Hello Friends!
I hope you all are having a great summer. I personally enjoyed watching the Paris Olympics over the last two weeks … although it reminded me again what a shame it was that Covid interfered with the Tokyo Olympics. The 2020/21 Olympics SHOULD have been such a wonderful opportunity for Tokyo to bask in worldwide attention about its unique and fascinating places, traditions and people.
Fortunately, if anything, the end of Covid (along with the cheap yen) seems to have sent Japan tourism surging. Whether it’s a result of the tourism boom or something else, interest in JSNC programming has also been very high.
I greatly appreciate the growing interest in Japan, as summer is the lead-in to some of our biggest events of the year, including our Tokyo Embassy Reception, our Annual Innovation Awards, and, coming in September, our Award of Honor Gala (more about the Gala below – but tickets are now on sale – BUY THEM HERE!).
In June I traveled to Tokyo to join JSNC’s VIP reception at the US Ambassador’s residence (photos). What a GREAT event! US Ambassador Rahm Emanuel made (brief) remarks, and more than 100 guests enjoyed excellent networking and conversation.
The Tokyo Innovation Reception was started in 2017 by our Board Chair, Larry Greenwood, as a way to celebrate entrepreneurship in the U.S. and Japan, and to kick off JSNC’s annual Innovation Awards program. It has become one of our “must join” events of the year – I loved meeting this year’s Innovation Award winners – and past winners – as well as a great mix of senior business leaders, government officials and friends.
On July 20, we hosted our 14th annual Innovation Awards program at Stanford University (photos). In my humble opinion, it was one of our best programs ever (and it seems that our guests agreed – the average satisfaction rating for this year’s program was 9.3/10!). Nearly 350 attendees enjoyed outstanding keynote presentations (Renee Chou of Uber and Shilpa Kolhatkar from Nvidia), excellent networking, and, of course, meeting this year’s impressive award winners.
Our 2024 Sunbridge-John Thomas Emerging Leaders were EVTOL maker Joby Aviation from the US, and lunar exploration company, ispace from Japan. Showcase winners included AI Medical, Citadel AI, EdgeCortix, Helical Fusion and Synspective. (Please check out these exciting companies!)
Even though we just finished Innovation, we’re already hard at work on our upcoming 38th annual Award of Honor Gala, which will take place on September 27. This year promises to be especially fun – we are honoring Peanuts with our Cultural Ambassador award, as well as Koichi Nakamura, the founder and head of Sozo Ventures, one of the most successful Japanese venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. We will also be treated to a musical performance by famed pianist David Benoit – who has a long history of working with Peanuts, and who has just been performing in the Bay Area this week.
The Gala will take place on Friday, September 27 at the Nikko Hotel in San Francisco. The program starts at 5 and goes until 9 pm, and we will have a Silent Auction and Live Auction to raise money to support our activities throughout the year. You can buy tickets here.
This year, you will also be able to participate in the Silent Auction (or donate) even if you can’t make the event itself. You can register to participate here – no purchase necessary. Or, if you have an item you’d like to donate to the Silent Auction, please do so here.
Finally, even though the big events take a lot of effort to organize, we continue to have an active schedule filled with other things. A few things that may be of interest:
- Grassroots Summit 2025: JSNC will be hosting the annual Grassroots Summit exchange program in the San Francisco Bay Area from June 3-9, 2025. We are actively looking for volunteers to help us organize this fun event. Please contact us at admin@usajapan.org if you’d like to get involved.
- US-Japan Healthcare Conference: this is our 3rd annual conference in Japan on healthcare innovation. We will have symposium events in Tokyo (Nov. 12) and Kumamoto (Nov. 14). We would love to have you join us in Japan! We are also looking for innovative early-stage healthtech and life science startups that may want to come to Japan and be part of our program.
- Japanese Ceramics video – we had a very popular program in June on Japanese ceramics featuring Steve Beimel, the founder of JapanCraft21, an organization dedicated to preserving traditional arts in Japan. If you missed it, you can see the video here.
We have a lot more programming coming up – so please keep an eye on our website for details. Thank you for your attention and support, and I look forward to seeing you at our upcoming programs!
Steve
