There were a couple of surprises in store when Megumi Matsumoto became a director at her husband’s precision automotive parts company. First, that it was usual for the wives of men running SMEs in Japan to take charge of the accounting department. Quickly followed by the realisation that few people at the firm could decipher a financial report.
“Almost 80% of the presidents of small Japanese companies can’t read a balance sheet,” says Matsumoto with a wry smile.
Her attempts at explanations to employees at Matsumoto Kosan were frequently met with blank faces. Raising two children at the time inspired her to try a playful, visual system utilising toys like balloons and piggy banks to make financial concepts click. Armed with props from a 100-yen store, she began to see a remarkable difference in the company’s staff within a few months.
“They started to show interest. Their behavior changed. They began thinking about how to make profits, like business owners themselves.”
Believing she might be on to something, Matsumoto continued to refine the system, going on to patent it as the Fusen (balloon) Accounting Method and writing a best-selling book by the same name.
From Fukuoka Prefecture to British Columbia
Displaying an ambitious can-do spirit at a young age, Matsumoto began working three jobs at age 16 to realise her dream of going abroad to study English, sparked by the exotic tales of an aunt who had spent time in Hong Kong.
Growing up in industrial Kitakyushu. “I wasn’t from a really rich family and my parents couldn’t pay for me to go overseas.”
In Victoria, British Columbia, she studied English while living with a host family. “It was beautiful: the people, the nature. I spent time with their kids after school every day.”
Back in Japan, Matsumoto completed a degree in electrical engineering and joined a U.S. semiconductor equipment manufacturer. The work was intense. “It was so tough. I worked from early morning until midnight almost every day. The quality standards were incredibly high.”
A new direction
After five years, she began to rethink her path. “In the semiconductor industry, it’s very hard for women to continue. I wanted to find a field where women could keep working and decided hospitality might be the answer.” That thought led her to Switzerland, where she earned an MBA at IMI University in Lucerne, learning to express her opinions more stridently than she had been used to doing in Japan.
She also admired the Swiss attitude towards work-life balance: “On weekends, shops close and people spend time with family. In Japan, weekends are the busiest days for retail. I liked that difference.”
Back in Japan, Matsumoto worked at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Tokyo. It was around that time that she met her husband, who owned Matsumoto Kosan. This would lead to her joining his company in 2015 and ultimately to another new career.
An Accidental Accountant
The intuitive approach to communicating accounting principles for her in-house training began attracting wider attention when she uploaded videos of them to YouTube.
“If the balloon shrinks, revenue is declining; if it grows, everyone feels happy. It connects emotion with accounting.” She used a piggy bank with a belt to explain fixed and liquid assets: “The upper part shows assets that can easily become money, the lower part fixed assets. The position of the belt shows financial health.”
Beginning to teach outside seminars, including for major corporations such as Shiseido and Sumitomo, she founded her company Star Compass Co. in 2022, receiving the Forbes Japan Women Award shortly afterwards.
“The Financial Services Agency and Ministry of Finance even asked me to teach their staff.”
She has also been invited to teach her method to schoolchildren.
“I went to a junior high school class with about 50 boys, 15-year-olds. They understood faster than adults! Some boys even started reading the financial reports of companies like Nintendo and Sony that they were thinking about working for in the future. It was so impressive.”
Corporate clients told her it was helping to boost profitability. “That’s when I thought, maybe this can be used all over the world.”
Matsumoto has already held seminars overseas and will be in Detroit teaching at an automotive firm later this year. She is also launching a visual accounting app based on her method, initially in Japanese, with plans to take it global by 2027.
As for her husband, he couldn’t be more supportive: “He comes with me to seminars at automotive companies who invite me to teach, and sometimes they also become his clients.”
Text: Gavin Blair for SCCIJ
