Forward International Corporation

Representative, Forward International Corporation
BA Osaka Prefecture University School of Economics
MBA Bond University (Qld. Australia)
The first class graduate of Social Entrepreneur School
Lecturer, The Sanno Institute of Management
NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) Master Practitioner
TOEIC 955 points

NLP (Neuro-Language Programming) Master Practitioner
CTI (Coaches Training Institute) Coaching Program Applied Course completed

25- years of experienced international business producer is to support overseas companies of the business development in Japan, to promote foreign sales development for Japanese mid-sized enterprises.

As a University student, I spent one year in Australia under working-holiday, studying English and working in a restaurant.
Also experienced homestaying and two months long camping tour.

Australians are very open-minded and friendly, Compared to Japanese character which some people are stereotypical thinking, they are different in that matter and it was new experience for me. To me, it was also a fine experience to discover what is good and not good of Japan after I left my country. The time spent there as a youth also let me realize it is not necessarily essential to put everything into a frame of Japanese way.

The experience in Australia made me realize my goal to work in an international business environment; I found a job at Nissho Iwai (presently Sojitz) a Japanese general trading company.

Multi-million dollar size of trading was surely exciting. English I have learned in Australia also put me in a position to negotiate with off shore clients.

In a general trading company, the first five years is mostly spent in a "back-office", a supportive duty. At that time, I was positioned in a division where one third of Japan's sugar import was traded. The annual volume handled was about half million ton.
Half million tons of sugar was the largest trade in Japan by far.
The figure equates to 500 million of 1kg sugar packs; there were outrageous volume of paperwork involved in import formalities. I was working till late every night in order to complete my task. But this experience later became very helpful for international trading.

When I turned 29, I was sent to London office.
There, I traded grain with western giant traders like Cargill and Continental.
Hard line negotiations with these giant traders were indeed tough experience.

Whilst handling the glamorous grain trading, I also worked on many unobtrusive assignments to develop marketing routes.
One of the jobs was to sell Vietnam coffee beans to Spanish and Italian coffee merchants. In the beginning, there was no clientele at all.
There was no internet, no search engine; I went to the Spanish Embassy to obtain contact of the coffee industry association from whom I purchased a list of coffee traders in Spain. I kept faxing direct mails to some 300 names on the list.
Out of 300, five merchants responded and ended up with closing twenty million yen's worth of contract.

This was the very first marketing of Vietnam coffee beans in Europe for Nissho Iwai, and became a landmark achievement.

I returned from London and started trading soybeans, rapeseeds, and sesame seeds, ingredients of cooking oil.

At age 35, I moved to a game software company. I basically did like games but never thought of making my living out of it.
It was very exciting world, totally different environment from the work at general trading company.
I was positioned in a star division to control the marketing subsidiaries in US/EU; however, with lack of experience in game industry, it was indeed a tough job for me.
Especially, working with game production companies was very stressful.
The game creators were very unique and interesting. On the other side, it took tremendous effort to manage scheduling to carry on the business smoothly. The release dates were often postponed.
In this company, I took charge of organizing an event in the world's largest game exhibition, and assigning managerial staff in L.A. game development studio. Whilst stationed in the U.S., I got involved in office politics and encountered numerous difficulties; however, when the first locally developed game in America went into sales successfully, it was brought quite a joy.
I was also assigned for 80 billion Yen class M&A; negotiations with American investment bankers were conducted with many difficulties. Later, these experiences had become rather a valuable asset in negotiation skill for me as a foreign business producer.

After working in the game company for two years, I was contacted by a foreign headhunter and then found myself working in a Sony group film distribution company. I was 37.
Its HQ was in Hollywood. It was indeed exiting to be working with Hollywood people.
The business went very smoothly gaining deals of trust from the company.
The last assignment I handled at Sony Picture Entertainment was to obtain the sales right in Japan of Michael Jackson's "This is it". It was the groundbreaking project to have Michael's film installed in USB memory and SD chip to be enjoyable on mobile phone and other devices.

In June of 2010, I have founded Forward International Corporation, as a position of its representative.