Author

Who runs this site, and why.

https://the-shashi.com/author/ / Last updated: 2026-08

Profile

Yutaka Sugiura / Software Engineer / Co-authored book (1) / Sole-authored book (1)

Columns: Nikkei Business / Toyo Keizai Online

Background: Repeated Years and a Modulation

Digging into the history of companies has been my hobby for over ten years. As a student in the early 2010s I spent years shut away in the closed basement stacks of Kobe University — the Library of RIEB (経済経営研究所図書館) and the Library for Social Sciences (社会科学系図書館) — turning the pages of mildewed company histories, back issues of the Nikkei more than fifty years old, and business magazines: Nikkei Business, Weekly Diamond, Weekly Toyo Keizai and President, read from their very first issues.

Both libraries hold remarkably deep collections of exactly this material. I skipped lectures to be down there, and repeated a year for it — twice. Cool in summer, cold in winter, and no daylight at all. I came out of it distinctly pale.

When I needed to concentrate, the same two recordings went on: Consecration, the eight discs Bill Evans recorded in the final weeks of his life in 1980, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 30, Yefim Bronfman with the Vienna Philharmonic under Valery Gergiev at Suntory Hall in 2004.

On the Evans it is “Days of Wine and Roses”: the deliberate lift out of F major into A-flat major still raises the hair on my arms. Of the concerto I have listened to more than thirty recordings, and that one is the best of them. To this day I consider both the summit of the art: the finest music ever made. It was music that taught me that God is in the details.

This site is run solo, as a hobby, combining the research discipline I picked up earning a master’s degree in business administration (MBA) with the engineering I do for a living. I was born in the Heisei era (1989–2019) and am in my thirties, so I plan to keep at it until 2040 — a date I first put in writing in 2018, quoted here by my co-author Ken Kusunoki.

Why This Site

Why run it at all, setting aside both economic and time rationality? Because if the long-term view spreads little by little and the world ends up slightly better for it, then looking back, the time will have been rational after all. I am in no hurry for that to happen. If things get even a little better, that is enough.

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