March 2011
Thank you to the over 250 friends of the Keizai Society who attended our Shinnenkai event this January in Palo Alto. It was wonderful to see so many new faces this year in addition to the familiar faces. We hope that everybody enjoyed the additional networking time we added this year based on the feedback we got from the past attendees. We would also like to thank over a dozen of our door prize donors whose contributions were one of the highlights of the evening.
Several very important announcements were made during the Shinnenkai program. Mark Kato is retiring as co-president and will be joining the board.. Joe Quinlan has been appointed as Vice President. Additionally, we announced a couple of new advisors. Scott Ellman, the founder of US Asia Venture Partners, joins Debra Bowen, the Secretary of State, as Strategic Advisor to the Keizai Society. Yokum Taku, Partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, joins as Legal Advisor. The Keizai Society has an all-volunteer executive team – 18 talented professionals working hard to make the Keizai Society one of the best professional networking organizations in the Bay Area. We welcome Mr. Ellman and Mr. Taku to this wonderful group.
We hope that you will join us for this year’s exciting programs from the Keizai Society. March’s Forum is “Re-examining the State of Japanese Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurship as Economic Engine: Silicon Valley Perspective” on Thursday, March 17, at the offices of Fenwick & West in Mountain View. The participating panelists will be Mr. Robert Eberhart, STAJE Fellow, Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship; Dr. Kenji Kushida, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford University APARC, and Graduate Researcher at BRIE; and Ms. Lisa Katayama, Journalist at Popular Science, Wired, Fast Company, PRI’s Studio360, and The New York Times Magazine. Join our panelists, as they discuss the myths, reality and promise of Japanese entrepreneurship and its impact on the overall Japanese economy. We look forward to seeing you there!
Sincerely,
Chimmy Shioya
President, Keizai Society