Interview 4: Owner of The Royal Scotsman pub in Kagurazaka

To help me get an idea of what to expect running my own business I am speaking to a few people who have had experience setting up their own shop, running a food business in Japan, or running a business as a foreigner in Japan. Here is one of the interviews.

I started learning to play the violin a couple of years ago, and have recently been attending Irish traditional music sessions at bars around Tokyo. A friend at one of the long-running sessions told me of a new bar that opened up at the end of last year in foodie-heaven Kagurazaka/Iidabashi. The Royal Scotsman is a lovely little bar not far from Iidabashi station run by 3 friends. It’s incredible how they transformed the space from a dark teishoku-type place to an airy, open space with large windows across the two main walls, and authentic-looking exterior signage. Having attended some wonderful Sunday afternoon sessions (currently on the 2nd Sunday each month 3-6pm, bring an instrument and join in!) I can attest to the quality of their fish and chips and cottage pie, and they even have haggis! Quite uniquely for Tokyo pubs the space is also smoke-free, and the atmosphere is very easy-going and welcoming.
So what’s their story, how’s business, and what plans are in the works? Green mohican-sporting, gentleman bagpipe player Tomo-san pulled up a bar stool and started at the beginning.

The bar - selection includes some fantastic domestic brews

What was the idea behind The Royal Scotsman, have you spent time in Scotland?
We opened on the 19th of December 2011, but I guess the Royal Scotsman story started years ago when I was in France, actually. I was studying French cuisine, training with a master chef in a famous Paris restaurant. During my time in France, when I was about 26 I had the experience of seeing 100 pipers perform in Bretagne, it impressed me so much that I decided that was what I wanted to do. I begged the chef to let me quit, found a pipes teacher and managed to spend the remaining 6 months of my visa studying bag pipe playing. By the time I came back to Japan I had changed my plan of opening a French restaurant to that of opening a European pub-style venue, so I could keep up my interest in playing the pipes and meet similarly minded people.

It was another 7 years or so before we opened the Scotsman in Kagurazaka. In that time I worked in various pubs and studied the business, all the while planning how I might do it if it were my bar. Ange and I got married, and we visited Scotland - I think we tried out every single pub in Edinburgh! It's such a great place, you know, the Edinburgh festival was going on and everywhere was so lively, I loved it. One of our favorite pubs was the 'Scotsman's Lounge' - it didn't feel like a touristy place at all. Elderly customers were there alongside younger guys who were playing pinball, and even we as Japanese visitors were treated like part of the community. Then there was another pub where an old man was playing the organ, I had my bagpipes with me and people were encouraging me to play, so we ended up having a bit of a session. It was relaxed like that, people bringing instruments with them and joining in. The name of that place was the 'Royal Oak', and so there you have it, the 'Royal Scotsman' :)

What would you say your niche is - how are you different to other Brit. pubs in Tokyo?
I'd say we're a "minor pub" by which I mean, we're a unique little place. We're not some big chain business, we're able to be free in our style and really mean what we do. Like the experience we had in Edinburgh, I want the Royal Scotsman to be a place people feel 'at home', a place you can be yourself within a real community context. We're actually currently the only such European 'pub' type bar in Kagurazaka. I've loved the area since even before I thought I would open a French restaurant here, it's a very 'at home' down-town type of place, with an old-fashioned village character. We're really lucky to have been able to open up shop here, and to be the first here with this type of business!

View of the Royal Scotsman from the street

View from the back end of the Royal Scotsman

You do have a great property, and have clearly paid close attention to detail in renovating. How easy was it to find the perfect space, and to make it exactly how you wanted?
Having decided Kagurazaka, I kept my eye open over the years visiting the area and various real estate agents to learn about the kind of places available. After I was really in the position to go for it and had started actively looking I guess it took about 3 months to find this place.

We were considering another property further up the slope, but preferred to be in 3-chome if possible. On the off-chance an agent let us know this place was for sale, and we knew this was it as soon as we saw it. It's a wedge-shaped space right on the corner, not far off the main shopping street slope. In Europe the entrance to a pub is often on the corner, right? and so I thought we could do something interesting with this space. In the end we positioned a genuine antique door on the corner - it isn't a functional entrance, more of a prank, or a nod to the European pub style that I remember. Having windows running along both sides of the bar mean that people walking past see all the way inside, they see the musicians when we're having a session, and it helps makes us part of the community.

Creating the space itself took a while - I broke down the original space myself over about a month. We worked with Ono-san, a good friend from Victorian Craft (www.victoriancraft.com) on sourcing the perfect furniture, and another friend of mine helped with the installation. All in all it was about two and a half months in the making. Ono-san's business is amazing; they import original goods and antiques from the UK, sell them online and from their shop in Nagano, and also do bespoke design for businesses as in the case of the Royal Scotsman. The bar stool you're sitting on, it's been treated specially to look weathered, the counter has been purposefully worn and aged, that ceiling above the bar was white, but was stained and sanded, stained and sanded to achieve the effect we wanted.

Now you're up and running what’s a typical Royal Scotsman day like for the team?
There are 3 of us running the place: me, Ange and Yuji. My day starts about 10am when I do things like visit the bank and go shopping for veggies. I'll get to the pub about 11am and do some admin, check the company email and Facebook and maybe about noon I'll start preparation in the kitchen. Yuji comes in around 1pm and cleans and prepares the beer stock and the pumps and things, we open from 3pm. Yuji handles the bar until about midnight when I come out of the kitchen and run the bar area till 3am. After that it's final cleaning, ordering any stock, cashing up and bed by 5am maybe..?

Gosh that sounds like quite the schedule! Has that been particularly challenging, and what have been some of the highlights in running the business so far?
Actually it's ok, I enjoy it so it isn't as hard as it sounds. It's also important to us to be open as much as possible, we're just at the 5 month mark at the moment so there is a lot to do and still lots to learn.
The biggest highlight so far is that residents from the area have started to visit us. Kagurazaka is a “マナーのある街 / place with manners”, so you have to behave properly to be accepted as a business. Becoming a real part of the community is exactly what we hoped to achieve, so it's particularly meaningful to us when people living nearby choose to make us part of their daily lives - when people drop in separately and know each other, when neighboring business owners come and chat with us.

Quite possibly the best fish and chips in Tokyo

Are you finding that the Scottish/British food is finding a warm reception? What dish would you recommend people to try?
Try our fish and chips. Really, try it. When I was in Scotland I was impressed with the sheer size of the fish, that and the fact that even the girls could eat a whole one themselves! In Japan fish&chips at the British chain pubs tends to be little pieces of fish and a few chips. Our dish surprises both Japanese "うぁ！でっかい！/ OMG it's huge!" and international customers "finally, real fish and chips in Japan!" alike. It's not easy either - the frier in a Japanese restaurant kitchen may be able to do multiple servings of Japanese-sized fried fish at once, but you can only fit 2 full-sized battered fillets in at a time. It might not be very efficient, but it's worth it. We make the effort to get it right, using two different types of flour in our batter, and separating eggs to make it as light as possible. British food does have a bit of a bad reputation with some people, maybe they feel it's just 'potatoes with everything' or 'beans from a can' whereas traditional Japanese cooking starts from the dried beans etc. To me though, the preparation is the same whether it's going to be French food or British food, it's still about quality ingredients and the best method. With the Royal Scotsman being a pub, we haven't encountered any strange food prejudices however, people come expecting pub food.

I’ve attended a couple of your excellent Sunday afternoon Irish music sessions, and I saw that you do other events such as whisky tasting - what types of activities are you most excited about?
I love any of the events that let me learn, as well as the ones where I can join in with bag pipes! - Like craft beer festivals and so on. Playing the pipes has also enabled me to meet some of the beer and whisky producers directly too, so I can get advice directly from the most knowledgeable source and pass it on to our customers and incorporate it into our business and events.

What advice would you give for someone looking to open a small food business in Tokyo?
While you're at the planning stage, be imagining the whole time you visit other businesses 'how would I do it differently, what would I keep?' be precise too, 'would it be 2nd floor, 3rd floor? Would the counter be here, how many staff would I need..?' study well and it will help you plan for and recognise your space when you find it. Then when you have found your opportunity, strike quickly!

The Royal Scotsman
Kagurazaka 3-6-28, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-0825
162-0825 東京都、新宿区神楽坂3丁目-6-28、1F
Closest metro exit: B3 from the Yurakucho or Namboku lines, then walk up the hill.
Google map http://qr.net/scotsman
Tel: 03-6280-8852
http://www.royalscotsman.jp/
http://www.facebook.com/pub.royalscotsman/

The turning you need to take, off Kagurazaka main shopping street

Interview 3: Owner of Yasai Kichi restaurant in Minami Aoyama

To help me get an idea of what to expect running my own business I am speaking to a few people who have had experience setting up their own shop, running a food business in Japan, or running a business as a foreigner in Japan. Here is one of the interviews.

'Yasai Kichi' is a lovely little restaurant near my office, between Gaienmae and Aoyama Icchome station. I'd walked past a few times and was always intrigued by the space - it's a striking stripped-out office space with large windows and bare concrete walls, slightly sunken down from street level. It has been reinvented as a unique, kooky little homely space with higgledy piggledy furniture, books on windowsills and low lighting - the effect is arty and welcoming, and the staff are refreshingly warm. It put me in mind of the kind of space I'd like to create for my shop. They do a lovely keema curry, and all of the menu seems to revolve around fresh seasonal vegetables. I spoke with the owner to find out more.

Could you tell me about your restaurant, what's the concept?
Do you know the meaning of 基地 (kichi) in Japanese? It's a bit like 'base camp' - you know, when you're a kid, and you build a fort out of whatever you have and have a flag? I wanted to create a space people could go and think, a healthy environment where you can work out what's really important to you. I've spent some time in Laos, and was impressed with the natural lifestyle people are still able to have there, and how relaxed and healthy it was. Our veggie base-camp 'yasaikichi' aims to provide an opportunity for busy people living in the city to be healthier, happier, and more aware of what makes them feel better. Good food made with fresh vegetables is just one of the ways we provide this chance. We also have varied workshops, where someone knowledgeable comes in and I become a student too. :)

I see! I had imagined that the vegetables were at the centre of the concept, but it's more than that. I can definitely recognise the cosy blanket-fort type atmosphere you've got going here. Tell us something about the process of finding your shop and altering the space.
Well we didn't have a huge budget when we started out, so we did a lot of it ourselves! Your rent/deposit etc. will probably be your main expense during set-up, I was lucky enough to know about the space as it became available (I used to work in the office that was here before the shop before going freelance), and so we had a nice deal. We broke down the space, sourced furniture from various places - that chair is IKEA actually :), the tables were custom made by a friend who is talented that way, and the walls were painted by students who we gave food for helping!

How big is your team, what's a typical yasaikichi day like?
At the beginning I was here from morning 'till night most days, and worked with a smaller team for the food preparation. Now I manage the bar and front of house during the evenings, and have a full time chef, part-time kitchen assistant, and 3 part-time hall staff who manage the shop during the day.

What plans do you have for the business?
I have 3 ideas: the first is that we want to build a 'hatake' - our own allotment. Probably in Hachioji which is still Tokyo and easy to get to, but far enough into the countryside to grow produce. We might do this as a project with interested customers and partners, we'll see, but it would be great to grow some of our own produce for the shop. The second idea is to open a ramen shop! When you eat regular ramen, your brain loves it, but your body doesn't necessarily enjoy it - The idea would be to make ramen with healthy veg that makes your body happy too. The third is a collaboration with food writers, farms, creative people and a local design company, and to produce an ‘e-hon’, a picture book with recipes and so on. Maybe we won't end up doing any of these, but this is what I'm interested in for the future.

What have been some of the challenges and highlights in running the business so far?
I guess the most challenging thing is trying to get it right - everything you do has an effect. Do you charge 500 yen or 1,000 yen for something? And actually you don't know the right answer right away.
In terms of highlights - now we've been going for about a year things are stabilizing so I really enjoy that when there are parties and events held here I can now also enjoy them - I can have a drink too and relax with the customers. I'm really happy to have got to that point. I’ve also been very pleasantly surprised that we’ve been so lucky with word-of-mouth. We haven’t spent huge amounts of money on advertising, most of the endorsements and publicity we get are just from people recommending us, which is fantastic. We’re quite active on social media – you can see people talking about yasaikichi on the twitter feed on our site.

Is there anything you are looking for in particular right now?
I'm interested for us all to be better at English! We're quite an internationally-minded business, and it would be interesting to be able to bring some of the best bits from outside Japan and share them here. English is going to help with that!

What advice would you give to someone thinking of opening a small restaurant in Tokyo?
Asobu desu ne, play! Just do it! My background is in advertising and planning, and so a lot of what we're doing I'm learning as we go along. If you enjoy what you're doing, and are doing it to be happy, then your customers and staff will be happy too. There will be difficult times, but those are necessary in order to be able to do what you enjoy. Be brave!

Minami-aoyama Yasai Kichi / 南青山 野菜基地
Pearl Heim 1st Floor, Minami Aoyama 2-10-11, Minato-ku, Tokyo.
107-0062 東京都港区南青山2−10-11 パールハイム１F
http://www.yasaikichi.jp
Tel: 03-6447-1607

Seasonal vegetable curry at Yasai Kichi

Interview 2: Video Game Development Company CEO, Tokyo

To help me get an idea of what to expect running my own business I am speaking to a few people who have had experience setting up their own shop, running a food business in Japan, or running a business as a foreigner in Japan. Here is one of the interviews.

Could you describe your company and what you do? What sets you apart?

We’re a video game development company, we make video games. We started initially with iPhone games because it was an easy in, but we do home console game development (Playstation, XBox, etc.) and basically anything that comes up or takes our fancy.

We’re still a small company and we are all foreign, which is a thing. We do plan to hire Japanese staff but the thing that will set us apart, and sets us apart now, is our Western approaches to video game development, which are vastly different from the Japanese ones - more efficient, we feel - in a time where Japan is struggling to compete in a global market. Because of this we also attract some of the best talent in Tokyo in a time when companies are having a hard time finding experienced developers.

Why did you set up your own business, how did the idea come to you? What were you doing at the time, work-wise and how did you make it happen?

The main reason was, more or less, to put our money where our mouths were, Me and my co-founder had been working at Japanese game development companies for quite a while, getting more and more frustrated at the slow pace of much-needed change that we decided to put our theory into practice and use Western sensibilities in most aspects of game development keeping, is the plan, that what we still feel works well in Japan, the creative and visual sides of it.

To make it happen we basically just took the plunge, we quit our jobs and started working from home. It was a bit of a wild move which made our start quite rough - we bootstrapped the whole endeavour. I guess I, personally, was just about frustrated enough with working within Japanese companies and trying so hard for so long and so pointlessly to effect change, that I more or less didn't have a choice but to start up on my own.

What have been some of the challenges and highlights in running the business so far?

Not going for investment and bootstrapping everything ourselves has been a huge challenge, but it has taught us a lot about fiscal prudence and drive. I wouldn't have had it any other way!

Dealing with the ever astounding amounts of paperwork that come with running a company, let alone in Japan, is something I still struggle with every day, especially as I started the company as a creative person who now more and more finds himself a manager and accountant.

The first fiscal year we posted a profit and the slow growth getting our first-choice employees on board have been amazing highlights for us.

What are you currently excited about, and what do you plan for the future of the company?

We still need to fill out some specific roles, to create a core team with which we can more easily tackle projects. We have some people lined up we want to get on board. We still want to keep the company small and lean, though, and avoid the pitfalls of rapid growth that plagues and eventually kills so many companies in our business.

I am also writing a book on working in this business in Japan which shouldn't take too much longer. We’ll self-publish, initially, digitally. Hopefully it’ll help people who want to work in video games in Japan to make the plunge like I did so many years ago. (Edit: Since this article was written, the book has been published! More information here - Japanmanship - the ultimate guide to working in video game development in Japan. )

Could you give an example of something you've learned through starting your own company?

Everything. That is to say: I didn't do a lot of research in advance and picked it all up as we went along. It’s doable, but we did fall into a few traps. It’s crazy the first year we had a nice profit only to realise, for tax reasons, that is the worst situation to be in and we had very little time to spend as much money on the company legally before the taxman took his rather generous slice (40%!) Companies in Japan aim to operate on a loss, if it can at all be helped.

Other unexpected costs also tripped us a little. Advance payments for next fiscal year’s tax, employment insurances, etc. A lot of it we should have researched more. It’s important to have a local accountant who knows about all this to consult you.

What advice would you give to someone thinking of starting up a business in Tokyo?

Get a bi-lingual lawyer to help you with the incorporation paperwork. It’s fairly cheap but doing it yourself will probably put you off from the get go - it is daunting, or rather, the stack of paperwork our lawyer went through on our behalf looked daunting, had I been the one to have to tackle it.

Get a good accountant. This will cost money but not having one will cost you much more. You need someone who can point out all the many little foibles of the Japanese tax system that you can legally exploit. We followed a recommendation from a friend, which is the usual and probably best way of finding a lawyer or accountant to help you out.

Of course if it’s something you want to do you should basically just do it. It’s overwhelming and a bit scary but it can be extremely rewarding. 

Interview 1: Wool shop owner, UK

To help me get an idea of what to expect running my own business I am speaking to a few people who have had experience setting up their own shop, running a food business in Japan, or running a business as a foreigner in Japan. Here is one of the interviews.

I grew up in a shop. My Mum ran a wool shop, with buttons, hand knitted items, wool and women and children's clothes. My sister and I would help out behind the counter and with counting up the takings at the end of the day. Sundays usually involved visiting the warehouses in Manchester and redecorating the shop window for the coming week. The front room was the business, and we had a living room and kitchen behind that, with bedrooms upstairs. There was a little back garden and a shed. Here's my 'interview' with my Mum about running her own business. Turns out there was a lot I didn't know about her business!

View from inside the shop window

Why did you set up your own business, how did the idea come to you? What were you doing at the time, work-wise?
- I had two small children, well you were about 8 and your sister was 6, and I wanted a job that I could fit around you two. I wanted to be around for you in the school holidays and when you got home from school, and I wanted to be able to look after you if you were off school ill. At first I thought I'd go for a job in a school but it was quite hard to get into - all the jobs I applied for weren't really available, they were just interviewing because they were required to but there was always someone already in mind for the job who had been trained up on the computer system they used.
When I decided to open my own shop I was working as a dinner-lady, preparing school meals, as a way of trying to get a school admin job from the inside. The idea for the shop was that if we lived at the property, or at least if there was a sitting-room there, then I could take you to work with me whenever I needed to. I liked the idea of working for myself, though I didn't know if I had it in me to run a business, and I liked the idea of having a challenge. I always enjoyed knitting, and so it was a natural choice that the business was a wool shop.

A dinner-lady, yes I remember you coming home with big balls of pastry we would freeze and use for making apple pies and cherry pies. :) So how did you make the shop happen? Was there a bank loan, did you have to save up? 
- I think there was a bank loan to start with, yes. Although we couldn't get a loan for the whole thing - I bought the shop as a 'going concern', it was already a business albeit a bit run down. So you buy the premises, the stock and pay extra on top for the business itself as 'good will' - something unmeasurable a bank can't give you a loan for really. The woman we bought the shop from asked for more than we wanted to pay, but because she hadn't been very active in keeping the business going, we kept asking for discounts on the 'good will' side of things.

When you saw the property you ended up buying, did you know that was the one?
- Definitely. It had a living space with it so it was perfect. It was also opposite the local maternity hospital, and in a busy residential area and so you could count on there being enough custom, especially for the baby items. A few other places we looked at either didn't have the living space, or were too close to an existing wool shop.

How long did you have your own business? How would you describe the trends of your business over the years.
- I ran it for 11 years. At some point I'd built it up into quite a nice little business, it made a profit and I tried things like outsourcing some knitting jobs during particularly busy times. Towards the end though, I did notice that costs were getting higher while takings weren't going up. Wool itself became expensive: say someone wants to make a baby cardigan and it takes 2x 50g balls of wool, if each of those is £1.75 each you're looking at £3.50 just for a tiny cardigan, and then you've got to take all the balls home and make the thing yourself. When you could start buying machine-perfect cardigans down the street for £2.00, some people didn't see the point of knitting, or even learning how to. The older customers started to get arthritis and stop knitting, and there just wasn't the same level of interest from the younger customers. Now I think that knitting has come back in a way, but more as an arts and crafts thing.

Was that what made you sell the shop and move on?  
- Though I noticed the decline in business, the real thing that made me stop was that I started to feel unsafe. I chose a wool shop partly because I thought it would be a safe business - you'd have to be mad to break into somewhere to steal balls of wool. I thought I would be fine. There were a few incidents in the end though where someone came in acting strangely with the aim of taking the till. There was one man who came in speaking incoherently, with his arm inside his coat. I felt afraid of him immediately. Thankfully there was a customer in the shop at the time and she stayed until he left. He was caught later by the police with a crow-bar under his coat. I had a panic button fitted behind the counter, but didn't feel safe after a couple of attempted incidents like that. The police said that with the accident and emergency ward being moved in with the maternity ward, the incidents were likely to increase: "people will be pulled of the street for being drunk, fighting, whatever, and taken to A&E and not have the money to get home. They look across the road, see the wool shop and think 'there'll be a woman alone in there'. " Once I had thoughts like that in my head, and the nights were getting dark for 3:30pm in the winter, the shop bell would ring and you wouldn't know who you were going out to, it was frightening.

Did having the shop make you more, or less employable afterwards?
- I felt it made me less employable, at least from an interviewing point of view - I hadn't had a job interview for 17 years! - but in the end it probably didn't matter as much as I worried it would. With the shop I was completely responsible, if there wasn't enough stock of something I couldn't say to anyone "well you didn't put the order through" and if there was a complaint I couldn't ask the manager to come and deal with it, it's different to working for a company. Not to mention that I hadn't had bosses and colleagues for all that time, and was outside corporate culture. Depending how you talk about it in the interview some of those things could be seen as assets, but I thought that someone interviewing me might be put off. When I started working for someone else again, I did feel at first that I'd been left behind in the work world, but in the end I don't think it has made much difference.

Part of the reason you chose a wool shop is because you like knitting. Did doing it professionally change how you felt about it?
- I still enjoy knitting, though I do it less at the moment. I think I did still enjoy doing it most of the time I had the shop. There were definitely busy times, staying up late to finish an order, that were quite tough and there were some orders I really didn't want to take, but on the whole I enjoyed it, yes. There were 2 orders in particular I remember trying to dissuade the customers from placing, because I just didn't want to do them. One was a crocheted (very labour intensive), double-sized bed spread. It took bloody months! Another was a knitted suit - a skirt and jumper suit (laughing), with a tiger that went from the skirt to the jumper and down the back. I tried to persuade her it would be too expensive with all the different colours but she really wanted it, so I made it. I have a photo of both of them somewhere. I guess there were also times when I felt bored at the prospect of making another one of something I'd made loads of already, but I could outsource some of the work I didn't want to do to my knitters.

What do you remember fondly from the experience?
- I enjoyed the relationships you built up with your regular customers, I liked what I was doing and I liked that I was in control and I knew what to do. Doing a good job made me quite confident.

Would you consider running your own business again at some point?
- I would run a business again, but probably not a shop front because of how I feel about the personal physical risk. If I had my time again I would still open the wool shop though, yes.