Recalling the “Frenzy” of Two Years Ago amidst the Silence of 2013
It was 2013. Having left the company I had poured my heart and soul into building, I found myself alone again. The stable profits I had accumulated over many years, the intense days spent sharing joys and sorrows with my colleagues, all slipped through my fingers in an instant. In that silence, what vividly returned to my mind was the “three months” of relentless, almost mad, pursuit that had occurred just two years prior.

It was the summer of 2011. The repercussions of the Great East Japan Earthquake were shaking the foundations of every manufacturing site across Japan. Amidst an unprecedented national crisis, supply chains were severed, and what had been taken for granted yesterday was no longer so today.

It all started with a single phone call.
“…The original uchiwa fans featured on your company’s website. Are they still something you can produce?”

At first, I thought I had misheard. Our main business was advertising agency services and stock photo services. Uchiwa fans were merely one past project listed in a corner. My immediate response was, “Yes, we can produce them.” However, the caller’s strained, almost desperate voice on the other end of the line struck me as odd.

“Really?!… You see, everywhere I’ve inquired, they tell me they can no longer be manufactured domestically, or that they don’t have the materials. I’ve already called dozens of places…”

After hanging up, I immediately looked into the situation. The reality was far more serious than I had imagined. Power shortages due to the earthquake and damage to manufacturing plants. The supply of the ribs and handles needed to make uchiwa fans, a symbol of summer, had halted, and uchiwa fans were on the verge of disappearing from Japan.

Pioneering a “System” Across the Sea: Weekends in Korea, Weekdays in Japan
“If we can’t make them in Japan, we have to look elsewhere.”

My mind immediately switched into a builder’s mode: “How can we fill this void?” It wasn’t about logic. It was an intuition that if someone was in trouble and a solution existed, we should connect them. The female staff member from the sales planning department reached out to a Korean vendor with whom she had contact for POP and printed material production.

“There’s a manufacturing route in Korea, though the shape is slightly different from Japan.”

A few days after hearing this, I was already on the ground at Incheon International Airport. I held samples and a quote from the local vendor. Back in my hotel lounge, I immediately finalized the pricing for advertisements and submitted them to Google Ads (then AdWords).

The moment I did, the world changed.

Within minutes of the ads being approved and starting to run, orders began flooding in.
“We need 10,000 pieces.” “Will it be ready for the event?” “Please send us a sample.”

Orders for uchiwa fans, which had been almost nonexistent until then, cascaded in like a torrent.

Our existing operations could no longer handle the volume.
I made up my mind.

For the next three months, my life became a literal dual existence: “Flying to Seoul on Friday nights, securing vendors and coordinating delivery times and quality over the weekend, and returning to Japan early Monday morning to take charge.”

“Unprecedented Busyness” and Facing My “Inexperience”
The quality of printed materials from Korea at that time was far from the standards we have today.
“We placed an order for 100,000 units, but can only accept 20,000.”
“When we opened the delivered products, the print colors had faded, and half of them were defective.”

Trouble was an everyday occurrence. There was even an “incident” where a local vendor, sensing Japan’s predicament, tried to unfairly hoard the stock of uchiwa fan handles and inflate prices. While engaging in near-shouting matches at local warehouses, I raced around Seoul with local partners in search of new, trustworthy vendors.

At the same time, to ensure timely deliveries, I personally inspected the products that arrived in Japan.
At the bonded area of the international post office at Kansai Airport. Late at night, I bowed to the staff and managed to get them to open stacks of cardboard boxes for me throughout the night. It was painstaking, manual labor to identify and set aside defective items one by one. Then, early the next morning, I would drive the truck directly to the delivery destination in the Kanto region, non-stop.

Sleepiness was banished by adrenaline. As I gripped the steering wheel on the highway with the sun rising, I was burning with a fierce determination: “I will push this system through, even if I have to get my hands dirty.”

The Reason a Company with No Salespeople Generated 15 Million Yen
Remarkably, my company had not a single person with the title of “sales representative.”

Essentially, everyone was a designer, an operator, and a director. In other words, everyone was from the “making side,” a collective of artisans. Only my colleague from sales planning and I were the ones actively out in the field. Everything else was handled by the “customer acquisition and production system” that I had honed over many years.

We streamlined the customer acquisition channels on our website, and the production team behind the scenes accurately handled the processing of a vast amount of incoming order information, creation of design data, and delivery time management, all without disrupting our regular services.

The marketing team kept pace with the constantly shifting trends in search demand, optimizing advertising costs down to the last yen.

The end of those three months, which we navigated in a state of focused euphoria, saw the sales figures for uchiwa fans alone reach over 15 million yen.

A New “Solidarity”: The Moment the System Gained a Soul
However, the true treasure I gained was not that 15 million yen figure.

By overcoming that grueling, extreme project together, our team had forged a strong, passionate “solidarity” that could never have emerged during more peaceful times.

“What we made, what we connected, is supporting summer events across Japan.”

That realization became a source of pride beyond mere profit, transforming into the team’s underlying strength. When I left the company in 2013, the most painful thing was losing this “solidarity” that had been nurtured, more so than losing the “system” itself.

But what I learned that frenzied summer still remains a part of me.
“If there is a void in the market, create your own path. With technology and networks (systems), people can rise again and turn the impossible into the possible.”

Starting anew in 2013, I had nothing and was back at zero. Yet, the “agility” and the “power to foster solidarity” that I had proven that summer were the “builder’s soul” that no one could take away, residing within my heart.

Founder Principles 5: Humans decide, agents execute.
What I did back in 2011 was the decision to “open up a route in Korea” and the overall coordination. All the vast operational tasks that followed were handled autonomously and perfectly by the members who possessed the “powerful system of the field” at the time. In today’s AI era, those partners are transforming from humans to digital agents, but my role remains the same. I find market distortions and decide the path to navigate them. That is the job of a builder.