Travel notes: Tokyo

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes

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Shibuya, Tokyo at night

I just came back from a week in Tokyo, Japan. It was a last-minute trip with the sole purpose of finding new ideas.

While I didn’t secure any company meetings, I met plenty of people and obsessively browsed the Japan Company Handbook to vet the ideas that I accumulated throughout the week.

In this post, I will summarize my main takeaways from the trip.

Table of contents
1. Japan has stagnated
2. A new era for Japan
3. A booming market for M&A
4. Nikkei in 2024
5. Financial innovation
6. Discount retailing
7. Conclusion

1. Japan has stagnated

It’s pretty clear that Japan’s economy has stagnated since the 1990s: