Monday, October 17, 2022 | The Japan Times | 11

sustainable japan

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E-book innovator Media Do also aids regional startups
ESG Talk
HIROKO NAKATACONTRIBUTING WRITER

E-book distributor Media Do Co. Ltd. notonly plans to expand its business beyond
the current form of e-books, but also supports entrepreneurs in regional cities torevive local economies and thereby help
the country’s economic growth.
“I believe companies that are profitable or listed on the stock exchange areresponsible for giving back to society
because their sales and profits receive
benefits from society,” said Media Do’s
founder, president and CEO, Yasushi
Fujita. Such activity means not only
giving back to society but also helping
employees understand their company’s
management and culture, which in turn
becomes their driving force, he said.
Based on its corporate mission of“unleashing a virtuous cycle of literarycreation,” Media Do focuses on the distribution of digital content to a wide rangeof people amid the digitization of books.
In addition to its e-book distribution
services, what makes the company competitive is an innovation for e-books: nonfungible tokens (NFTs) provided to those
who buy traditional books or magazines
in physical form. With the NFTs, readers
also have access to the digital content,
including music, videos or other formsof art. Last year, the company created acapital and business alliance with theJapanese book distributor Tohan Corp.,
launching 40 titles of books, magazinesand photographic collections with digital
benefits provided by NFTs.
Media Do, the No. 1 e-book wholesaler in the country, has a competitiveedge because unlike in the United States,
where Amazon Inc.’s Kindle digital bookstore dominates the market, a huge number of online bookstores vie with eachother in Japan. In 2006, when Media Do

started its digital distributing business,there were only 20 online bookstores in
the country, but the number has surged
to 150. “If e-commerce companies witha digital book section are included, thetotal reaches around 500 firms,” Fujita
said. Media Do’s role is to link more than
2,000 publishing companies to the digitalbookstores.
As the digital content market grew,
Media Do’s sales increased. They havedoubled to ¥100 billion ($690 million) overthe past four years. In the business year to
February 2022, its sales rose 25.4% fromthe previous year to ¥104.7 billion, with
operating profit up 5.5% at ¥2.8 billion.
With its innovations, Media Do pays
back to society by cultivating new customer demand, helping to expand thedigital content market and also benefiting the analog market. In the domestic
market for physical books, sales peakedat ¥2.6 trillion in 1996 and then shrank toless than half of that over the next quarterof a century. Media Do developed blockchain technologies that make it possiblefor digital content to trade secondhand,since it has records of the content’s pasttrades. That means secondhand trades
bring royalties to authors, creators or publishers, unlike in the secondhand market
for traditional paper books. The digitalbooks or magazines with NFTs protect
the copyrights by giving the specific NFT
platform “FanTop” app to those who purchase them so they can have access to thedigital benefits.
Media Do’s business is not limited todigital distribution. The company also
focuses on incubating startups in local
areas.
“It is very important for future corporate leaders to not just concentrate on
their business but to let people understand that their companies are facing society and contributing to it,” Fujita said.
That is why Fujita, a native ofTokushima Prefecture, supports local

Media Do’s founder and CEO, Yasushi Fujita COSUFI FOR PHOTOMATE

entrepreneurs to address issues such as
the outflow of population from regional
towns and cities to Tokyo and other metropolitan cities. A lack of young labor has
weakened local economies in the rapidly
aging country, while more than half ofthe startup companies in the country arelaunched in Tokyo.
Fujita started the Tokushima Innovation Base Association (TIB), an incubation
hub to support entrepreneurship in theregion, together with local media outlets and banks. TIB opened a co-working
space in the city of Tokushima in 2020.
For instance, TIB planned an event to help

Chakaiseki Onjaku
Fishmonger, chef collaborate on kaiseki cuisine

people learn how to utilize blockchain
technologies in business. On another occasion, it hosted a business-pitching event
for high school students. It also invites
owners of startups to lecture and holds
workshop events on a regular basis sothat young entrepreneurs can study how
to find business seeds, how to overcome
troubles they face and what is important
to make their business sustainable.
“Those who have power to change
society are business leaders and entrepreneurs. It is the local cities that need many
entrepreneurs because they [entrepreneurs] involve people around them and

HIROKO NAKATACONTRIBUTING WRITERTAEKO TERAOCONTRIBUTING WRITER

With the local food movement as popular as ever these days, forgotten regional
ingredients are in the spotlight, and chefs
are usually the ones responsible for pulling them onto the gastronomical stage.
Sasue Maeda Fish Shop is a prime example.
Located in Yaizu, Shizuoka Prefecture, thefishmonger receives orders from famous
chefs throughout Japan but also supplies
fish to several local chefs. Daigo Sugiyama,proprietor of Chakaiseki Onjaku, is one ofthem.
Sugiyama’s grandfather, established asoba shop in Yaizu. Later, his father trainedat Wako, a restaurant in Tokyo’s Mejiro
district known for incorporating the spirit
and techniques of the tea ceremony into its
chakaiseki cuisine, then went on to establish
Chakaiseki Onjaku. Like his father, Sugiyama
trained at Wako before returning to the family business eight years ago.
The Sugiyama family has been sourcing
fish from Sasue Maeda Fish Shop for three
generations. As Sugiyama began frequenting
the fishmonger, he gradually came to view
Maeda as his teacher of all things fish.
For ¥16,500 ($115), guests receive a multicourse meal that respects the chakaiseki

tradition of hospitality without clinging to
its formalities. At one meal, guests can enjoy
high-quality ingredieents such as aji (horsemackerel), sakura shrimp, itoyori tai (golden
threadfin bream), katsuobushi (bonito shavings), Tsuruna (New Zealand spinach), jindoika (Japanese squid) and kinmedai (splendid
alfonsino).

His restaurant’s outstanding reputation,
he said, comes “thanks to the fishermen
who risk their lives out on the ocean tocatch fish for us, and all our forebears here
in Shizuoka.” His own search for delicious
flavors, he added modestly, is “still a workin progress” that will surely continue in theyears to come.

HEITA KAWAKATSU
GOV. OF SHIZUOKA PREFECTURE

HIROMICHI NAKANO
MAYOR OF YAIZU

I would like to express myheartfelt congratulations to
Chakaiseki Onjaku for being
selected as one of the Destination Restaurants 2022.
Shizuoka Prefecture is blessed withdiverse natural features such as Japan’s highest mountain, Mount Fuji, and its deepest
bay, Suruga Bay, and produces abundant agricultural, forestry and fishery products. Due totheir high quality, it is called the “Kingdom ofFood.” At Chakaiseki Onjaku, you can enjoy
the rich ingredients from Suruga Bay. We
hope you come visit Shizuoka Prefectureand enjoy the area’s cuisine and food culture.

We would like to extend
our heartfelt congratulations to Chakaiseki Onjaku
for being selected for The
Japan Times Destination
Restaurants 2022.
It is also an honor for the port city of Yaizu,
which has prospered as a fishery city sinceancient times. At Chakaiseki Onjaku, you canenjoy not only the taste of the cuisine, butalso the theatrical performance of the chef
carefully preparing fresh and rich local ingredients in front of you. In addition, we hope
you have a heartwarming and joyful time
thanks to the attentive service of the staff.

“We want to provide readers with a new way ofenjoying e-books,” Fujita said. COSUFI

shelves on the internet. But the books are
currently arranged in two dimensions.
Media Do plans to distribute e-books withspecially designed covers that are different from traditional books and can bearranged three-dimensionally on online
bookshelves.
In the future, Media Do plans to expand
overseas. In 2021, the company acquired
Massachusetts-based Firebrand Group.
They provide technologies and marketing services by supporting publishingcompanies’ management of their internal
workflow and e-book distribution, witha network of more than 100 publishers in
the U.S., Britain and Germany. Earlier thisyear, Media Do also bought out Londonbased Supadu Limited, a provider of web
designs, e-commerce and data for hundredsof publishers, including the world’s four biggest. Media Do plans to take advantage of
their know-how and intellectual property.
Through the two companies’ global networks of publishers, it plans to export its
business model developed in Japan — publications with
NFTs providing
access to a variety of digital content.
The ESG Talk series are interviews with business leaders
who are active proponents of
ESG investing and practices
in Japan.

How FPCO turned disposable
trays into valuable resource
Unraveling Japanesecompanies

Address
Chakaiseki Onjaku
6-14-12 Honmachi,
Yaizu-shi, Shizuoka
http://www.all-yys.
com/onjaku

create power to revive the local economy.
To do that, they [cities] need to learn business models, technologies, finance andmanagement — business basics that havenot been taught in the regions far awayfrom big cities,” Fujita said.
Fujita’s strong motivation to support
entrepreneurs stems from his own background. He was born in a small Tokushima
village with about 1,000 residents, but
he saw the place reviving after new businesses and facilities were invited there.
The TIB model has affected other local
cities, prompting 18 similar startup hubs
to launch in the past two years. Fujita said
he expects 12 more hubs to be establishedin other regions by the end of 2023.
TIB’s education and incubation methods come from Fujita’s experience at theEntrepreneurs’ Organization. Founded in
the U.S. in 1987, the global entrepreneurial organization currently has more than
14,500 corporate members worldwide,
including 600 members at eight Japanesebranches. Only companies with sales ofmore than ¥100 million are entitled tojoin.
Fujita learned at the organization that it
is important to build a network of entrepreneurs to overcome the plethora ofhardships that startup businesses face. Bysharing their experiences, startups findthe keys to overcoming their problems assoon as possible and gain a better chanceof succeeding. Fujita applied this methodof supporting entrepreneurs to the TIB
platform when he launched the hub.
The idea of packaging multiple factors
to maximize value, which Fujita learnedat the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, hasbeen applied to Media Do’s new businessmodel for digital content.
“We want to provide readers with a
new way of enjoying e-books,” Fujita said.
The company plans to create additional
value for digital benefits and make them“collectible.” For example, consumers
may keep their e-books on virtual book-

What drove FP Corp. to establish its own
recycling system for foam food trays earlier
than any of its competitors was a strong
sense of crisis that the waste issue could push
the company out of business. As a result, thelargest food tray maker in Japan started recycling, which has made its business sustainable for more than three decades.
FPCO’s first turning point was in 1990,
when McDonald’s decided to stop using
clamshell-style foam containers. The giant
U.S. fast-food chain announced it would
switch to paper wrappers, since the containers littering the beaches in Los Angeles andelsewhere had triggered consumer boycottsof its hamburgers. The consumer movements and pressure from environmentalists stunned Yasuhiro Komatsu, the founderof FPCO and its president at the time, who
visited the United States every year tocheck U.S. supermarket chains and learn
from them, as many Japanese retailers didat that time. “The founder had a sense of crisis after McDonald’s made the decision. He
announced that FPCO would start recycling
its foam trays before deciding how to do it,”said FPCO Chairman and Representative
Director Morimasa Sato.
Komatsu’s sense of crisis also stemmed
from the problem of rising waste in Japan.
Since postwar economic growth had led toincreasing amounts of garbage that troubled
policymakers in Tokyo, the founder fearedthat the issue would bring similar criticism

NAONORI KIMURA
INDUSTRIAL GROWTH PLATFORM INC.
(IGPI) PARTNER

Since FP Corp. started
recycling food trays in
1990, it has established afirm position in the business with its recycled Eco
Trays. Although recycling
is a very common activity in today’s business world, it was a boldstep with high uncertainty at that time,

PAGE: 11

He said the recyagainst food traycling system ismakers in Japan.
supported by four
The Hiroparties: supermarshima-based
kets, consumers,
FPCO took
wholesalers andquick action.
FPCO itself. SuperThe foundermarkets not only
swiftly
set up recycling bins
requested six
but replace the plassupermarFPCO Chairman and Representative Director
tic bags inside when
ket outlets in
Morimasa Sato THE JAPAN TIMES
they fill up with
Hiroshima anddisposed trays. Consumers rinse used trays
Osaka Prefecture to set up recycling bins
and bring them to recycling boxes. Wholesalwhere consumers could dispose of used
ers pick up the trays when they bring new
foam trays for recycling. That decision led tocontainers to supermarkets. FPCO collects
an unexpected outcome. The bins not only
the used trays from wholesalers when it procollected trays, but those outlets attracted
vides them with new ones. “Without theirmore consumers than other supermarefforts, FPCO couldn’t have continued the
ket chains, Sato said. The popular system
recycling system,” Sato said.
encouraged more outlets to place recycling
Another factor that makes the food tray
boxes at their entrances. Two years later,
maker sustainable is its trust in its workFPCO developed foam trays made from colers. For example, FPCO has hired people
lected ones, named Eco Trays. The country’s
with intellectual disabilities because they
recycling laws, which took effect later in thehave a special ability to precisely sort white
1990s, further supported the recycling trend.
from colored containers. “We hire them not
The second turning point for FPCO was
because we have to, but because they have awhen one of Japan’s largest retailing chains
talent for the job,” Sato said.
decided to introduce the Eco Trays at all its
While the company’s competitivenessstores. “The decision accelerated recyclingcomes from producing and transporting foodmovements,” Sato said. The company later
trays, its corporate purpose is to establish a
started recycling clear plastic packages andbetter environment for its workers. “I believe
PET bottles as well.
sustainable management is to not stop the
The increase in the number of recycled
cycle — distributing our profits, investing
trays and compacting the trays for easierthem to create a better environment fortransportation after white trays were sepaworkers, and making their power the source
rated from colored ones helped the recyclingof our competitiveness,” he said. “I wantbusiness to start making money. As of thisworkers to get rewarded for their efforts
March, FPCO had recycling bins at about
every year and feel
10,000 outlets. Still, the number of collected
they want to work
trays accounts for a mere 40% of its products,
here forever.”which Sato aims to boost in the future.
requiring partnerships with many parties
such as retailers and transporters to complete the whole system. Lacking strong
leadership with a vision for the future, thisbusiness activity would not have beensuccessful.
As Sato emphasized, “workers play
the leading part in the company.” Thecompany efficiently uses various humanresources and aims to create additional
value as a company by actively investingin a comfortable working environment.
The source of FPCO’s sustainable manage-

ment is to have many workers think, “It isgood to work at FPCO.”
I expect the company to develop a newrecycling society in cooperation withworkers and customers without pursuing
extreme growth, an approach that Satodescribed as “tree-ring management.”
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