SPECIAL INTERVIEW

Noma

So we met exactly a year ago.

Fumito

I remember it well.

Takaya

Our companies had already begun collaborating, and you suggested featuring art from HERALBONY on Kodansha’s business cards during that meeting.

Noma

That’s right, the idea suddenly came to me. Kodansha created its current logo in 2021, and at that time we established 10 corporate colors. I felt that the message HERALBONY was sending to society fit well with the message of diversity that our 10 colors express.

Takaya

After we collaborated on the business cards, we had people reaching out from all over, telling us that they had heard of us from Kodansha’s business cards. I feel that this was a valuable opportunity.

Noma

I quite often use my business cards created in collaboration with HERALBONY. I keep all ten versions in my case, and I hand them out randomly and tell people about our collaboration. It’s a good opportunity to show people Kodansha’s stance on diversity. Almost half of our employees use them and we’ve not only been told that they have amazing design value and are great conversation starters; they have also said they appreciate Kodansha’s inclusive perspective. It’s sparked various responses both inside and outside the company.

Takaya

We’re glad to hear that. At HERALBONY, we refer to the artwork and talents of our artists with disabilities as “Your Colors.” We want those different colors to shake up what society considers “normal”.

Fumito

I think that once artists with disabilities are taken seriously by society, we will have a society that will take a positive view of the differences between all of its members.

Global strategies to clearly define the companies’ social value

Noma

But I’m amazed by how rapidly HERALBONY has grown. You’ve won a lot of awards and your international renown has skyrocketed in the last year.

Fumito

Oh, we still have a way to go. Happily, we have won many awards, including the “Employee Experience, Diversity & Inclusion” category of the LVMH Innovation Award 2024 and the Gold award in “Glass: The Lion for Change”, an international advertising award by Cannes Lions, but our full-scale global expansion is just beginning.

Takaya

It’s been a year since we first established HERALBONY EUROPE as a subsidiary in Paris. From next year we want to start opening stores and galleries too.

Noma

I think that beginning your global expansion in Paris was the right move.

Takaya

I’m glad. It’s reassuring to hear that from you.

Noma

If you want to spread cultural value, France is the place to do that. It’s a major base for recognition and support of cultural activities. If you want to expand as a business, I think expanding your activities to the United States would be a good idea.

Fumito

That’s useful to know. We thought starting with France would be best too. And we wanted to go into it authoritatively. We want to use the recognition we’ve received from global brands as a tailwind to solidify the trust we’re receiving from society.

Noma

That’s an important point. In HERALBONY’s case, you want to build the company’s brand power first and then use that to promote artists. Kodansha’s case is the opposite; IP such as artists and their works are already well-known worldwide and have earned high acclaim and passionate fans. But there still aren’t many people overseas who know that Kodansha is the company producing that content. So we ourselves are focusing on strengthening our brand power in our global expansion.

Fumito

You mentioned that Kodansha created a new logo in 2021. What was the strategy behind that?

Noma

Kodansha’s global expansion began about 60 years ago. At that time, there was a lot of significance to culture exchange in the form of introducing manga and novels. And in recent years, we had been hearing from our overseas sales representatives that we needed a logo. We didn’t have one to show in places like our booths at book fairs. All we could do was write the characters for “Kodansha” in a font to suit each event. In Japan, this isn’t an issue because, for example, ViVi and FRIDAY magazines have their own media logos and media colors. Kodansha has a wide range of publications from weekly magazines to parenting books, so we were in the opposite situation; it would look odd if all of our publications across all those genres had the same logo. But overseas, we’re in situations where people want to know about the publisher itself, not each piece of media. So with a more full-scale global expansion in mind, we commissioned a brand design studio in New York to create our current logo.

Takaya

I see. We made a new logo ourselves in 2024.

Noma

I didn’t know that.

Fumito

The company name itself came from our autistic brother, Shota. He had written characters in Japanese that spelled “HERALBONY” over and over in his notebook. So our first logo was those characters, written in his handwriting.

Takaya

Later, we created a logo in English letters, and we used both logos. That made it difficult for us to become known in society, and establish a unified stance within the company, so in 2024 we created a new logo in English letters so that it would be easy to expand globally.

Noma

Yes, global communication gets smoother all at once when you have a logo and a purpose. Before we did that, we were telling people that Kodansha was the company that created AKIRA, THE GHOST IN THE SHELL, Sailor Moon, and Attack on Titan. In terms of novels, we would say, for example, that Mr. Haruki Murakami’s debut novel was published by Kodansha. That IP was something we could explain, but it’s faster to be able to state our philosophy and say that we are a company that works to “Inspire Impossible Stories.” Then when we give the names of works, it makes a deeper impression.

Fumito

What kind of corporate philosophy does a company that produces powerful IP need to have? I guess that’s what “Inspire Impossible Stories” is summing up.

Noma

Our purpose, which we’ve striven for since we were first founded, is omoshirokute, tame ni naru in Japanese. It translates literally as “interesting and useful,” but we struggled to find a way to express that purpose in English. A direct translation just didn’t leap out and grab us. We went with “Inspire Impossible Stories” because it’s a bold statement that conveys the important elements of omoshirokute, tame ni naru in English. It’s become an essential phrase for telling people overseas who we are.

Takaya

We definitely need to have a purpose as well as a logo in order to be recognized globally, then.

Noma

I think so. People overseas always ask “what kind of things does your company create?” I think a logo and a purpose are effective tools to give a clear answer to questions like that.

Stories have the power to cross language barriers

Noma

So far we’ve been talking with a conscious focus on global expansion. What I’m about to say now is the exact opposite view: I think that recently, there’s no need to distinguish between what we do in Japan and what we do globally. Do you find that HERALBONY is received differently globally compared to in Japan?

Fumito

To tell the truth, we haven’t seen much difference. The other day, when we were giving a presentation about HERALBONY in France and we ran out of time. We were disappointed, because we had wanted to finish our speech by introducing our brother Shota.

Takaya

But then during our Q&A session, a member of the panel said “What was it that you wanted to say at the end?” and gave us the floor again, so we got to invite Shota up to the podium and introduce him. In that moment, with everyone giving us a huge round of applause, I realized that there are things that transcend languages, that there are people out there in the world with the same story.

Noma

That’s certainly true. The same thing happens with manga, and with novels. I think the power of stories is universal.

Takaya

What kind of results are you getting with your global expansion now, Mr. Noma?

Noma

Like yours, Kodansha’s expansion is still beginning. We’ve just created a new logo, set a purpose in English, and strengthened our global expansion in the last few years. From here, we’ll need to do more than putting the company’s name out there if we want to get results. But churning out IP also won’t lead to expansion. Now that Kodansha has become better known globally, I want to use that as a starting point and actively put in place plans that will enable us to use our IP to expand laterally. In November we held a press conference to announce Kodansha Studios, a film production company that will be based in Hollywood. We’ll create our own live-action movie and TV adaptations of novels and manga published by Kodansha.

Noma

Another important branding strategy that targets our North American fans is KODANSHA HOUSE, which we held in New York last year and again this year.
We received quite a lot of visitors both years—this year we had more than 21,000 in total during the period of around two weeks that the event ran.

Fumito

KODANSHA HOUSE had a big impact on HERALBONY too.

Takaya

By communicating with people from around the world, I’ve noticed now that Japanese culture is widely respected around the world. The French in particular have respect for Japanese manga, and that has made our global expansion very smooth. It’s something we’re very thankful for, and I think Kodansha laid the groundwork for that.

Diversity is the keyword for sustainable operation of a company

Fumito

I’d like to take this opportunity to ask you something, Mr. Noma. I heard that Kodansha has been in business for more than 100 years. Is there a principle or something that you share with your employees to ensure that your company can operate sustainably?

Noma

That’s difficult to sum up in a few words.

Takaya

Why is that?

Noma

We don’t have the kind of guiding principle on paper that I think you have in mind. If I had to pin it down, I’d say it’s about the mentality. Even “Inspire Impossible Stories”, our purpose, isn’t a message that we explicitly communicate to our employees, but I think it comes across to all the employees. They’re all on the same page at an emotional level.

Fumito

I see... I’d say that in a way there are commonalities between Kodansha and HERALBONY when it comes to things like how we work with artists. Are there any guidelines you give to employees about their dealings with artists?

Noma

When a publisher is in business for 100 years, obviously the way we work changes a lot over that time. So we don’t have any documented guidelines. Not to mention, just like every creator is different, so is every editor. Trusting the creativity of the artists is a major premise, but it’s a team effort so there are times when an editor and an artist just don’t mesh, and conversely, sometimes the perfect team comes together by chance. AI can’t analyze who will work best together.

Fumito

I see. That might be similar to the principle of diversity that we’re trying to spread.

Takaya

We want to have a society that looks at people’s characteristics instead of dividing them up by ability into those who can do something and those who can’t. There’s a term, “neurodiversity,” which considers developmental disabilities such as the autism spectrum to be natural variations of human genomes. If we value that way of thinking, there’s sure to be a way for these people to use what they’re good at to participate in society.

Noma

If we think about the fact that people are diverse in Kodansha’s terms, we have many different types working as editors and that’s a strength of our company. Instead of pushing them all into one mold, we let each of them work on the things they’re good at. That might be one answer to a sustainable operation of a company.

Fumito

The concept of “diversity” has been accepted lately at an intellectual level, but I want it to become a way of thinking that is more rooted in people’s daily lives.

Noma

That goes back to what I said earlier, about how I think there’s no longer any need to think of Japan and the rest of the world separately. Japan itself is one part of the globe, so when it comes to global expansion, instead of strategies where we alter our approaches, there’s probably value in refining them so that we can more quickly and decisively branch into areas where we are not known, and coming up with plans to expand good IP in more directions. It was very interesting to compare our respective companies today. Let’s talk about the progress on our overseas expansions in a year or two.