SPIRIT Adventure! Adventure! Adventure!

I was totally fascinated by the innovativeness of DJ culture, so in 1988 when the whole world had switched from records to CD’s, deciding to set up my own business after university, I went and opened up a record shop at the age of 25. Club music became popular, and in our best year in the 1990s we sold 1.7 million records. Not CD’s, records! We sold all that with just two retail stores and an online shop. We went on selling records for 23 years from 1988 until 2011.

However, as people started being able to listen to music for free on YouTube and other sites, record sales plummeted, and so in 2011 we switched to handling music equipment as our main product. Our company had made its name through selling records, so it was no easy feat to change course and embark on selling different products. But, with the music industry shrinking fast, time was of the essence. Thanks to the frantic struggle I made together with all the staff at dmr!, we somehow managed to change our core product, and to get our customers who had been buying our records to instead buy headphones and other such products from us.

Actually, just at the time where we were trying to completely stop selling records and embarking on the sale of headphones and other merchandise, the Great East Japan Earthquake happened. People who had come from abroad left Japan, feeling that it was unsafe. Some Japanese people also relocated. But there was the English issue, and it seemed that there were few individuals who could represent Japan through the English language. At that point, with the belief that I wanted the people of the world to know more about Japan and that I wanted to connect Japan with the world, I took a few steps. One of them was to make a request to the company that runs TOEIC here in Japan to interview me, and to use that interview to express the importance of learning English. They didn’t come to me for an interview, I asked them to interview me! I must have looked like quite a weird guy! But they willingly agreed. I thought that I wanted Japanese people to improve their English skills, and for Japan to be a country that was open to the world on an individual level.

I also wanted to try and put these ideas into practice at dmr!, the company I myself run, and so I decided to take on interns from abroad. At the moment we have interns from many countries, including Peru, Russia, China, Korea, France and the US, working with us at dmr!. In fact the renewal of this recruitment site itself was led by a French intern in her first two months here in Japan. As well as being surprised by her rich ideas, I am also really satisfied with her work.