Osaka Investment Promotion and Support Site

Interview with TAKABAMA Limited – A Cultural-Tech Company Headquartered in Hong Kong and Osaka

Interviewees: 
Andy Chung, Co-Founder, CEO, TAKABAMA Limited
Lavin Yeung, Co-Founder, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), TAKABAMA Limited

　


Could you introduce your company and the services you offer?

Takabama is a cultural-tech company headquartered in Osaka, Japan.
We build digital tools that preserve, scale, and share the wisdom of Japanese service culture — turning timeless values like omotenashi (hospitality) and omoshiroi (meaningful delight) into future-fit capabilities for the world.

At the heart of it all is our core philosophy:
O to the World — from Omotenashi to Omoshiroi, from Osaka to the world.

We believe Japan’s most powerful export isn’t just technology or products — it’s how Japan makes people feel. The calm anticipation of others’ needs. The harmony in every guest interaction. The ability to communicate care without words. We call this deeply intuitive quality cultural empathy — and we use immersive technology and ESG-driven learning platforms to bring it to life at scale.

We offer immersive XR-based training designed to help companies deliver authentic service with heart, ReasonQ, an ESG reasoning tool that helps businesses think clearly and act responsibly, and Prompting-as-a-Service, AI-powered tools that support ESG teams in communicating with clarity, humanity, and purpose.

We work with clients across food & beverage, design, and museum innovation. And we’re proud to be among the exhibitors at Expo 2025 Osaka, representing how Japanese values can meet global challenges.

What were the reasons for choosing Osaka as your business location?

Osaka felt like a calling.   
It is known as the spiritual home of Japanese hospitality.  It offered the right context for what we do. It’s a place where people understand care, as a business advantage. It’s also a city where legacy and innovation meet. From the transformation happening in Grand Green Osaka to the creative energy inside Knowledge Capital, there’s a sense here that the future is being built.

At the same time, Osaka is a city of forward momentum.
With Expo 2025 now underway, the world’s eyes are on this region — and the theme, “Designing Future Society for Our Lives,” couldn’t be a better fit for us. We're honored to be an official exhibitor in the Osaka Healthcare Pavilion.

What kind of support did you receive from the INVEST OSAKA team (IBPC Osaka) when expanding into Osaka?

We're very thankful indeed.  The INVEST OSAKA team was instrumental. As a foreign-founded company bringing a culturally rooted vision to Japan, we needed more than legal help—we needed local insight, encouragement, and community.

They helped us set up, navigate systems, and connect with early partners.  In particular, they invited us to present at Hack Osaka, the signature innovation event in Osaka, where we connected with potential collaborators and gained crucial visibility in the Kansai startup ecosystem, and connected us with TEQS (Team Expo 2025), which directly led to our successful selection as an official exhibitor in Expo 2025 Osaka. 

But more than anything, they saw the value in what we were trying to do—and that belief gave us early momentum.  We often say: we didn’t just land in Japan. Osaka helped us take off.

 

Could you share your future vision and goals for your business in Osaka and Japan?

Our vision began with a simple but powerful question:
What if Japan’s quiet strength — its cultural empathy — could be shared with the world through technology?

At Takabama, we believe Japan’s greatest contribution to the global future isn’t just robotics or design — it’s how people care.
The unspoken attentiveness of a server.
The heartfelt bow from a hotel clerk.
The harmony in a team’s unhurried collaboration.
These are not just rituals. They’re signals of something deeper — a kind of emotional intelligence unique to Japan that we call cultural empathy: the ability to anticipate others’ needs, respond with sincerity, and act with grace.
We founded Takabama to ensure these values are not lost in a digital world — but reimagined, scaled, and made more accessible. That’s what we mean by cultural-tech.
 
Since establishing here, we’ve supported a leading food & beverage group with XR training that brings omotenashi to life, helped a design and planning firm and a museum tech company assess their ESG and SDG alignment, and signed an MOU with the Future-Fit Foundation (UK) to co-develop products in Japan aiming the global market.

We’re honored to be an official exhibitor in the Osaka Healthcare Pavilion. But our ambitions extend well beyond the Expo.  We aim to partner with stakeholders and businesses to turn Osaka into a living lab of cultural-tech innovation, spark new conversations on how Japanese traditions can shape the next era of global ESG, hospitality, and education, and develop use cases that resonate not only across Japan but in ASEAN, Australia, and beyond.
 
We want Takabama to be the company that made caring scalable—and Osaka the city that launched that vision.  O to the World!