Yesterday several J-List staff members and I went to Tokyo Big Sight to check out the International Gift Show, a large convention where manufacturers and distributors show off various products. It was quite pleasant walking around the convention center with a mere 20,000 people around me instead of the 500,000+ otakus present during the Comiket doujinshi convention, and we had fun scouting for interesting products for the site. I found myself reflecting on how things had changed since I started J-List back in the stone age, when people still used modems and instead of “Googling” we all used Yahoo or (shudder) Hotbot. I decided to see if anyone on my Twitter feed had any questions for me, and a few did. What inspired you to start J-List in the first place? How well did you know the market when you started?I started J-List in 1996 after sensing that the time had come to do something interesting with the Internet. I’d laid some of the groundwork by bringing stock to sell at anime conventions in the early 90s, and had run a side business offering JPOP CDs on Usenet. (The name “J-List” refers to the giant list of products I had in an Excel spreadsheet back then.)How does a Westerner start his own business in Japan? There were no special barriers to starting a business here, although as with any business you need to understand the language and culture. We learned early on that distributors would only work with corporations they could build trust relationships with, so we made sure to shape our company into the form these distributors expected. My wife is the president of the company, which is good since doing accounting in Japanese would probably break my brain.Have you faced any problems being non-Japanese? i.e., “we’re not doing business with a foreigner”?There may have been a time when toy distributors would have preferred to avoid the hassle of dealing with foreigners buying toys and figures due to linguistic problems, but by the time J-List was launched they’d really come to appreciate our business, going out of our way to help us since we represented an important source of revenue for them. I realized that whenever the Japanese economy experienced a downturn it would actually open doors for J-List, as companies were forced to think about the outside world if they wanted to survive.What kind of relationship do you have with post office?They love us, since we send hundreds of packages a day. They gave us an award thanking us, presented by the Japanese Postmaster General. What was your biggest challenge?Perhaps learning to say “no” to carrying new products on the site, which is why we carry everything from cookbooks and bento books to shimapan to Death Star ice makers for your bourbon. There’s just too much cool stuff in Japan…
The J-List staff made a trip to Tokyo Big Sight.
