On Day 1 of SusHi Tech Tokyo 2026, on the Main Stage, two of the most influential elected officials in Japan stood next to each other and made the case that startups are now national strategy.
Sanae Takaichi, who became Prime Minister of Japan in 2025 — the country's first female PM, a veteran of the LDP, and previously the Minister of Internal Affairs and Communications — delivered the keynote. She was hosted by Yuriko Koike, the Governor of Tokyo, founder of the SusHi Tech Tokyo initiative, and a former Minister of Defense.
This was the first time a sitting Japanese Prime Minister has appeared at a startup conference. That alone is a meaningful signal. Heads of government make calendar decisions deliberately, and Takaichi being on that stage tells you that the highest level of the Japanese government has placed startups inside the core of national strategy.
For foreign founders watching from outside Japan, the question is: what should you actually do with this information? Here is my read.
The Three Pillars, Read Generously
Takaichi laid out three explicit pillars of Japanese startup policy. Each is worth taking seriously.
Pillar 1 — Scale-Up Financing and a Circulatory Ecosystem. Enhanced financial support for scaling companies, an improved environment for grown startups, and active recruitment of overseas talent. The phrase Takaichi used — circulatory ecosystem — captures something specific: the idea that successful founders generate the next generation of operators, who go on to build the next round of companies. This is the flywheel logic that has powered every world-class startup hub. Japan is now committing to it at the highest level.
Pillar 2 — Deep Tech Commercialization. Quantum computing and semiconductors were named explicitly. The government is expanding the SIR scheme — Startup Innovation R&D — and lowering procurement hurdles so that startups can participate in government contracts, including proof-of-concept and testing phases. This is the pillar with the most concrete operational substance.
Pillar 3 — Social Implementation Acceleration. Startups can now sell directly to local governments, with the national government actively reducing friction. SusHi Tech Tokyo and the national administration are working in coordinated alignment, creating a two-level pathway — metro plus national — for startups to access public procurement.
Read together, these three pillars are coherent and reinforcing. Talent comes in (Pillar 1), builds deep technology with government as the early customer (Pillar 2), and scales through public-sector deployment (Pillar 3). It is a well-designed policy stack.
Why Pillar 2 Is the Headline for Foreign Deep Tech
Government-as-first-customer is one of the most powerful unfair advantages a deep tech startup can have. The history of strategic procurement building world-class technology industries is well-documented — SBIR funding in the United States, defense procurement in Israel, e-governance procurement in Estonia. Japan formalizing a deep-tech procurement path is a structural opportunity that does not exist in most markets right now.
For a foreign founder building in quantum, semiconductors, advanced materials, robotics, or related deep tech areas: Japan's lowered procurement threshold is genuinely meaningful. The Japanese government becoming an active early buyer of frontier technology is the kind of policy lever that takes years to put in place, and Japan has now put it in place.
If you are running a deep tech company, the next 18 to 24 months in Japan deserve a serious look.
The Japanese Deep Tech Research Culture — A Complementary Strength
Walking the SusHi Tech floor and talking with Japanese deep tech teams, one thing stood out as a distinctively Japanese strength. There is a category of Japanese researcher-founder building remarkable technology under research-institute or government-grant funding — quantum sensors, novel materials, robotics components — with multi-year horizons and deep technical talent.
This funding model is different from the US venture-backed model, and the difference is a strength worth understanding. Where the US system optimizes for fast iteration and rapid customer validation, the Japanese system can sustain longer research cycles with deeper technical work, producing technology that is sometimes years ahead of comparable US R&D in specific domains.
For foreign founders, this is not a system to compare unfavorably to Silicon Valley. It is a system to partner with. Some of the most interesting collaborations of the next decade will be Japanese deep tech research paired with global commercialization expertise. The talent is here. The technical foundations are here. The opportunity is to connect both sides of that bridge.
Relationship-Based Business: A Strength, Not a Friction
The other thing foreign founders consistently observe about doing business in Japan is that it is a relationship-based market. Major deals are typically built over multiple meetings, often with shared meals, and trust is established before contracts are formalized.
It is worth pushing back on a common foreign framing of this. The relationship-first business culture is not a friction to be overcome. It is a feature that produces durable, long-term commercial relationships once they are established. The Japanese executives and government officials I met at SusHi Tech were thoughtful, deeply informed, and genuinely engaged with the founders who showed up to engage with them seriously. The contracts that come out of these relationships tend to last — and the partners stay loyal in ways that are increasingly rare in transactional markets.
The advice I would give foreign founders considering Japan is to engage in the spirit Japan is offering. Come to Tokyo. Sit through the meetings. Stay for the dinners. Come back a second and third time. Build the relationship before you ask for the contract. The founders who approach Japan this way close the deals that the founders who fly in for a transactional two-day visit do not. That is not a quirk of Japanese business. That is how durable commercial relationships have always been built — Japan simply preserves the practice more rigorously than markets that have drifted toward pure transactionality.
If you are a founder who is willing to invest the time, the depth of partnership you can build in Japan is rare and valuable.
The Two-Level Coordination Is Real
One of the underrated details of the Takaichi-Koike appearance is the coordination it signals between the national and metropolitan governments. This is not always the case in large countries. In many markets, federal and city governments work at cross-purposes on startup policy, and founders end up trying to navigate two bureaucracies with different priorities.
Japan, at this moment, has alignment from the Prime Minister's office down through the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, and that alignment is operationally visible in the way SusHi Tech is being run. For a foreign founder, this means there is a coherent entry path — engage Tokyo Metropolitan Government on metro-level procurement, engage the national SIR scheme on national-level deep tech R&D, and the two are designed to reinforce each other rather than block each other.
That coherence is itself a competitive advantage of doing business in Japan that foreign founders should appreciate when they compare entry markets.
How to Engage Well
For founders, investors, and operators thinking about Japan after SusHi Tech, here is my honest practical advice.
Show up in person. Tokyo rewards founders who come to the city, meet the people, and build the relationship in the room. Video calls work for the maintenance phase. They do not work for the opening phase.
Find a Japanese partner you genuinely trust. Whether that is a co-founder, a country manager, a board advisor, or a distribution partner — the people who do well in Japan have a Japanese collaborator at the center of their effort. This person is not a hire who handles "the Japan thing." This is a strategic partner who shapes how you build for the market.
Invest the time correctly. Plan for a longer relationship-building phase than you would in the US or Europe. The companies that budgeted the time correctly closed the deals. The companies that expected a US-style sales cycle did not.
Take Japanese deep tech seriously as a partnership opportunity. If you are building anything in frontier technology, the Japanese research-grant teams working in your domain are some of the most underappreciated talent pools in the world. Reach out. Show up at the conferences. Read the papers. Build the bridge.
Engage with the SIR scheme and government procurement directly. The path that Takaichi's Pillar 2 opens is real, and the early movers will benefit most. Talk to the SusHi Tech Tokyo office. Talk to METI. The doors are open in ways that are unusual for any major economy.
What This Moment Actually Means
The image of a sitting Prime Minister and the Governor of Tokyo standing next to each other on a startup conference stage is a meaningful one. It tells you that Japan has made a choice about what kind of economy it wants to be in the next decade — one where startups, foreign and domestic, are central to national strategy.
For foreign founders, that choice creates an opportunity that did not exist with the same clarity even two or three years ago. Japan is genuinely opening doors that have historically been hard to walk through. The window is open. The policy framework is in place. The political will is at the top.
Go now. Show up well. Build the relationships in person. Take Japanese deep tech seriously as a partnership opportunity, not just a market to sell into. Engage the government-procurement pathways the SIR scheme is opening. Be patient with the timeline, and the relationships you build will be durable in ways that are rare in any market.
This is a good moment for Japan, and a good moment for the founders who choose to be here.