We're pleased to announce that FirstPoint Japan's Expert Interview Series is set to begin shortly.

So what exactly differentiates the FirstPoint Japan Expert series from the numerous Japan-related and Japan-focused websites that are already out there?

The answer is three fold:
1. We focus only on Japanese Business. You won't find the latest restaurant ratings or tourist attractions here. Sorry if that disappoints you but there are countless sites out there for that.

2. We tend to lean towards brass-tacks advice gleaned from those fighting in the trenches. What is really experienced on the ground? What are the difficulties? What are the opportunities? What are the risks?

3. We work to find solutions to enable you to seize an opportunity, extract value or mitigate risks.

Our expert interview topics range from recruiting, talent management, coaching, the in's and out's of Japanese labor unions, market entry, technical and technology issues (e.g, i18n/L10N, Han Unification, medical trials, etc.) and much, much more.

We also analyze the Japan market from industry vertical including fashion, banking, finance, high-tech, life science, automotive and many more.

If you don't sign up to for our newsletter, you'll miss out what you need to know to succeed in the Japanese market. 

A big thanks goes out to Roukan.com as Roukan.com's Work Environment Surveys Solution Is Now An Official Sponsor of FirstPoint Japan.

SINGAPORE--Hiroshi Suzuki is one of a handful of Japanese executives who have given up on Japan as a base to conduct global business operations and opted for a more cosmopolitan setting.

Suzuki is president of optical lens and eyeglass maker Hoya Corp., which is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s First Section and headquartered in the capital’s Shinjuku Ward.

Yet, he moved a major part of his business to Singapore, figuring that access to on-the-ground information and other opportunities would enable him to better steer the company.

For the past year and a half, Suzuki has spent more than half of any month in Singapore.

“What a president should do is develop a strategy on how to allocate funds and personnel to businesses with higher growth potential,” he said. “I have better access to information required for such responsibility outside Japan.”

Suzuki, 54, has a long-term contract on a residential floor of an exclusive resort hotel on Sentosa Island and commutes to his office in the business district in central Singapore.

Suzuki returns to Japan mainly for Hoya’s 10 board meetings a year. He consults with representatives of company divisions once a month, either at a meeting outside Japan or through a teleconference.

“From our factories and workers to our customers and rivals, everyone is based outside Japan,” Suzuki said. “I considered relocating our headquarters abroad, but I decided that I would go out first.”

Five of Hoya’s seven board members are from outside the company. The remaining two, Suzuki and Kenji Ema, chief financial officer, are both based overseas.

Ema, 65, set up the company’s financial headquarters in the Netherlands in 2003 and works out of the country.

In late April, Suzuki and Ema met at Hoya’s headquarters in Tokyo and discussed dividends and other issues for an hour. They soon left Japan for their respective bases.

“If we have something to discuss, we can communicate via e-mail and other means,” Suzuki said. “We do not have to get together.”

Sunstar Co., whose main business is health care products, operates its global headquarters in Switzerland.

The company chose Switzerland to change the way its employees view the global business environment.

“How will the world look like if we see it from Switzerland, not from Japan?” a Sunstar official asked.

Sunstar Group Chairman Yoshihiro Kaneda recently moved his base for business to Singapore to expand the company’s Asian operations. He rarely returns to Japan.

The company has no plans to place Japan, whose market is shrinking, at the center of the group’s operations.

A growing number of Japanese companies are relocating some of their headquarters functions or their business divisions abroad.

There are 60 such companies in Singapore alone, including Panasonic Corp., trading house Mitsubishi Corp., shipping company Nippon Yusen KK and chemicals producers Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corp. and Mitsui Chemicals Inc.

Mitsui Chemicals moved a division in charge of sophisticated resins two years ago. It has a production base in Jurong Island, which hosts a number of petrochemical complexes.

Atsushi Komoriya, president of Mitsui Elastomers Singapore Pte., a local subsidiary, said: “Everyone is here, from U.S. chemicals giants with which we compete for market shares to automotive manufacturers to which we supply our products. The basic rule is to do business close to where there is business. It will take too long if we stay in Japan.”

At Hoya, Suzuki and Ema have discussed where each business operation, such as production, sales and research and development, can be conducted most efficiently.

The company moved its eyeglass division to Thailand in 2009 and later relocated its hard disk division to Vietnam and its intraocular lens division to Singapore.

“When it came to whether we can choose Japan as the best place to do business, our conclusion was that we have to choose elsewhere for most operations, such as finance and strategy planning,” Ema said.

A key goal for Hoya’s Dutch-based financial headquarters is to minimize tax payments, drawing on different taxation systems around the world.

In the year ended March, Hoya’s group-wide effective corporate tax rate had fallen to 20.3 percent, compared with 35 percent in Japan.

Hoya concentrates earnings at regional headquarters in countries with low corporate tax rates or at manufacturing companies in Asia and elsewhere where tax burdens are relatively low.

Ema said U.S. and European shareholders consider taxes as business costs and do not invest in a company unless it reduces tax payments at least to levels of Western companies.

“Companies have no choice but to adapt themselves to the environment,” he said. “We are in an era when companies can choose a country where they make products, employ workers and pay taxes.”

SINGAPORE FACES PROBLEMS

As part of its strategy to bolster economic growth and increase tax revenue, Singapore has sought to attract foreign companies, top-level engineers and wealthy people from around the world by offering them an environment in which they can operate freely.

Its corporate tax rate of 17 percent is among the lowest in Asia. An even lower rate applies to regional headquarters and financial centers set up by foreign companies.

Entrepreneurs and wealthy individuals who transfer a certain level of assets to Singapore are granted permanent resident status and exempted from inheritance tax.

However, the influx of foreign companies has caused office rents in central Singapore to double compared with a few years ago. Real estate prices have soared beyond the reach of residents.

Prices of automobiles and other products have risen more than wages. Real income has fallen, hitting low-income earners particularly hard and widening the wealth gap.

The weakened yen and promotional packages fueled a surge in Southeast Asian visitors to Japan in May that offset the decline in Chinese tourists that has continued since a territorial spat erupted.

The number of visitors from Thailand soared 67.8 percent in May from the same month last year, while the increase was 39.3 percent for Indonesians and 24.5 percent for Singaporeans, according to a report released June 19 by the Japan National Tourism Organization.

Tourist numbers from Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam also rose by double digits, the report showed.

Overall, 875,400 tourists visited Japan in May, up 31.2 percent from the previous year. The number is a record for May and the third largest monthly total.

Tourists from South Korea and Taiwan--the largest and the second largest groups--were also higher than last year. Visitors from South Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong still account for 65 percent of all foreign travelers to Japan.

However, the number of tourists from China has drastically fallen since the Japanese government bought three of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea from private ownership in September 2012. The acquisition triggered anti-Japan protests across China, which also claims sovereignty over the uninhabited isles.

With no end in sight to the dispute, the Japanese government plans to raise visitor numbers from Southeast Asia and lower its dependence on tourists from East Asian countries.

Specifically, it wants to attract 1 million Southeast Asian tourists this year, and 2 million in 2016. The number was 780,000 last year.

To achieve these goals, the Japan Tourism Agency plans to lower conditions for Southeast Asians to obtain tourist visas to the same level as those for South Koreans. The eased requirements will allow Thai and Malaysian tourists to enter Japan without visas by this summer.

Another thing working in the favor of Japanese tourism officials is the weakened yen.

Nazerah Mohamed, 44, a Singaporean elementary school teacher, and her husband joined a six-day, five-night tour to Hokkaido and Tokyo. They ended up at the Takeya discount store in Tokyo’s Taito Ward on June 19 to buy chocolates and other souvenirs.

“The mesh-grilled scallops we had near Lake Toyako were delicious,” Nazerah said.

An official of a Tokyo-based company involved in arrangements for the tour said, “Buoyed by the weakening yen, the demand for tours that cater to Southeast Asians has been rising since the end of last year.”

The influx of Southeast Asian tourists is also evident at department stores.

The increase in Thai shoppers in May was largely behind the highest monthly duty-free goods sales at the Takashimaya department store in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward since 2008, store officials said.

Thippawan Yongsiriwit, 56, a Thai civil-service worker, bought three Issey Miyake brand bags at the store.

“Due to the weakening yen, they are about 30 percent less expensive in Japan,” said Thippawan, who added that Issei Miyake brand goods have gained in popularity in Thailand because they are the favorites of the Thai queen.

Japan’s tourism companies have also taken measures to increase visitor numbers from Southeast Asia.

In April, a record 12,500 foreign group tourists visited the Shinyokohama Raumen Museum in Yokohama, a facility featuring ramen noodle specialties from across Japan. Thai tourists accounted for 60 percent of the total.

Tokyo continues to be the world's largest urban area with more than 37 million people, according to the recently released 9th Annual edition of Demographia World Urban Areas. Tokyo has held the top position for nearly 60 years, since it displaced New York. There have been only modest changes in the ranking of the world's largest urban areas over the past year. The top four urban areas remain the same, with Jakarta (Jabotabek) second, Seoul third and Delhi fourth. Fast-growing Shanghai, however, assumed fifth place, displacing Manila where the latest census data showed less population growth than had been expected.

Hiroshi Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten, says mandating that his employees speak English at work was tougher than expected; it slowed meetings and embarrassed senior managers. But Mikitani says he's sticking with it.

The champagne used to flow at Heartland, the bar in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills complex that drew bankers from the Japan headquarters of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. upstairs.

“Every day, there was a party,” said Mai Shioya, the 39- year-old manager, who started in May 2008 before the global financial crisis that led to Lehman’s bankruptcy.

Bankers in well-cut suits would come in about 5 p.m., hand bartenders corporate credit cards and let their friends charge drinks to the tab until 2 a.m., said Michio Nakamura, 45, who’s been running events and entertainment at Heartland since its opening as part of the famed Roppongi Hills development in 2003. After the financial crisis, many disappeared, cutting revenue by 30 percent, Shioya said.

“Those customers and that age have gone,” she said.

The void is being filled by a new group of bar patrons: information-technology workers. While financial firms have cut staff in Japan, technology companies have boosted hiring, and as bankers vacated offices at Roppongi Hills, companies including Google Inc. (GOOG) and Lenovo Group Ltd. (992)moved in. As early as this month, Apple Inc. (AAPL) will also make the complex its home in Japan, two people familiar with the plan said in January.

With no CG, no invisible wires, and even no magical powers to rely on, a photo posted on Twitter by a 16-year-old high school girl in Japan has gained worldwide attention for its “Matrix”-like special effect, with more than 20,000 re-tweeting to date.

Posted under the username “Chanman,” the picture shows a half-crouching girl with her arms and legs outstretched as if she is casting a spell. Surrounding her are 10 girls jumping in the air and spreading their arms, appearing to be blown away by an invisible force.

When Chanman added the caption, “Makanko-sappo” (a lethal finger beam technique appearing in the famous “Dragon Ball” manga series), the number of views sharply increased.

Chanman and her classmates took the photo to commemorate the end of the school year.

Inspired by Chanman’s Makanko-sappo, similar postings have been growing in number.

Twitter user “Chara” posted a photo looking like “Hadouken,” a special “wave fist” attack used by characters of the popular video game “Street Fighter.”