President

Time to confess the biggest thing that happened during my absence from this blog:

Exactly one month and one day ago, the paperwork was finished and the registration finally took place. Since that day, I am the owner and president and CEO and only employee of a little start-up company in Kyoto, Japan.

It’s a little one-woman online media company, run from the tiny 9 m^2 office I showed you in my post a week ago. For now, it will stay this way until I can see that the business is viable and can make a stable profit. If this happens, I have plans to expand. I don’t want to go into details here, but the company is set up so I am able to do a variety of things: teaching, translations, editing on the one hand, and, honoring my education, IT consulting, web design, algorithm design on the other hand.

Meanwhile, I have already received lots of new paperwork. All the documents that pertain to the establishment of the company of course – all of which are in Japanese and I cannot read… Or the tax documents intended for no less than three different tax offices (city, regional, national ones). Or the proof of registration of my company inkan, only one in a set of three inkan that my company has for different purposes. The registered one is for official use, then there is a special hanko for the bank once I open a company account, and then there is the hanko for daily use with which to sign letters and invoices for example.

To be honest, now that I have arrived at this, I have somewhat mixed feelings. I am certainly proud that I made it so far, and I am sure that my business idea is viable. On more rainy days I realise that this is just the beginning of a really long journey, and that, no matter how good the idea is, it is not certain that I can make it work…