Rebuilding the country
on what its regions make.

I am Takuya Ishizuka of Ishizuka Corporation. Thank you for visiting our site.

The Ishizuka family were fishermen. My grandfather was not the eldest son, so he left the household and took up whatever trade he could to establish himself. One of those was wholesaling, and that is where this company begins.

The venture that found its footing was metalworking, around 1960, as the motor industry grew during Japan's postwar boom. From that base my grandfather widened the business into woodwork, beekeeping and farming. He was not only a man who sold; he made things himself. He knew both the labour of making and the difficulty of selling.

My father, the second generation, took over the business and saw the company through the long recession that followed. During the downturn of the Heisei years he made the decision to narrow the business, and then passed it on to me as the third generation.

I started out separately from the family business, founding a company in information technology and working on management and operational improvement across a range of industries. I bring that experience with me as I take on what my grandfather began.

I established the trading division, and gave it the name the family has traded under, because I wanted to take my grandfather's founding spirit back into my own hands. Move when the moment comes, and take responsibility for both making and selling. Keeping the name is how I keep that beginning in view.

Leaving the margin in Japan's producing regions

Working in Vietnam and Malaysia, and travelling around Southeast Asia, one thing became clear to me. The Japanese name is already established. A few characters of Japanese on a package are enough to signal quality and good taste. Pick the product up, however, and much of it turns out to have been made in China.

Japanese food has become a culture in these markets. That is where we stand today. And yet most of the value it creates goes to those who have moved faster in production and in trade. My honest reaction was that this is a waste.

Having grown up in a family that made things, I feel it all the more. Good products take time to make. The difficulty of turning that effort into a price is something I believe I understand, having watched my grandfather and my father.

With the yen where it is, I believe this is an opportunity for Japan's producing regions to send good products out into the world and be properly paid for them. We handle every step from purchase in the region to the shop counter overseas, and run our own outlets, so that the value of Japanese origin returns to the region as price.

There is a reason we placed our first outlet in Da Nang. I have worked in Vietnam for many years and our group has a subsidiary there in another line of business. There are people I have worked alongside, and I understand how business is done. As a place to entrust what a producing region hands to us, I chose the one I know best.

There are buyers overseas who insist on Japanese origin. What is in short supply, I believe, is less the demand than the means of getting the product to them.

To those in Japan's producing regions: I expect we will meet through a conversation about purchasing. I would be glad, first of all, to hear what you have to say.