Strategic Advisory
Bringing Japan into global rooms — and global voices into Japanese ones.
Some of the most useful work happens between worlds: Japan and the US, the impact sector and the business world, the fundraiser and the funder. TMatsu advises organizations that need someone who can read both sides, translate between them, and open the right doors.
What this work is
Helping Japanese organizations communicate across contexts, build relationships, and take part in international funder and peer communities — not only attend them.
Finding and inviting speakers from outside Japan whose ideas fit the purpose of an event, a program, or a community.
What matters is less who you know than who is right for this particular purpose, and how the connection is made. That takes judgment about fit, context on both sides, and the social capital to make an introduction worth taking.
Selected work
Shared to show the range and nature of the work. Details are anonymized to protect confidentiality.
A Japanese organization building the capacity of leaders in the social-enterprise sector, newly funded by a global philanthropic foundation.
The organization was invited, along with the foundation's other grantees, to a two-day gathering. They needed someone who could communicate across contexts, build relationships, and help them become part of the grantee community — moving from funded participant to genuine member.
An annual two-day forum run by a Japanese knowledge-tech company that connects the insight and capacity of academia with Japanese organizations and society.
I helped organize the forum by finding speakers from outside Japan, drawing on my network to identify the people best suited to the forum's purpose and audience.
An annual conference run by a Japanese company that supports nonprofits, bringing together several hundred nonprofit and business participants committed to social impact.
I help source speakers from the US nonprofit sector and its supporting players — foundations, think tanks and others — bringing perspectives from outside Japan into a Japanese conversation about nonprofit management and fundraising.
Also: ビジネスモデル3.0図鑑 (Business Model 3.0 Visual Dictionary), a book published in Japan in January 2026 featuring 50 innovative business models. I wrote four of the cases and contributed ideas and examples from outside Japan that helped shape which companies were featured.
Advisory engagements are shaped around the purpose, not a standard package. Some are a single event, some are ongoing. They tend to begin with a conversation about what needs to happen on each side of the divide.
No agenda beyond the one you bring.
Available in English & 日本語