“The possibilities are endless, and that’s what motivates much of our thinking at PUSH.”

London-born, Tokyo-based multidisciplinary creative and strategist, Mike Sunda co-founded PUSH Japan in 2010 and then led Japan-market strategy and creative that grew it to become an 8-figure, award-winning independent agency in Japan, with brand clients spanning Amazon and Nike to Manchester City FC and Uniqlo. The independent creative studio specialises in culturally resonant work ranging from branded content to music videos and in 2023, Mike was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year by the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan. Mike has also written extensively about Japanese society and culture for global publications including the BBC and The Japan Times, and spent his formative years in Japan working as a music journalist, documenting Tokyo’s electronic music scene for various publications. He has also produced music videos for music artists such as Rosalia, Arlo Parks and Jacob Collier.

ADFEST: You moved from London to Tokyo in 2014. What attracted you?

Mike Sunda: I actually moved for the first time in 2007, when I was 18, straight after finishing school. I worked as an assistant English teacher in a regular Japanese high-school for a year, while doing a homestay with a family whose children went to that school. There was no particular reason behind my decision. My school in London offered the placement, so I volunteered more or less on a whim and that ended up becoming the formative year where I really developed my interest in Japan and Japanese culture. My subsequent move in 2014 was to do my master’s degree at Sophia University in Tokyo, and I credit the incredible MEXT government scholarship for making that such an easy and beneficial process.

ADFEST: What did you observe about Tokyo as a freelance culture journalist for five years? How has Japan changed since then?

Mike Sunda: Accessibility in terms of information. When I was most actively freelancing as a journalist around 2013-2015, there wasn’t a lot of English-language information (or even Japanese-language information, in many instances) around what you might deem “niche” subject matter, but there was certainly appetite from an international readership. My two most widely shared articles were on Buraku caste discrimination and youth activism – both were almost entirely informed by first-hand interviews, and both reached millions of readers on the BBC despite not being “obvious” topics, demonstrating the level of global interest in Japan. Now you have “social-native” publications like Sabukaru and Yokogao reporting on subculture and counter-culture, as well as a plethora of YouTubers either conducting vox-pop interviews with a broad range of demographics, or digging into lesser-known facets of Japanese culture, ultimately narrowing the gap between the sheer interest in Japan and the amount of material available online.

ADFEST: How and why did you found Push? What did you identify as the “hole” you could fill? Challenges you conquered?

Mike Sunda: I co-founded the Tokyo office with the two original founders of the first PUSH office, which was situated in Shanghai, and we were all confident in the market opportunity – my co-founders because they had previously seen demand for joined-up client solutions across both markets, and myself because I had enough experience in the industry in Japan to know that aside from a certain few examples (like UltraSuperNew or Monopo), there weren’t many end-to-end creative agencies that were bilingual and bicultural enough to service global clients, but also agile enough to execute content marketing effectively in a fast-paced, social-first digital mediascape. I was still relatively young at the time (I had just turned 31 when we launched the office in January 2020) and, in retrospect, I had the right amount of naivety to throw myself into the challenge without overthinking things. The first year immediately presented us with seemingly insurmountable challenges: The pandemic made in-person content production almost impossible, early client opportunities predicated on the Tokyo Olympics immediately vanished, and my co-founders were unable to travel to Japan, so I was running the company by myself. It meant that I had to confront parts of the business that I was weaker in and may have otherwise delegated, like hands-on production, as well as finding scrappy solutions to survive at a time when projects were few and far between – so although it was incredibly stressful at the time, it likely made us a more robust company in the long-term. The following year, in 2021, we signed our first retained client which gave me headcount for a small team, and we’ve managed to grow quickly and consistently ever since. Each successive year in business we’ve close-to-doubled our revenue while maintaining good profitability.

ADFEST: Your session on Saturday is about Japanese content and collab. May we have a teaser about the strengths and assets that make Japanese content, plus creating and producing it at Push, stand out?

Mike Sunda: Japan is somewhat unique in that it’s one of the few non-English-language countries whose cultural output has consistently resonated with audiences throughout the globe. Now, on top of that, the ease of international travel and the increasingly weakening Yen has turned that interest into a boom in inbound tourism. The result is that you have the incredible benefit of a huge global audience that is primed for Japan-related content, but the challenge then becomes satisfying that increasingly “educated” appetite for more context, more authenticity, more novelty, more nuance than ever before… and that means there’s pressure to innovate when it comes to storytelling, visuality, casting, locations and so on. The government’s “Cool Japan” strategy fundamentally fails to recognise this because it is still investing in the same tropes – sumo, kimono, anime, etc. – as it was decades ago. That’s not to say that any of those things aren’t interesting anymore, but rather that the baseline literacy levels regarding Japanese culture already supersedes them. One of the main points of the session is to argue that diversity of perspective, which might be accomplished by crewing up a culturally diverse team, therefore becomes a necessity in order to create content that brings something new and interesting to the table. Embedding diversity into a project through people and process then allows for truly “Cool Japan” content: whether that’s exploring strands of subculture that haven’t surfaced elsewhere, applying a queer lens to subjects that have typically only been presented through a straight male gaze, or going beyond Tokyo to feature lesser-known regions and lifestyles. The possibilities are endless, and that’s what motivates much of our thinking at PUSH.

ADFEST: You’ve lived and worked in Tokyo for a decade. What do you love about both? What don’t you love about both?

Mike Sunda: I love almost everything about living in Tokyo – food, music, people… the convenience of the city as well as the ease with which you can leave it and travel elsewhere in Japan. Working is a different story: The normalisation of long hours, the importance of constantly respecting the rituals and hierarchies embedded in the labour culture, the high expectations that come even with low budgets – all of these things can be draining over the long-term, albeit also mitigated as long as one’s company culture allows for enough rest and recuperation. Going back to the theme of the session, Japan is able to attract a lot of top-tier international creative talent because of the interest and goodwill generated by its cultural output – if it wants to maintain that, as well as hold onto the top domestic talent in demographics that have historically been marginalised in the workplace (women, in particular, but also neurodivergent workers, single parents, disabled workers, people with caregiving responsibilities, etc.) then there are still sweeping reforms that need to be made to improve and modernise work culture.