I'm sorry that the story is always derailed, but I wrote that I would like to get hints from seeing, listening and so on.

These days we can learn a lot from the internet, which will give us some hints. The Internet surfing may be a work of looking. There, it is necessary to have the sensitivity and power to connect what you see and hear with problem solving and new product/service development. When you see a phenomenon or when you hear a story or information, if you don't digest and feel them as hints, they end up as just a phenomenon or a mere story.

Then, how can we develop the sensitivities that connect the phenomena we see and the stories we hear to problem solving and the development of new products and services? Or in what kind of environment would such sensitivity be nurtured?

I think they are, for example, moderate financial poverty, moderate educational background, moderate anxiety. I spent my high school days with some difficulties and didn’t think that I could go to university even with poor school grades. My twin brother was attending a commercial high school and I was studying at a technical high school in the same period, but I was later told that he could not pay the tuition fees for many months. At that time, our father was hospitalized. I think it was a very tough time for my mother. I don’t think that I had the academic ability to enter university easily, but I was at the top of my class when I was in the second grade. Thanks to that, I took the entrance examination for TOYOBO Co., Ltd., aiming at TOYOBO's domestic university study system and fortunately I was allowed to join the company.

This company of TOYOBO had many employees who graduated from National University including University of Tokyo and some of them were qualified doctorates. I couldn't help but feel that I had a low academic background as an industrial high school graduate almost every day. But this was a good environment to appreciate because until then I had never been exposed to such a highly educated environment. For this reason, this environment provided me with a great deal of repulsion and good motivation to pass the examination the company had prepared to the high school graduate employees. I was grateful for the fact of the lack of educational background because I was able to use it as a driving force.