We founded Investment Lab to be a trusted Japan specialist — to bring an accurate local understanding of this market, and the investment opportunities it creates, to investors around the world.
Our founding partner’s career began in 2000 at Goldman Sachs, followed by fifteen years there before moving inside one of Japan’s largest institutional investors, where he helped run the alternatives programme and helped launch one of Japan’s largest private equity firms. Across two decades on both sides of the table, our team has seen, very closely, what works and what does not in delivering returns for end-investors.
Why this moment matters.
For a long stretch, the consensus view from abroad treated Japan as a difficult market for active capital. That consensus is now changing, and the structural reasons are easy to name. Corporate governance reform is producing visible changes in how boards return capital and engage shareholders. Inflation, after a generation, has normalised. The macro and the micro are pulling in the same direction for the first time in a long while.
Meanwhile, the inefficiency that originally made Japan interesting has not disappeared — it has migrated. The Japanese listed market remains unusually deep, with a long tail of mid- and small-cap names where local fundamental research is still rewarded.
This is the rare moment in a developed market where the headline narrative and the bottom-up reality have both improved at once.
Our role for overseas investors.
Foreign investors have, broadly, a few ways to access Japan: large global asset managers with a Japan sleeve; quantitative strategies; or the small number of independent local specialists who do nothing else. We belong to the third group, and we believe this is the right structure for capturing what Japan offers right now.
Our team has spent its careers in this market. We meet companies in person, repeatedly, across years. We read Japanese disclosures in Japanese. We sit close enough to issuers and to the broader local conversation to know when something is genuinely changing.
Our commitment to you, as an overseas allocator, is straightforward. We act for you. Our incentive structure is designed to maximise fund performance, not asset under management. We are disciplined about risk, deliberate about capacity, and honest about what we can and cannot do.
Our pledge.
What we ask of every member of this firm, and of ourselves, comes down to four things. They are the same in any language.
Self-discipline. Fair and honest.
Contribution to society.
We hope this gives you a sense of who we are and why we built this firm. If our way of thinking resonates, we welcome the conversation.