Game Changers of Japan: Tokyo Interlopers’ Isaac Aquino on diversity and how to find your niche in Japan

Written by: Tatsuro Sakamoto | Date published: 24th July 2020

Short biography: Takayuki Hoshino, founder and CEO of “Your mystar”, joined Rakuten as a fresh-graduate shortly after he graduated from Keio University. Among his achievements at Rakuten, the giant E-commerce company, include becoming the No.1 sales representative at Rakuten and becoming the youngest candidate for the executive position. However, he did not choose to become the executive member of Rakuten, instead he started his own company, “Your mystar, Inc.”, in 2016. In fact, he has overcome difficult challenges such as being inflicted with a life-threatening illness during college and adoption of English as the official language at Rakuten despite not having any English ability at the time. Read on to know more about his experience as a former member of Rakuten and as the current CEO of Your mystar, Inc.

20--Takayuki Hoshino graduated from Keio University

2010 Joined Rakuten as a fresh-graduate. Became the top sales representative and the youngest candidate for an executive position

2016 Founded Your mystar, Inc (Founder/CEO)

Currently active as the CEO of Your mystar

Japan has something that's fairly unique compared to other developed countries: 98.5% of the population comprises of its native people. Despite this, foreigners are becoming more visible in Japan — 2019 hit a record number of foreigners in the country, and even headlines from recent years, such as Ariana Miyamoto being the first biracial woman crowned as Miss Japan, have raised awareness for biracial and second & third-generation Japanese people.

With these factors in mind, it might be worth taking a look at what diversity means for a country like Japan. What exactly can we learn from listening to the small, but growing voices of these people who have found themselves living here?

We talked to Isaac Aquino, founder of Tokyo Interlopers, a photo blog that raises awareness for diversity by showing the different types of people living in Japan’s capital. The blog has over 14,000 followers on Facebook, and over 3,000 on Instagram. He’s documented hundreds of Tokyoites, so we decided to talk to him about his story, what he learned from doing interviews, and his advice for finding your niche as an ‘interloper’ in Japan.

Early days and Isaac’s move to Japan

Facing the realities of working in Japan

Despite his colorful experiences at APU, once he graduated, Isaac was faced with the much less vibrant reality of working in Japan. His first job was working as a sales representative at a Japanese company. “It was a tough transition for me. I think students who come to university here, sometimes they’re prone to shock from work life. I was one of them.” 

He then switched to a different company to work as a project manager, then changed his job a second time and worked in customer support for a multinational American company. “Then I found a lucky break,” he says. Since he had writing and journalism skills, Isaac was able to join the company’s news department and worked there for 7 years until 2019.

While he was doing this job, he found himself gravitating towards something he did back in the Philippines: photography. It was this re-connection with photography that led to Tokyo Interlopers.

The beginning of Tokyo Interlopers

Tokyo Interlopers is an online collection of photos and interviews of the different people that Isaac meets, either through chance encounters or through social media. At first, he didn’t expect his project to evolve in the way it has, but he says his friends saw similarities between Tokyo Interlopers and Humans of New York, and he received encouragement to make things official.

What Isaac’s friends are referring to is the photo blog, Humans of New York, which documents everyday people in a similar vein. It was started in 2010 by Isaac’s American counterpart, Brandon Stanton, and currently has over 18 million followers on Facebook alone.

The difference between the two might be in their initial target subjects. Tokyo Interlopers started as a way to introduce foreigners in Japan, which eventually expanded to include mixed-race and foreign-born Japanese people to encourage diversity and inclusion. “The more I was doing Interlopers, the more I discovered that there are problems in society. But then I thought, it’s not just foreigners—there are also Japanese people who are having difficulties in life.”

Telling the stories of those with unheard voices

Browsing through Isaac’s collection, it’s easy to see the wide range of stories people in Tokyo have to tell, from a happy family from Indonesia talking about their new life in Japan, to a nurse from Myanmar who overcame workplace bullying. So we asked Isaac if there’s a common theme that often comes up during his interviews. 

“Loneliness,” he tells us. “If you’re a foreigner, a lot of the feedback I get is that when they read the stories, they feel like they’re not alone. They can see someone else going through something difficult, [and] when they see something positive, it encourages them.”

In an almost contradictory way, the more different backgrounds there are in his subjects, the more it becomes obvious that we all have a lot in common. He says:

“‘Even though we’re different, we’re the same.’ A lot of people say that. We all come from different places, but we have the same human emotions & the same problems. Life is hard and we’re all just trying to get by. We’re all the same in that sense.”

Finding your niche as an ‘interloper’ of Japan

As a closer to the interview, we asked Isaac for any advice he has as a former international student in Japan, and he admits that his advice comes from a place of regret.

“I had a false sense of security [as a student]. In the real world, it takes more than just cracking jokes in Japanese—you have to do a lot of work.” He adds that more than just perfecting his Japanese skills, he wishes he developed other skills such as marketing or IT while he was still a student.

Isaac also mentions “21st-century skills”, and how this might be a good starting point for those who might not know what skills they want to develop just yet. 21st-century skills are traits or abilities that some professionals in education believe students need to equip themselves with in modern times. There are lists of these skills online, such as one from the World Economic Forum, which mentions things like complex problem solving and creativity.

Another pointer he gave relates to a concept called synchronicity, which he says he learned from one of his classes at Globis University, where he’s currently studying for a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree. 

The word ‘synchronicity’ came from Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, and the concept means that everything can be interconnected through “meaningful coincidences”. Isaac suggests applying this to look at your past, present, and your future when thinking of a possible career. 

He advises students to look at their inclinations in the past and why they enjoyed doing them, and to then take these into the present and develop useful skills. He also emphasizes that it’s important to consider where these skills can be applied to in the future, and to tie all of this together to find their 'niche'.

Lastly, he goes on to explain why he believes this method works. “It’s so easy to get distracted when you’re doing shukatsu (job-hunting). You look for the sexy job or the job that pays well. But if you just go for anything, you might work too hard for something you don’t enjoy and get stuck there. You’ll have to put in more effort, or burn out, and you won’t be so happy.”

“It’s hard to see the future, of course. When you’re a student you want to party and that’s the last thing you want to think about. But you have to think: are you developing the kind of skills you would need in the future, and that matter to you in the past and the present? That would be my advice.”