some individuals who worked at a large technology company in Japan and they got to know my background and when I returned back to San Francisco they asked me to start doing some work for them. I began to work with them and then they wanted me to work more with them and so I ended up traveling every single month between San Francisco and Tokyo to help out this company. And it actually got to a point where the CEO of the company, and this is a fairly large company in Japan, a domestic company, asked me to move to Tokyo in order to spend more time with them. So I actually moved there after doing about a year of this back and forth on a plane. And that’s when things started to get real in terms of my immersion into the Japanese business world.
One of the things I actually asked the CEO was to allow me to spend my mornings studying Japanese. And so I ended up studying at a school for three hours a day, every day, when I was working there. That was a very important part of my time there.