Japanese
Japan Market Entry
Insights from our Bridging Borders conversation with Daisuke Sakai, Co-Founder of teamLab
Idea in BriefThe problem. Foreign companies entering Japan are trained to treat time as an enemy — to raise capital, hire sales, and force early traction. In Japan, that instinct often destroys the very thing that would have won the market.The case. teamLab is now the most-visited single-artist museum on earth. But it took no venture capital, ran with no sales team, and spent eleven years in obscurity before its first major exhibition. Its scale is a product of that patience, not despite it.The lesson. In Japan, the most defensible market position is often built the slow way — quality first, distribution second. teamLab’s founder explains why treating time as raw material, rather than cost, is a strategy foreign operators consistently misread.
Foreign companies misjudge the relationship between time and quality in Japan
Most Western scaling playbooks treat time as a cost: every quarter without traction is a quarter wasted, and outside capital exists to compress it. teamLab is the clearest counter-example we know. It built quality first and let recognition arrive on its own schedule — and that schedule took more than a decade. The result is not a cautionary tale about slowness. It is now, by visitor numbers, the most-visited museum of its kind in the world.
The scale is worth stating plainly. In 2025, teamLab Planets in Tokyo welcomed roughly 2.5 million visitors — enough to hold the Guinness World Record for the most-visited museum dedicated to a single art group, and to rank 24th among the world’s most-visited art museums. Its sister museum, teamLab Borderless, drew another 1.69 million, two-thirds of them international. Across its two Tokyo museums alone, more than 4.2 million people stepped inside teamLab’s work in a single year. In 2025 the collective opened its largest Japanese museum yet in Kyoto and a stadium-sized venue in Abu Dhabi; in 2026, Fast Company named it one of the world’s most innovative companies.
It looks like a sudden global phenomenon. It wasn’t. When we sat down with co-founder Daisuke Sakai for Bridging Borders, he described a very different origin: five engineering friends from graduate school, no investors, no clients, no sales team, and — for more than a decade — almost no recognition at all.
“The best decision we made in teamLab was to be independent — not to be affected by the outside world, and to stick to the core value of ourselves.”
Three principles from his account explain how the slow path became the winning one.
1. Independence wasn’t a funding choice. It was a design choice.
teamLab was founded in 2001 by five friends who, in Sakai’s words, were “just makers.” At a time when Japan had almost no startup culture inside its universities, they had no mentors and no venture capital — and chose to keep it that way. More than two decades later, the founders still own the company.
Most Western playbooks treat outside capital as the accelerant that makes scale possible. Sakai sees it almost the opposite way. Being independent, he told us, meant there was no external pressure to rush the work to market before it was ready.
“We didn’t have any outside pressure to shorten the time of going out to the market. So it naturally grew the presence of teamLab in the world. We didn’t push anything out.”
This is the distinction foreign operators most need to grasp. Call it two views of time. In the capital-rich, exit-driven model, time is a cost — every quarter of delay burns runway, and funding exists to buy speed. In teamLab’s model, time is raw material — the input that turns competent work into work that cannot be copied. The decade of obscurity wasn’t a failure state to escape; it was the period in which the work became good enough to survive contact with the world. Which of the two views you hold silently shapes every entry decision you make in Japan.
2. The eleven-year gap was the strategy, not a setback
teamLab held its first solo exhibition in 2013 — in Taipei, at the invitation of the artist Takashi Murakami, who saw their work and told them they belonged in the art world. That was the debut. It came eleven years after the company was founded.
Sakai is matter-of-fact about that gap. Looking back, he calls it the most challenging stretch of the journey — not because it felt hard at the time, but because, from the outside, eleven years with no major recognition looks like failure. From the inside, it was accumulation.
“That ten years was very important for us to accumulate all that knowledge — not going so fast into the market. That made us confident. The quality itself is the most important thing to survive and to be appealed to in the world.”
This is the part of the Japanese long-game that foreign companies most often misread. Viewed through a quarterly lens, a decade without a breakout is a reason to pivot or shut down. Viewed through teamLab’s lens, it was the necessary cost of building something that could not be easily copied. The patience was not passive. It was a bet that quality compounds — and that a reputation built slowly is far more durable than one bought quickly.
3. Structure follows conviction — which is why there is no sales team
Perhaps the most striking operational fact about teamLab is what it doesn’t have. A company of more than 1,000 people, Sakai told us, runs with roughly five people in HR and five in finance. Around 97% of the organization are “makers” — engineers, designers, animators, mathematicians. There is no marketing team. There is no sales team.
That is not an oversight. It is a deliberate refusal, and Sakai’s reasoning is sharp:
“If we have a sales team, their objective is to grow sales. The sales would affect the product. But sales will not sharpen or make the product better. That’s the reason we don’t have any sales or marketing team.”
Everything at teamLab, he explained, is reasoned down from a single belief: if the output is high enough in quality, it will find its audience. The organization has no CEO/CFO/CTO titles and operates as a flat structure where decisions are debated and made close to the work. Sakai describes his own role not as a boss but as a catalyst — someone whose job is to help the team raise the quality of what it makes.
When we visited teamLab during a Stanford LEAD innovation tour, this was visible in the room itself: a founder talking as an equal with junior staff, in what looked like structured chaos — genuine disorder held together by a single shared logic. Sakai embraced the phrase. Nature is chaos, he noted, but there is a structure within it that sustains it.
The Bridge Nippon View
teamLab is often read abroad as a technology and entertainment success story. We think that misses the point. Its real lesson is about sequencing: it built quality first and let distribution follow, rather than building distribution and hoping quality would catch up. For foreign companies entering Japan, the instinct is usually the reverse — hire sales, chase pipeline, show traction fast. Sakai’s story is a reminder that in Japan, the most defensible market position is often earned the slow way, through work good enough that it eventually markets itself. The independence, the patience, and the refusal to let sales shape the product are not quirks of an art collective. They are a coherent operating philosophy — and one that produced, eleven quiet years later, the most-visited museum of its kind on earth.
Ready to Navigate Japan?
Building or scaling in Japan requires understanding which of your instincts to trust — and which to leave at the border. If you’re planning your Japan strategy, we’d welcome a conversation.
This article draws on our Bridging Borders podcast conversation with Daisuke Sakai, Co-Founder of teamLab. Views expressed by our guest are their own.
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By Nitin Mehra
Founder, Bridge Nippon
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