Japan's Patient Revolution in Startup Collaboration

This commentary stems from conversations with Masaru Nagura and Ayumi Fujimoto, whose shared mission to connect Japan’s fragmented startup ecosystem. Listen on Spotify.

Japan has mastered the art of precision—its trains arrive within seconds of schedule, its manufacturers achieve six-sigma perfection, and its research institutions once led the world in fundamental science. Yet this same nation, home to Toyota, Sony, and a research apparatus that dominated entire fields through the 2000s, struggles to translate excellence into startup dynamism. In conversations with Masaru Nagura and Ayumi Fujimoto, co-founders of the Startup Ecosystem Association Japan, a paradox emerges: Japan's challenge is not a deficit of talent, capital, or technology, but a crisis of connection. The ecosystem exists in fragments—universities generating world-class research, corporations wielding global reach, and startups operating in isolation—each powerful alone, yet unable to combine.​​

This is not a story of failure. It is a narrative of transformation, where collaboration itself is being reimagined as cultural infrastructure, and where Japan's distinct social fabric—from lifetime employment norms to oshikatsu fandom culture—might become the foundation for innovation on its own terms.​​

The Fragmentation Dilemma

Nagura, a nuclear fusion engineer who left academic research to build innovation ecosystems, describes the core problem with clinical precision: "All the ecosystems are separated or segregated because universities are not having great collaboration with industry yet". Japanese universities house top-tier researchers and generate breakthrough technologies, but lack the commercialization mechanisms to move discoveries from lab to market. The gap is structural—entrepreneurship education in Japanese universities is barely a decade old, emerging only in the 2010s after generations of training focused exclusively on engineering, science, and traditional economics.​​

Meanwhile, Japan's corporate giants—the Mitsubishis, Toyotas, and Softbanks—possess capital, global distribution networks, and customer bases that startups elsewhere can only dream of. Yet these corporations historically practiced "closed innovation," conducting R&D in-house rather than collaborating with external ventures. University-industry ties existed, but served primarily to channel technology toward established firms, not to spin out new companies. The result: a system where brilliant research remains trapped in academic silos, large corporations innovate internally at glacial pace, and startups—when they emerge—operate without access to the ecosystem's most valuable assets.​​

Nagura's work at CIC Tokyo, one of Japan's largest startup centers housing over 300 companies, gave him a front-row view of this disconnect. Startups had ideas and energy; universities had technology and talent; corporations had scale and resources. What they lacked was connective tissue. The Startup Ecosystem Association was born from this observation—not to create more programs or deploy more capital, but to build bridges between disconnected nodes.​​

Cultural Gravity: When Risk Is Stigma

If structural fragmentation is Japan's organizational challenge, cultural attitudes toward risk and failure are its deeper existential barrier. Fujimoto, who witnessed Silicon Valley's rise during her years at Google (2007-2015), describes the cultural gulf with stark clarity: "Most Japanese define failure as mistake. It's not a big deal, but the mistake is a really big matter for everyone". In global startup ecosystems, failure is reframed as learning—a necessary step toward eventual success. In Japan, failure carries lasting consequences.​​

The statistics are sobering. Only 7% of Japanese adults see good entrepreneurial opportunities in their country, compared to a 24-country average of 37%. Fifty-five percent cite fear of failure as a barrier—the second-highest rate globally. Just 3.8% of working-age adults are engaged in starting firms, compared to 5.3% in Germany and an 8% average across innovation economies. Perhaps most telling: among the 98% of startup founders who took their companies public, only 2% were women—a ratio that reveals not just gender inequality but the narrowness of who is culturally permitted to take entrepreneurial risk.​​

These attitudes reflect structural realities. Japan's shūshin koyō system—lifetime employment with seniority-based progression—creates powerful disincentives for risk-taking. An elite graduate joining a top corporation can expect stable employment for 20-plus years, ascending predictable career ladders. Leaving for a startup means forfeiting this security with little chance of return; firms that invest heavily in training workers have created informal "no-poaching" pacts to prevent talent migration. Entrepreneurs who fail face personal liability through loan guarantees, making bankruptcy a multi-generational burden rather than a fresh start.​​

Collaboration as Connective Tissue

The Startup Ecosystem Association operates from a simple premise: Japan's ecosystem already contains the necessary ingredients; what's missing is the platform that brings them together. Rather than create another accelerator or investment fund, SEAJ functions as neutral infrastructure—an information hub, policy pipeline, and global gateway.​​

Nagura emphasizes connectivity as the transformative lever. "If we have more connected ecosystem, universities can have more good startups coming out of their research". The association helps universities link to industry partners, facilitates corporate-startup collaboration, and bridges Japan's ecosystem to global networks. Their annual Startup Ecosystem Summit gathers "the entire ecosystem players in Japan"—accelerators, investors, government agencies, researchers—to share knowledge and coordinate action.​​

But information sharing alone cannot overcome cultural inertia. Here, Japan's government has played an unusually active role. The 2022 Startup Development Five-Year Plan commits to increasing startup investment tenfold—from less than ¥1 trillion to ¥10 trillion by 2027—while fostering 100 unicorns and 100,000 new startups. Tokyo's parallel "10x10x10 Innovation Vision" targets tenfold increases in unicorns, startups, and public-private partnerships by the same year. A new ¥100 billion deep-tech fund supports university commercialization at ten times the scale of previous efforts.​

These are not trivial commitments. Startup funding in Japan reached ¥779.3 billion in 2024 (approximately $5.2 billion), stable at +3% year-over-year despite global headwinds. While still dwarfed by Silicon Valley's scale—Japan's venture capital represents roughly one-fiftieth to one-hundredth of U.S. investment—the trajectory is clear. Foreign investors, including Khosla Ventures and New Enterprise Associates, are entering the market, attracted by Japan's deep-tech potential and geopolitical stability.​

The real innovation, though, lies in how SEAJ and its partners are leveraging distinctly Japanese social mechanisms—particularly oshikatsu—to build startup culture from indigenous roots rather than importing Silicon Valley wholesale.

Oshikatsu: Fandom as Economic Engine

Oshikatsu—the practice of passionately supporting a favorite idol, character, or cause with time, money, and emotional investment—might seem peripheral to startup ecosystem development. Yet Fujimoto sees it as a cultural resource uniquely suited to Japan's innovation challenge.​​

In traditional oshikatsu, fans spend an average of ¥250,000 annually to support their oshi, contributing ¥3.5 trillion to Japan's economy—roughly 2.1% of total retail sales. This is not transactional consumption seeking personal benefit, but unconditional support driven by identity and belonging. "There's no return expectation," Fujimoto explains. "It's just one-way love to them".​​

Applied to startups, oshikatsu reframes support as a cultural practice rather than an investment calculation. Under programs like the government-backed ICT Startup League, board members select startups to champion—providing not just capital but network access, mentorship, and public validation. The "oshi system" allows judges and steering committee members to strongly endorse ventures they believe in, increasing selection likelihood not through financial metrics alone but through passionate advocacy.​​

This model acknowledges what rational investment frameworks often miss: early-stage startups, especially in deep tech, are fundamentally uncertain. Traditional risk-reward analysis struggles to price ventures tackling quantum computing, space technology, or biotech materials. But oshikatsu thrives on uncertainty—fans support nascent idols precisely because mainstream recognition hasn't arrived. The act of support itself generates value through network effects: as more people champion a startup, awareness spreads, legitimacy builds, and opportunities for funding, talent, and partnerships multiply.​

Nagura draws the parallel explicitly: "Building a fanbase isn't just about increasing the number of supporters. As the number of fans grows and they talk about the startup they support in their daily lives, the number of people with a positive impression of that startup increases automatically". In a culture where institutional credibility and social proof carry enormous weight, oshikatsu creates cultural permission for risk-taking by distributing it across a community rather than isolating individual failure.​​

The Patient Revolution

Western discourse on startup ecosystems often emphasizes speed—rapid iteration, fail fast, move quickly and break things. Japan's ecosystem is building something different: infrastructure for patient, deliberate transformation. Nagura and Fujimoto don't promise overnight Silicon Valley replication. Instead, they describe a long-term project of cultural and structural rewiring.​​

This patience is strategic, not passive. Japan's strengths—research excellence, manufacturing precision, long-term thinking—emerge from disciplined processes that value mastery over velocity. The challenge is channeling these virtues toward innovation rather than conformity. Universities are introducing entrepreneurship training, but "it's quite new," Nagura notes, and "universities are learning right now". Open innovation between corporations and startups is expanding, but companies are "start learning about the global ecosystem" rather than executing finished playbooks.​​

The ecosystem's geographic concentration accelerates learning. Tokyo, ranked 11th globally among startup hubs, houses 70% of Japan's startups. Proximity enables dense interaction—chance encounters at CIC Tokyo, partnerships formed at ecosystem summits, cross-pollination between university labs and corporate accelerators. As independent venture capital surpasses corporate VC for the first time, positive feedback loops emerge: successful exits create returns that fund more startups, which produce more exits, attracting more capital and talent.​​

Yet Japan's ecosystem remains distinctly Japanese in pace and philosophy. Startups here often go public after just a couple of funding rounds, leveraging the Tokyo Stock Exchange's lenient IPO rules to achieve liquidity faster than Silicon Valley counterparts. This reflects both capital constraints—early exits provide necessary returns—and cultural preference for stability over exponential growth. Japan produced six new unicorns in 2024, bringing the total to eight or nine, including AI pioneer Sakana AI (valued at $1.5 billion within months of founding) and biotech innovator Spiber.​

These are not world-conquering unicorns scaling to hundreds of billions in valuation. They are companies building sustainable businesses in quantum computing, autonomous driving, lab-grown materials, and enterprise SaaS—solving hard technical problems with long development timelines. The model is less "winner take all" and more "precision at scale," leveraging Japan's manufacturing heritage and scientific depth.​​

Building on Distinct Foundations

Japan isn't late to innovation. It's building its own tempo, rooted in collaboration over competition, community over individualism, and patience over impatience. The fragmentation that Nagura identifies—universities, corporates, startups operating separately—is being addressed not through top-down industrial policy alone, but through deliberate infrastructure-building that respects cultural realities.​​

Fujimoto emphasizes the language barrier as both challenge and signal: "There's very limited information regarding the Japanese ecosystem because we have a really the language barrier for the global ecosystem right now". SEAJ's mission to translate and bridge isn't merely logistical—it's an assertion that Japan's ecosystem deserves understanding on its own terms rather than as a deficient copy of Silicon Valley.​​

The revolution happening in Japan is quiet, incremental, and systemic. It transforms oshikatsu fandom into startup support, lifetime employment culture into talent mobility, research excellence into commercial ventures, and corporate capital into open innovation. It builds connective tissue where fragmentation once reigned, creating platforms for collaboration that honor cultural norms while enabling change.​​

This is not fast. But it might be durable. Japan's startup ecosystem is learning to innovate the way Japan has always excelled: through discipline, precision, and the patient accumulation of small improvements that compound into transformation. The question is no longer whether Japan can build a startup ecosystem. It's whether the world is patient enough to watch one emerge in Japan's image—collaborative, meticulous, and profoundly its own.

Upcoming Japan Startup Ecosystem Events

Need help finding the right event for your needs? Contact the Startup Ecosystem Association Japan:

• Website: https://startupecosystem.org

SEAJ serves as a gateway to Japan's startup ecosystem and can help connect you with the most relevant conferences, programs, and opportunities based on your specific interests.