The NAJAS/KKC Business Speaker Series was held in Portland, Oregon in cooperation with the Japan-America Society of Oregon (JASO). Mr. Yoichi Mineo, General Manager of Marubeni America Corporation and Mr. Glen Fukushima, Senior Fellow of Center for American Progress were invited as speakers.

Mr. Mineo gave a wide-ranging overview of operations, and helped guests understand the broad and diverse reach of a modern Japanese trading company. As a specialist in mergers and acquisitions, Mr. Mineo’s personal specialty enabled the audience to hear about, and then ask questions about, how Marubeni formulates a rubric of criteria in assessing where to invest to develop its holdings. With assets over $2billion, and more than 15,000 employees and 35 companies in the US alone, Mr. Mineo stressed the company’s philosophy of long-term investment and cross-industry purchases oftentimes in “traditional” sectors such as industrials – rail cars and aircraft and auto parts – sectors that lend themselves to long-term, steady growth and continuous need. He used the example of their ownership of a company that makes conveyor belts, as a simple example.

Mr. Fukushima discussed the latest happenings between Japan and the U.S. from the perspective of trade. He took the audience on a journey through TPP to bilateralism and from the inner workings of the Japanese government to a dissection of current US maneuvering.