Episode Details

"Your biggest asset as an entrepreneur is actually yourself—your own personal strengths"

"You cannot get a cultural translator"

"You have to develop a different mentality for any retail business"

"It boils down to developing a strong corporate culture"

"One size does not fit all"

Ernie Higa is a Japanese American entrepreneur, business leader, and long-term Japan executive who built a career by bridging Japan and the United States. Born in Hawaii, educated in Geneva and Japan, and later trained at the Wharton School and Columbia Business School, he returned to Japan in the late 1970s to join his family's businesses before becoming an entrepreneur at the age of twenty-six. Starting at a time when entrepreneurship in Japan was far from mainstream, he built businesses across lumber, medical devices, and food service, including the development of Domino's Pizza Japan and later Wendy's Japan. His career arc reflects adaptability, cultural intelligence, and the ability to localise global business models for the Japanese market. Across multiple industries, Higa learned to lead older Japanese employees, attract talent outside traditional corporate pathways, build strong corporate culture, and balance global thinking with local execution in Japan.

Ernie Higa's leadership story is a practical case study in what it takes to build, adapt, and lead businesses in Japan when the usual paths are unavailable. As a Japanese American who looked Japanese but initially lacked Japanese fluency and deep cultural familiarity, he entered Japan with both an advantage and a disadvantage. He did not fit neatly into the Japanese corporate hierarchy, yet that ambiguity also allowed him to break certain unwritten rules. In 1979, at the age of twenty-six, entrepreneurship was not a recognised or respected career track in Japan. Banks were sceptical, age mattered, company pedigree mattered, and credibility was usually attached to large organisations. Higa had none of those traditional signals, so he had to build credibility through performance, adaptability, and cultural understanding.

His first major opportunity came in lumber. During the U.S.-Japan trade tensions of the 1970s and 1980s, he saw a way to add value by having Japanese lumber specifications cut in North American sawmills rather than simply importing logs for Japanese mills. This required him to bridge American production capabilities with Japanese precision requirements. The work demanded more than translation. It required understanding Japanese expectations around quality, reliability, tolerance, process, and trust. Higa's insight was that language could be translated, but culture could not be outsourced so easily. This became one of his central leadership lessons: leaders in Japan must understand the hidden rules, not only the spoken words.

As his businesses grew, Higa had to attract talent despite not being a famous Japanese corporation. He found opportunity in retired executives and staff from major trading houses and large companies. These people brought experience, networks, and discipline, while his own strengths were U.S.-Japan bridging, entrepreneurial thinking, and the ability to access decision-makers in ways a young Japanese executive might not have been able to do. Because he was not fully inside the Japanese system, he could sometimes bypass the conventional constraints of nemawashi, age hierarchy, and formal ringi-sho decision pathways, while still respecting the rules that could not be broken.

His leadership style evolved as his businesses diversified. In lumber and medical devices, leadership