About three decades ago, a visiting Westerner to rural Samarkand, Uzbekistan spoke at a local primary school. Among the students who listened that day was a six-year-old girl so intrigued by his otherness that the encounter altered the course of her life.
“He was dressed differently and spoke a language I’d never heard,” recalls Fariza Abidova, co-founder and CEO of Trusted Corporation. “But that moment sparked something in me. I wanted to understand what he was saying, where he was from, what he ate. That curiosity about languages and cultures became the core of everything I do now.”
That spark drove Abidova from a small Uzbeki village to Japan, overcoming educational, cultural and familial hurdles along the way to founding two companies, becoming a regular in Japanese media and an advocate for a more dynamic domestic startup ecosystem.
Cultural enrichment and confinement
Though a Westerner had been novel, multiculturalism and multilingualism are the norm in Uzbekistan, home to around 130 nationalities and ethnicities, notes Abidova: “As soon as we step out of the house, we hear different languages. At home, I spoke Tajik; then school was Uzbek; between friends we spoke Russian, and there are also Tatar Jewish people, along with many other communities.
But this melting pot did not mean that Abidova could escape the cultural norms of growing up in a traditional Muslim Uzbeki family where she was expected to enter an arranged marriage at 17.
She begged her family to give her one year to try for a university scholarship before they married her off. Once at university, to her English language studies she added Japanese, her initial interest piqued by another childhood experience – her father watching samurai films and dramas. She next set her heart on a Japanese government scholarship to Kobe University but faced twin challenges of passing the JLPT language test second grade in a year and renewed pressure to marry.
To Japan and back again
Having got through the scholarship written test, “The whole village kind of celebrated,” piling on the pressure for the interview in the capital, Tashkent, the furthest she’d then been from home. However, winning the scholarship was not a get-out-of-jail-free card. Her family now fretted for their ‘honour’ with a single daughter heading overseas alone.
An engagement was hastily arranged. After a year in Japan, she returned to endure three years of marriage “like slavery,” before she was able to convince her husband he would be happier with a more compliant wife (women being unable to initiate divorce).
Returning to Japan “with almost nothing,” Abidova briefly stayed with the volunteer Japanese teacher who had done so much to get her through her language test in Uzbekistan – they remain in touch to this day. Soon after, while living in a pay-by-the-day guesthouse in 2010, she launched founded SOPHYS Corporation to train Japanese executives and managers in intercultural communication.
Starting from scratch
“I was effectively homeless when I founded my first company,” Abidova recounts with the same humour evident when she recalls her other tribulations. Not one for self-pity or sympathy-seeking, she emphasises that: “So many other women are in much worse circumstances than I’ve ever been in.”
Training more than 3,000 senior staff in its 12-year history, SOPHYS was a success but difficult to scale due to clients insisting Abidova delivered the seminars herself.
Co-founding Trusted Corporation in 2016, she closed SOPHYS in 2022:” I felt if I always had that safety net, I could never fully commit to the new business.”
With a mission to connect Japanese technologies and corporations with European partners, Trusted has offices in Tokyo and Zug.
Switzerland functions as, “a perfect test bed…The market is small, but the innovation environment is excellent. Once something works in Switzerland, we can scale it across Europe.”
Trusted’s three-year model involves identifying complementary strengths between companies, designing and testing business concepts, and then scaling promising ventures through joint ventures, M&A, or spinouts.
As with most human endeavours, the most common issue is the humans: “There are so many super cool technologies already developed – which we saw in sci-fi movies 50 years ago – that could change the world. But 90% will never be commercialised because of communication barriers and rigid organizational structures. It’s usually not a technology problem but a people problem.”
This is where Trusted comes in: “In theory, it’s perhaps ten years of actual collaboration. Now, you need to work with startups, with other ecosystem members. But many big companies struggle to do that.”
Abidova also advocates for more openness in Japan’s startup ecosystem through media appearances on AbemaTV and J-Wave Radio, alongside work with Tokyo Metropolitan Government. “It’s part of educating the market. Japan has incredible technology and talent, but the mindset needs to evolve.”
Outside work, her main hobbies – perhaps unsurprisingly – involve discipline and overcoming hardship: running and powerlifting. Competing twice in the latter, her deadlift record stands at 105kg, approaching double her bodyweight.
The drive that has propelled her thus far shows little sign of dwindling. “That hunger is still there. I feel even if I live 100 years, it won’t be enough to do everything I want.”
Text: Gavin Blair for SCCIJ
