Seth Sulkin: ‘Having risk-averse banks with risk-averse venture capitalists makes

Originally from Chicago, Seth Sulkin, 56, first came to Japan in 1987 as a financial journalist for the Wall Street Journal, but soon switched careers and went into real estate. Thirty years on, he is now CEO at commercial developer Pacifica Capital. When the pandemic hit, he launched his first internet startup, a gourmet food-delivery service called Food-e that courriers meals to homes from such high-class restaurants as Nobu Tokyo, the Tokyo American Club and Elio Locanda Italiana.

1. How did Japanese financial news become your beat? I joined the Wall Street Journal around the time Japan was starting to become an economic superpower. I woke up one morning and the Plaza Accord was happening. I ran over to the Plaza Hotel and had a chance to interview the Finance Minister Noboru Takeshita. After that, I covered a lot of Japanese investment in the U.S. and interviewed Japanese organizations all the time. Eventually, I decided that Japan was the place I wanted to report from.

2. Why did you stop doing financial journalism? Two years into my assignment, I decided I wanted to get out of journalism. I was seeing lots of changes at the time in the business news world, and I didn’t see myself doing it for 30 or 40 years. So, I decided to go back to graduate school and change careers. I went to Stanford for graduate school. I came back to Japan to enter Stanford’s language institute in Yokohama where I studied for a year and was able to become fluent in Japanese.

3. Do you have any tips about learning Japanese? I have a lot of advice on this. If you want to become fluent, you have to quit work and concentrate only on Japanese. You should also find the best program you can. A good program with the appropriate time commitment is the only way. It is possible to become fluent in a year — I did it — but I couldn’t have done it part time.

4. What was it like studying the language in the early 1990s? I am jealous of people studying Japanese now. Just before I finished my studies, Canon developed the Wordtank electronic dictionary and it saved me several hours a day that I was spending with the Nelson kanji dictionary. I wish I had something like (Wordtank) from the beginning.

5. When does real estate development come into the picture? From 1991-93, I worked on big infrastructure projects all over the world for a quasi-governmental Japanese organization that did economic development work. This was my true start in real estate development. I then opened my own firm in ’95, Pacifica Capital, building American-style shopping malls in Japan. I was going all over the country — Kanto, Kansai, Kyushu — bringing American retailers into Japan.

6. How did Pacifica go from shopping centers to hotel development? By 2004, I saw that there was very little room to innovate in the shopping mall industry. Japan already had too many shopping centers. We moved into mixed-use commercial development in central Tokyo and, after the 2011 earthquake, we started building solar power plants for a few years. We were successful at that, but when the Japanese government changed the renewable energy subsidies, I looked at what sector I could get involved in that had less government regulation and had a real future. I felt that hotels were the best opportunity.

7. You seem to be comfortable making major shifts in business when needed. How do you make such transitions work? I apply the same skills to real estate development that I used as a journalist, which means I follow trends and develop networks of sources for information useful to producing a successful product. As a financial journalist, I needed to write something that my readers wanted to read, and that meant understanding financial markets. The same is true with real estate. I need to know the markets and trends, I need to know what banks are willing to invest in, then I need to take…