Concentration researcher, eyewear enthusiast
Mr. Inoue is Division Manager at famous Japanese eyewear brand JINS Co., Ltd. in charge of JINS MEME, the world's first eyewear that lets you see not only what is in front of you, but also allows you to look inside yourself, by showing shifts in your emotional state, activity logs, as well as your health. He is also the Director of Think Lab, a unique workspace design for concentration.
Mr.Inoue has ranked fourth in Asia for the Arithmetic Olympics. Recently he wrote "How to work to increase concentration by 300 times".
Keisuke Igarashi
Cellular agriculturist
Mr. Igaashi received a Ph.D. research on cytoplasmic male sterility in rice at Tohoku University Graduate School of Agriculture. He joined Shojinmeat Project from 2016 and started research on cultured meat.
Cultured meat is meat grown in the lab rather than from slaughtered animals. Various efforts has been made by scientists, entrepreneurs and corporations all over the world to create cultured meat that has quality of real meat (color, texture, taste, etc.), as well as scale up production to meet the need of commercialization. The bottle neck is: the serum critical in culture process is very expensive. Shojinmeat has thus worked on a way to substantially drive down the cost and democratize the technology.
Mr. Igarashi has recently found an NPO on cellular agriculture. At the second Cell Farming Conference, he taught a team of elementary and junior high school students and developed a fish primary culture method.
Shinya Umezawa
Biophilic architect
Born in Gunma Prefecture in 1980. Brand Manager / co-founder of famous Space design brand “parkERs”.
Telling us about his first trip to the Kenyan Savanna, Umezawa san said: “I felt rumbling inside, and I realized how myself is truly a living organism”. This was a life changing experience, since he then resigned from his job in IT industry and entered the new world of space design. Using plants and natural elements (Biophilic design), he has created a unique business model which then thrives in Japanese market. His works include Haneda Airport ANA SUITE LOUNGE, Starbucks Coffee Omotesando Hills, 2020 Tokyo Olympic Marathon Course (Asakusa area), etc.
Zhu Yi
Ethnography researcher
Born in China, received education in Japan, China and Hong Kong, she is currently based at the University of Tsukuba as Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Business Sciences. She is a business ethnographer, and interested in organizational culture, cross-cultural communication as well as corporate ideology and identity. Yi Zhu teaches Human Resource Management and Business Anthropology at the University of Tsukuba, Japan.