Where the record falls silent.

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ABOUT US

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FOUNDER & SENIOR PARTNER · TOKYO

EXPERTISE: HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

Seigen began his career in journalism at Nikkei Business, Japan's leading business weekly, where he was part of the team that launched Nikkei Business Online, and was a founding member of FACTA — the investigative monthly behind the country's major corporate exposés. He has spent his career where information is hardest to reach, and convenes a private policy circle near the center of government.

He founded the cybersecurity firm Sprout in 2012 and led it until 2021; since 2022 he has been co-principal of STeam Research & Consulting, a crisis-management firm built around veterans of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department's organized-crime and public-security divisions. Few private practitioners stand as close to Japan's media and law-enforcement worlds at once. In June 2025 he founded CSI Japan.

For Japan's listed companies, he has managed the moments boards fear most — compliance crises, media firestorms and the reputational fallout that follows — across real estate, construction, finance, insurance, telecommunications, technology, fintech and entertainment. The hardest cases reach into Japan's gray zone: organized-crime-linked actors and market manipulators inside a company's orbit. His practice does not stop at identifying them; it severs the relationship and sees them out, with a practiced sense of when — and through whom — to involve the authorities. As a consulting model, it is without precedent in Japan.

Drawing on this reach across media, law enforcement and cybersecurity, he advises senior executives on decisions under compound risk — M&A and investment diligence, internal misconduct, crisis response. In cybersecurity, he led the creation of Japan's dark-web investigation and vulnerability bug-bounty markets, and has written three books on the hidden internet and its criminal economies.

A frequent commentator and lecturer, he served on the Sasakawa Peace Foundation's security studies research group (2019–2021) and has been a director of the Next-Generation Security Institute since 2025.

SENIOR PARTNER · USA – WASHINGTON, D.C.

EXPERTISE: STRATEGY & CAPITAL

Takashi began his career at Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Consulate-General of Japan in Honolulu, covering military and security affairs. At Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting he led growth-strategy and rulemaking engagements and was named Best Consultant of the Year; he later served as a strategy consultant to the World Economic Forum and, based in Brussels with the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), worked on rulemaking with the European Commission and the European Parliament.

Entrusted with launching the Tokyo office of Brunswick Group, he went on to serve as Director for US–Japan business in its Washington, D.C. office, specializing in the most demanding CxO mandates — cross-border M&A, governance crises, activist defense — for Fortune 500 and major Japanese companies. He has served on the board of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of New York, and led partnerships with Keidanren and the Keizai Koho Center.

As Head of the M&A Strategy Department at Kansai Paint, concurrently responsible for IR and corporate communications, he drove medium-term planning, group M&A strategy, portfolio review and organizational reform, with particular depth in cross-border acquisitions, PMI and group governance. He is now based in the United States, providing standing counsel that combines growth strategy, M&A and stakeholder strategy, shaped to the realities of how Japanese companies are run.

He is an Executive MBA candidate at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, and studied at the University of Cambridge, Missouri State University and Hosei University.

PARTNER · TOKYO

EXPERTISE: CYBER & INCIDENT RESPONSE

One of the small circle of practitioners entrusted with Japan's most serious cyber incidents, Takamasa has led response and forensics in hundreds of cases — government included. Between 2021 and 2023 he fielded two to three hundred incident consultations a year, leading emergency response in roughly half. From the front line, he reads the attacker's hand.

Years spent designing, building and operating networks and systems convinced him of the weight of cybersecurity, and he turned to incident response for unauthorized access and ransomware, digital forensics, and penetration testing. He brings deep insight to cyber-threat research, including independent investigations into the backgrounds of attackers in Japan and abroad.

A regular voice at Japan's leading security gatherings — Interop Tokyo and the Nippon CSIRT Association's annual conference among them — he is a Registered Information Security Specialist (RISS) and active in the Japan Network Security Association (JNSA).

DIRECTOR · TOKYO

EXPERTISE: DIPLOMACY & ECONOMIC SECURITY

Seventeen years in Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs as one of its small cadre of Russian-language specialists, Koichi served where diplomacy, economics and security meet: Vice-Consul in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the Russian Far East portfolio, Central Asia, the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, and Japan–Russia economic relations. A direct read on the official temperature, where statecraft meets the market.

Seconded from 2018 to the Cybersecurity Division of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), he helped build and run the Japan–US–EU Industrial Control Systems Cybersecurity Week for the Indo-Pacific — the flagship exercise launched in 2018 with US counterparts including CISA and the State Department, joined by the EU in 2021 — training critical-infrastructure operators, national CERTs and policy officials from across the region.

He then moved to the private side of the same terrain — an Israeli-founded cyber-defense training company and an Indo-Pacific advisory founded by alumni of CSIS, the Washington think tank — before joining CSI Japan. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Law, Keio University.

アドバイザー
Tokyo

専門：コーポレートガバナンス／経済安全保障／意思決定構造分析

広報コンサルティング会社arexを経て、2015年にエゴンゼンダーに入社。日本でコーポレートガバナンス改革が本格化した初期から、業界横断で日本を代表する上場企業における取締役会実効性評価、独立社外取締役・外部専門家等の招聘、および社長・経営幹部など意思決定者層の行動心理特性分析・後継者計画に従事してきた。2021年にボードアドバイザーズに参画（2025年よりパートナー）。取締役会の機能向上と経営チームの強化の他、経済安全保障に関する調査・助言・情報発信を行っている。

「経済安全保障の動向と日本企業の取締役会に求められる戦略的対応」旬刊商事法務（2021年10月5・15日号）や「第二次トランプ政権の国家安全保障と転換期の国際秩序」金融・資本市場リサーチ（2025年9月号）など国際政治・経済安全保障に関する著作多数。国内外で広範な実務家・専門家ネットワークを有する。

宮城県出身。仙台第一高等学校を経て、東北大学法学部卒業。Diplomatic Academy of Viennaより高等国際学修士（MAIS）取得。

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