Author: Ryu Araki

Yamaha motorbikes. Vietnamese coffee. Bánh mì.

And shelves full of Detective Conan.

Detective Conan follows a teenage detective trapped in a child’s body, and has over 270 million copies in circulation worldwide.

Seeing a familiar Japanese character surrounded by Vietnamese text made me look more closely at the business behind the bookshelf.

JETRO’s 2024 report cites annual comic printing of 60 million copies in Vietnam in 2019, alongside an industry estimate that Japanese manga accounted for around 90%.

An older estimate, certainly. But useful context for the shelves I photographed.

The business extends well beyond books.

MANGA Research Institute estimates that the global market built around Japanese manga IP—including publishing, screen adaptations, games and merchandise—was approximately ¥4 trillion (26.7 billion USD) in 2023.

Up 9.7% from the previous year.

Overseas markets accounted for 44%, or roughly ¥1.8 trillion (12 billion USD).

These are market-size estimates, not export receipts or profits flowing back to Japan. But they show how far the commercial life of a story can extend beyond its original publication.

On a spreadsheet, that international reach is a percentage.

In Ho Chi Minh City, it was a bookshelf full of familiar faces.

It was my first visit to the city. Detective Conan had already found a place there.

For me, a familiar character from home. For someone picking up a volume, perhaps their first encounter with a story that could keep them coming back for years.

I’ve already left Vietnam.

Conan is still on the shelf, waiting for the next reader.

(USD equivalents are approximate, using an illustrative exchange rate of ¥150 per US dollar.)

In the 1990s, Masayoshi Son, Hideo Sawada and Yasuyuki Nambu were counted among Japan’s most prominent entrepreneurs.

SoftBank.
H.I.S.
Pasona.

Three founders. Same country. Same era.

They were known as the “Three Musketeers of Japanese Entrepreneurship”.

Thirty years later, all three have built substantial businesses.

But the outcomes are radically different.

H.I.S. became one of Japan’s best-known travel companies.

Pasona became one of its best-known human resources groups.

Both survived multiple economic cycles and built brands recognized across Japan.

Son, however, played a different game.

He didn’t just keep building the business he started.

He repeatedly repositioned SoftBank — and its capital — around what he believed would define the next technological era.

Software distribution.

Internet.

Alibaba.

Broadband.

Mobile.

Semiconductors.

AI.

Some of those bets were spectacular successes, especially Yahoo Japan, Alibaba, Vodafone Japan (later SoftBank Mobile) and Arm.

Others were spectacular failures. WeWork alone made that obvious.

But the asymmetry is what matters.

As of September 25, 2026, SoftBank Group’s market capitalization was roughly $223 billion.

September 2026 figures put H.I.S. and Pasona each well under $1 billion.

They’re all successful but from a capitalist pov, SoftBank is in a league of its own. The rivalry is no more.

The difference is well over a hundredfold in market capitalization — not a comparison of shareholder returns.

That gap wasn’t created because Son was right all the time.

He wasn’t.

It was created because he kept risking capital on new technological waves — and when he believed he had found one, he was willing to bet at a scale large enough to change the trajectory of the entire company.

That is a very different model of entrepreneurship.

Most founders spend decades becoming better at the business they started.

Son kept asking a different question:

What is going to become exponentially more important from here?

And then he tried to put himself — and his capital — in front of it.

Over 30 years, those decisions compounded.

There is a broader lesson here.

Execution matters enormously.

But over a long enough period, what you choose to compound may matter even more than how efficiently you compound it.

A great operator in a stagnant industry can create an excellent company.

A great capital allocator positioned in front of a structural change can create something orders of magnitude larger.

The biggest outcomes rarely come from doing the same thing 10% better for 30 years.

They come from being positioned correctly when the world changes.

Japan has roughly 39,000 registered CPAs.

ACCA — the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants — has more than 257,900 members.

That is roughly 6.6 times the number of Japanese CPAs.

These are not directly comparable qualifications. Their examinations, experience requirements, professional roles and regulatory frameworks differ.

But the difference in scale highlights something we often overlook when evaluating professional qualifications:

Network size matters.

Living in Malaysia has changed the way I think about this.

In Japan, professional credentials are often judged primarily by difficulty.

How hard is the examination?

How many years does it take to pass?

What percentage of candidates succeed?

These are reasonable questions.

But there is another question that may matter just as much:

How portable is the qualification?

A Credential Is Also a Network

A professional qualification looks like an individual achievement.

But economically, it is also membership in a network.

The examination is only the entrance mechanism.

The real asset includes everything surrounding it: employer recognition, professional standards, training infrastructure, alumni, institutional relationships, and compatibility with other markets.

This resembles the network effects we normally associate with technology.

A payment system becomes more useful as more merchants accept it.

A language becomes more useful as more people speak it.

A professional qualification can similarly become more useful as more employers, regulators and institutions understand what it represents.

This is why the difference between roughly 39,000 Japanese CPAs and 258,000 ACCA members is interesting.

The numbers do not tell us which qualification is better.

They tell us something about the scale of the networks in which those qualifications operate.

Difficulty Is Not the Same as Value

We often assume that harder qualifications should be more valuable.

But that does not necessarily follow.

Imagine two qualifications.

Qualification A requires enormous effort but is primarily recognized within one country.

Qualification B may require a different level or type of effort, but is widely understood by employers and institutions across many markets.

Which is more valuable?

There is no universal answer.

For someone planning to spend an entire career in one country, the domestic qualification may clearly be the better choice.

But for someone whose career might move between Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong or London, the calculation changes.

Difficulty is only one variable.

I increasingly think about professional qualifications through four factors:

Difficulty × Recognition × Portability × Market Size

A qualification that performs strongly across all four dimensions can create a very different set of opportunities from one optimized primarily for a single domestic market.

Japan Built Deep Systems. Britain Built Wide Ones.

Japan created extraordinarily sophisticated domestic systems.

Its universities, professional examinations, corporations and regulatory institutions developed to function within one of the world’s largest and most advanced economies.

For decades, that was an enormous advantage.

And Japanese professional qualifications remain extremely valuable in the markets for which they were designed.

But specialization can also create limits when careers become international.

A qualification that is immediately understood in Tokyo may require considerably more explanation in Kuala Lumpur or Dubai.

British-rooted qualifications developed within a very different historical network.

Britain once governed territories around the world. English, common law, educational structures and professional institutions spread internationally.

The political empire disappeared.

But many of those institutional connections remained.

More importantly, many continued to expand.

Professional qualifications are one manifestation of that legacy.

ACCA is an especially interesting example because it has evolved far beyond Britain itself. Its membership today is international, and its institutional network extends across a large number of markets.

That does not mean British qualifications are inherently better.

It means some of them operate within unusually wide international networks.

And networks compound.

The Educational Arbitrage

This creates what I think is an interesting form of educational arbitrage.

People naturally compare credentials by prestige and difficulty.

But perhaps another comparison deserves more attention:

Effort required to acquire the credential versus number of opportunities the credential can potentially access.

A qualification that is exceptionally difficult but geographically concentrated may offer a very different return on invested time from one that can travel across multiple labor markets.

Again, this does not mean everyone should choose the international qualification.

A Japanese accountant planning to spend an entire career practicing regulated accounting in Japan has very different requirements from someone building an international career.

Local expertise has enormous value.

But for young people who genuinely do not know where they may live or work twenty years from now, portability has economic value.

The same applies to parents thinking about their children’s education.

The future location of a career is increasingly difficult to predict.

Tokyo today.

Singapore ten years from now.

Dubai after that.

Or perhaps somewhere we are not currently considering at all.

In that environment, a portable qualification preserves options.

And the younger you are, the longer those options have to compound.

Portability Is Optionality

This is ultimately why I find the comparison between Japanese CPAs and ACCA interesting.

The headline numbers — roughly 39,000 versus 258,000 — are not a ranking of the two qualifications.

They illustrate two different types of professional ecosystems.

One developed within a deep and sophisticated domestic market.

The other developed across a much wider international network.

When evaluating a qualification, perhaps the most interesting question is therefore not simply:

How hard is it to obtain?

But:

How many doors can it open once you have it?

Difficulty matters.

Prestige matters.

Technical competence certainly matters.

But network size and portability matter too.

Portability is a form of optionality.

And optionality has value.

Eduardo Saverin is often described as lucky.

That is fair. Meeting Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard was an extraordinary piece of luck. Saverin provided some of the early money that helped get Facebook running, became its first CFO, and received a large ownership stake.

There is no useful lesson in “meet the next Zuckerberg at college.” You cannot replicate that.

What happened afterward is more interesting.

As Facebook moved to Silicon Valley, the relationship between Zuckerberg and Saverin broke down. Saverin’s stake was heavily diluted, and the dispute eventually ended in litigation and a confidential settlement.

He could easily have ended his financial relationship with Facebook there.

He didn’t.

Saverin fought to protect his ownership and remained a shareholder. He eventually sold some of his shares, but continued to benefit enormously as Facebook grew.

That decision interests me most.

It is easy to hold a company when you like the founder, work there every day, and feel personally invested in its success. Saverin’s situation was almost the opposite. His relationship with Zuckerberg had collapsed. He was no longer helping to run the company.

But owning a company and working for a company are two different things.

Facebook continued to add users, engineers, advertisers and eventually billions of dollars in revenue. Saverin did not need to return to the office to participate in that growth. His shares did that for him.

This is one of the things I find most interesting about equity.

You can stop working for a company without necessarily wanting to stop owning it.

By Facebook’s 2012 IPO, Saverin was living in Singapore and had renounced his US citizenship. The tax consequences of that decision attracted considerable attention, although the actual long-term savings are difficult to know from public information.

What is much easier to see is the value of the Facebook stake.

As Meta grew, so did Saverin’s fortune. He subsequently co-founded B Capital and built a substantial investment business of his own. Today, he is regularly ranked among Singapore’s richest people, with a fortune estimated at more than $30 billion.

There is an obvious warning here.

Holding a concentrated position in one company is not automatically smart. Plenty of founders have held declining companies all the way down. Sometimes selling is exactly the right decision.

But Saverin’s story illustrates something that is easy to forget, particularly for entrepreneurs.

We tend to think about our contribution to a company in terms of work: the meetings we attend, the decisions we make, the people we manage.

This is especially true in Japan, where hard work is deeply respected while income earned without visible effort — particularly investment gains — is sometimes viewed with suspicion.

But ownership works differently. That is true in Japan just as it is anywhere else.

If you own part of an exceptional business, other people can continue creating value on your behalf long after your own operating contribution has ended.

Saverin was extraordinarily lucky to get his original opportunity.

Keeping an economic interest in Facebook after everything that happened was a separate matter.

And in the end, that may have been almost as consequential as getting the opportunity in the first place.

For decades, the familiar Japanese face overseas was a corporate expat with an expected return date. That image feels increasingly incomplete.

In 2015, Japan recorded 457,084 nationals living abroad as permanent residents. By October 2025, the figure had reached 588,486, up approximately 29%. It increased every year across that decade.

Meanwhile, the long-term-stay category fell from 859,994 to 709,684, down approximately 17%.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs counts students and other temporary residents alongside corporate expatriates and their families, so the second figure is not a direct measure of expatriate assignments. “Permanent” means residence without a fixed end date, rather than a promise never to return. What the figures do show is a sustained change in the composition of Japanese communities abroad.

I moved my family from Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur at the end of 2019. Our reasons were fairly practical: direct 6-hour flights back to Tokyo, English widely spoken, good food, warm weather, schooling options and a long-term visa that made the move feasible.

None of that required us to think badly of Japan. We were choosing somewhere to live, with Japan still close enough to remain a big part of our lives.

That experience shapes how I read these numbers.

Japan has a long history of emigration. Earlier migration to Brazil included agricultural workers and families looking for livelihoods they struggled to secure at home. Economic hardship weighed heavily on many of those decisions. Those migrants exercised agency too, often under much tighter constraints.

The households that interest me today have a different starting point. They could afford to stay in Japan. Their income, savings or investments give them the option of leaving.

International marriage also belongs in this discussion. Research on Japanese women in Australia shows how marriage and settlement can develop out of an initial move for study, work or a different lifestyle. The sequence is not always “marry, then emigrate”. A temporary stay can become a life.

That research helps explain one route to settlement, but it leaves me wondering about another: Japanese households moving together, without an overseas employer or a foreign spouse determining the destination.

My suspicion is that this group is becoming more significant, particularly among people with substantial assets or income they can earn from anywhere. The residence statistics cannot confirm it. They contain neither the wealth breakdown nor the account of motives needed to establish a wealthy exodus. And the permanent-resident total is an accumulated population, not the number who departed that year.

Still, the financial logic is easy to recognise.

An investor does not generally need to live where the portfolio is invested. For someone in that position, the choice of home can turn on schools, housing, language, climate and the ease of getting back to Japan. A country that would be an awkward place to earn a local salary may be a very attractive place to live on income earned elsewhere.

This is a different calculation from accepting a company posting. The household has to choose the destination, arrange the move and decide whether it is working.

It can also keep much of its old life. Investments, business relationships, friendships and family ties do not disappear at departure. Having another base need not involve a final break with Japan.

I understand the reasons to stay in Japan. Safety, convenience, food, infrastructure and cultural depth make Japan an exceptionally appealing place to live. Those qualities also make it somewhere people who have left continue to visit, and may eventually return to.

But once a family has the financial means to live elsewhere, the comparison becomes real. The question extends beyond the next job or the next school year to where they want to spend a substantial part of their lives.

The permanent-resident figures do not tell us how many people made that calculation. I think it deserves closer attention.

We are used to asking where Japanese companies will expand overseas. I would like to know more about where Japanese families with a choice are deciding to settle—and what persuaded them.

Sources

• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan — Annual Report of Statistics on Japanese Nationals Overseas, October 2025. Percentage changes calculated by the author.
• Japanese Women Marriage Migrants Today: Negotiating Gender, Identity and Community in Search of a New Lifestyle in Western Sydney — Western Sydney University