An Old Comrade Told Me:
“Why Not?”

Appearing in a senior’s diary

On 3 November, I appeared in the diary column of the web magazine Machikado no Creative. The title: “Business in Japan, life in Malaysia. Why not?” (in Japanese). The writer was Yorihiko Kato, an old fellow entrepreneur from my overseas years. Fellow, yes, but as Japanese entrepreneurs doing business in Southeast Asia, he is both a comrade-in-arms and a senior who has walked several steps ahead. People who are both tend to be formidable.

We go back a long way. In fact, I knew his name before we met. Around 2000, I co-founded an online ad auction company in Shibuya with Masatoshi Kumagai of InterQ (now GMO Internet Group) and others, and Kato’s name came up often even then. That company, by the way, was later swept up in an industry reshuffle involving major ad agencies, and lives on today as part of one of Japan’s leading internet ad agencies in the Hakuhodo DY Group. Companies, too, have curious lives.

We first met in person around 2003. Kato, then president of the ad agency Nikko, came to my office in Shinjuku to sell the “Shibuya Bit Valley Calendar”. Bit Valley was the nickname for Shibuya’s cluster of IT firms, a pun on “shibui” (bitter) and “ya” (valley). The calendar carried a map of Tokyo’s IT companies, and the pitch was: why not put the MARSFLAG logo around Shinjuku on the map? For a fee, of course. Those were the days when everyone hung a big calendar on the wall. A company president personally selling plots on a map: before any estate agent did, it was Kato who sold me prime land in Shinjuku. I bought with great pleasure.

Tracing that calendar map from memory, Tokyo’s IT firms were laid out roughly like this: Yahoo! in Roppongi, excite in Ebisu, MARSFLAG in Shinjuku, CyberAgent and ON THE EDGE in Shibuya. Search engine companies and the online ad agencies working with them were jostling at the very centre of IT.

The office Kato came to was above a 7-Eleven on Gyoen-dori near Shinjuku-gyoemmae. If I remember right, it was MARSFLAG’s fourth office. Rice balls were never a problem. After more moves, the company’s sixth and current head office is in Tokyo Square Garden, in front of Tokyo Station. From above a convenience store to a tower by Tokyo Station: in twenty-odd years, the view from the window has done rather well for itself.

In 2008, Kato’s company (then NIKKO) joined the GMO Internet group, and he stepped down and moved to Singapore. And in 2012, we met again, in Singapore. Seniors are usually there first.

The preparation office at 80 Robinson

I knew Kato had been involved in launching Crosscoop Singapore, the first Japanese shared office in Singapore. When we decided to set up in Singapore, I went to him first and signed up the same day. Less a bold decision than a lack of alternatives.

Our Singapore entity did not exist yet. Our title was “preparation office”. I and one other man, the candidate to head the Singapore company, were stationed there to hire Singaporean staff and set up an ASEAN headquarters. A preparation office building a headquarters: the egg laying the chicken.

Crosscoop was at 80 Robinson Road. I had a dream of one day having an office in Raffles Place. Not a lofty dream: Raffles Place was simply a rather cool financial district. A starstruck sort of wish. 80 Robinson sat right between Raffles Place and my home in Tanjong Pagar, walking distance from both. Every morning I walked to just short of the place I admired, then turned off to go to work.

A year later, we hired Singaporean and Chinese staff and opened our ASEAN headquarters in Raffles Place. Even a starstruck dream comes true in a year. Many people from Crosscoop and fellow tenants of the time came to the opening. From preparation office to headquarters: I still remember that year well.

Looking it up, I found Crosscoop Singapore still going. It opened in 2011 as Singapore’s first Japanese shared office and has been used by more than 600 Japanese companies. In September 2024, Japan’s Zero-Ten Park took over and reopened it under a new name. My preparation office was one of those 600-odd. New name, but no exit from Singapore. A neat prelude to what follows.

Kato’s diary even included a photo of a 2012 Crosscoop networking party. I looked for myself and could not find me. I was surely somewhere in that room. Where’s Wally, from Wally’s side.

Reunion at the Hilton

We met again on 23 October, at a “thank-you party” in a sixth-floor ballroom of Hilton Kuala Lumpur, celebrating the new KL office of IKILINKS, a company that helps people move to Malaysia. IKILINKS has been helping me too. About sixty people came, mostly families who had moved to Kuala Lumpur in the last year or two.

When Kato called out to me at the venue, I was surprised. IKILINKS turned out to be a company in which Kato invests and takes part in managing. Behind a company I rely on stood a comrade of twenty years. They say it is a small world; the world of Japanese entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia is about the size of a four-and-a-half-mat room.

His diary, after running through my history of moving house, concluded: “I see. I get it. That is the kind of person he is.”

What exactly he got, he did not say. I will not ask. Then again, I was only surprised for a moment myself. To borrow his words: “Ah, that’s the kind of person he is. I get it.” We are both that kind of person.

Why not?

His diary ends like this: the place you do business and the base of your family’s life need not be the same.

That is exactly what I wrote, in thousands of words, in No. 18. What took me Mencius’s mother, Bashō and four charts to say, Kato dispatched in one line of Osaka dialect: sore mo ee yan, why not?

Annoyingly, said in Osaka dialect it is thirty per cent more convincing. Perhaps my No. 18 was just a long footnote to that one line. The footnote is considerably longer than the text.

You may withdraw your business, but not yourself

His diary had another sharp observation: old comrades pulled their businesses out of Singapore and Malaysia long ago, yet somehow keep a foot in both countries.

He is right. The overseas entrepreneur is a creature that withdraws its business from a country but not itself. A country you have lived in becomes less a client and more a relative. Even with no business there, you want to drop by at least for the holidays.

Kato himself lives in Singapore as a permanent resident, chairs an Osaka radio station, and is involved in running a Malaysian company. Not one foot but both hands and both feet, here and there. He would have won at Twister long ago. When it comes to being that kind of person, the senior is a step or two ahead.

Stand by Gaspard

Stand by Me is the story of four twelve-year-old boys on a journey. At the end, the grown-up narrator writes that he never had friends later on like the ones he had when he was twelve.

Comrades from your early days as an overseas entrepreneur are probably the same. People who floundered alongside you in a country whose language and customs you did not know are never made again. So when you meet, the talk runs long, from the 2003 calendar to what comes next. The boys walked along railway tracks; we mostly walk along airport travelators.

Kato-san, thank you for writing about me. Next time, tell me the rest of your “why not?” over a coffee. I do not drink, so however long the talk runs, I will remember all of it.