Forward looking: Yoshiharu Fukuhara makes a point during the recent interview he gave The Japan Times at the head office of Shiseido in Tokyo's central Ginza district. The world-famous cosmetics and toiletries company was founded by his grandfather in 1872, and Fukuhara now serves as its Honorary Chairman, while also running the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. YOSHIAKI MIURA PHOTO
Yoshiharu Fukuhara not only headed the iconic company his grandfather started, but there’s his orchids and cameras — and a museum to run, too…
Among the many thousands of visitors who crammed in for some wartime distraction was an 11-year-old boy named Yoshiharu Fukuhara. Gazing at da Vinci’s paintings, drawings and designs for such machines as helicopters and water pumps, the young Fukuhara was astonished that a single person could embody such diverse interests and expertise.
It’s not surprising that da Vinci struck a chord with Fukuhara. His own family boasted several modern-day Renaissance men. The pattern for their lives was to combine artistic activities with careers at the business that Fukuhara’s grandfather, Arinobu, had founded in 1872: the cosmetics and toiletries-maker Shiseido. As Fukuhara explained recently to The Japan Times, it was a pattern he followed himself.
By the time Fukuhara was born, in 1931, Shiseido — whose name derives from a passage in the “I Ching” calling for “the virtues of the Earth” to be praised — had established a thousands-strong network of stores throughout Japan, where it profitably sold its toothpaste, perfumes, facial powders, vanishing creams and soaps.
The company was then under the leadership of Fukuhara’s uncle, Shinzo, a multitalented man who had not only steered the business through expansion and incorporation, in 1927, but had also established himself as one of Japan’s leading art photographers. In 1919, he was also responsible for creating what is now Japan’s oldest existing art gallery, the Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo.
Fukuhara’s father, Nobuyoshi, also shared his brother Shinzo’s twin interests of business and photography. When he wasn’t keeping tabs on the Shiseido books as the firm’s accountant, he was snapping flowers in his carefully kept garden.
The young Fukuhara followed his forebears into Shiseido in 1953 — a move he puts down to a series of coincidences rather than familial grooming. Nevertheless, his commitment to the company, and the respect he was accorded within it, led to him being named the president of its then-new U.S. subsidiary, Shiseido Cosmetics America, in 1966. Just over two decades later, in 1987, he took over the presidency of the entire operation.
Fukuhara oversaw massive expansion of the Japanese brand, playing a direct role in its metamorphosis into an international, or, as he says, a “stateless” icon. Shiseido now has annual net sales of over ¥690 billion, with more than a third coming from abroad. Top products such as its Tsubaki shampoos and the Shiseido makeup line have seen it become a household name not just in Japan but in Asia and elsewhere around the world.
Nevertheless, Fukuhara never forgot the lesson he learned from da Vinci and his own family members, and the horizons of his interests have always extended far beyond the Shiseido domain. His two greatest passions are orchid cultivation and photography, both of which he has pursued since his student days.
But he has done more than that. For the last two decades, in particular, Fukuhara, now 78, has become a self-made champion of the arts, lobbying high-flyers in the public and private sectors to improve their support for the arts. – read more at The Japan Times Online…