Our company Tokyo Gets Co., Ltd. had an exclusive interview with Mr.Kazuo Rikukawa, the president of Character Databank Co., Ltd.Tokyo Gets has worked together and closely with Character Databank which is running “CharaBiz.Com”, a partner website of our “CharaBiz.Asia” and an unique portal on character licensing business in Japan.
Discover Mr.Rikukawa’s insights and expectations in industry.
Interview with Mr. Kazuo Rikukawa /
President of Character Databank Co., Ltd.
CharaBiz.com’s origin
I was working in a research company before and got chances to handle projects related to character businesses. I had the feeling that this business category is very closed and hard to do marketing practices.
Not only the strength of the properties themselves, but also the knowledge of what is going on in each industry is important in order to expand the market size.
I started this company in 2000 because it is a good opportunity to become a third person that can observe the market and conduct researches as the main business.
CharaBiz.com is a media that can provide good sources of information for the outsiders and new companies to know more in details about each industry and have chance to expand their businesses and increase profits.
About Character Business in Japan
From the year 2000, Japan has the new vision of “Cool Japan” which quite promote the character business to the bigger picture. This helped expanding many characters to be more recognized and give companies and licensors to be more creative with their business practices.
Companies and licensors now have many chances to talk and discuss about what kind of activities they can do together.
Situation and future of Licensing business in Asia, and the differences from Japan
Even though it might be hard to understand each country’s culture differences, it will be best if we can adapt the know-how of character licensing business from Japan to the designated countries.
The business will expand if the licensors only take control with only something that is really needed to be revised, and leave all the rest for the local companies to take parts of other parts.
Furthermore, if it is possible to get updated information about situations in the countries, it will be easier to conduct the business matching for everyone.
Your expectation for CharaBiz.Asia
I think that the way that we can gain access to character information from abroad in real-time is one of the strengths.
With this, I hope that it will help connecting Japanese and international business with more useful information.
Message
I feel that information is something that is very important. By receiving good information at the right time, there will be many chances to deal with characters.
I would like to share news and information to everybody from every business industries and I hope that it will help them in some ways.
(Interview time: October 2016)
– End of Interview –
charabizasia.com 