Fifty Years of the Same Question

By Corey Lien, Co-founder, DOMI Earth · November 2025, Taipei

Walking through old Taipei with Professor Kanji Tanimoto — pioneer of business-and-society scholarship in Japan, founder of JFBS, and a teacher and friend to many of us — on the eve of his retirement.

On a mild November afternoon in Taipei, I clipped a small microphone onto Professor Kanji Tanimoto's collar and asked him to keep talking. We were setting out on a walk through the old city — the narrow streets he has come to know well over a decade of visits — and I did not want to lose a word. He had a concert to attend at the National Concert Hall at eight. We had the whole afternoon, a table of shrimp dumplings waiting somewhere ahead, and fifty years to cover.

Professor Tanimoto retired at the end of March 2026. Long before "sustainability" appeared in any annual report, he was asking the question that would occupy his entire career: what is the proper relationship between business and society? This piece is drawn from our recorded conversation that afternoon — a walk, a meal, and a masterclass I did not want to keep to myself. It is my way of saying thank you.

1974 · The pioneer who was told the boom was over

The first real debate on CSR began in the United States during the 1970s. The story of Tanimoto's own work begins with a graduation thesis. As an undergraduate in the mid-1970s, Tanimoto had picked up on a discussion then circulating among Japanese and American scholars: the role and function of the corporation seemed to be changing. He wanted to keep pulling on that thread. But by the time he entered graduate school at Kobe University in 1979, the oil crisis had crushed the economy — and with it, the fashionable debate about corporate responsibility. He doubted whether it was a viable research topic at all.

"This is not a boom now. But the relationship between business, society and government is a basic and important question. You should be the pioneer in this field in Japan." — His graduate advisor, 1979

So he became one. There were barely any Japanese materials; he worked from translated American books and whatever international papers he could find. He built his career entirely inside Japan — Osaka, then Kobe, the Kansai years — without ever studying abroad. In 1997 he moved to Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, arriving just as Japan itself was about to change.

1992 · The history most of us take for granted

What I remember most from our walk is how casually he carries the entire timeline of this movement in his head — because he lived all of it. In 1992, the Earth Summit in Rio: governments only. Ten years later in Johannesburg, the word itself changed — "environment" became "sustainability," because economic, social and environmental issues could no longer be discussed separately — and NGOs were formally invited to the table for the first time. At Rio+20 in 2012, business was finally, formally, in the room. Three years later came the SDGs.

Walking beside him, I confessed something: when I entered this field in 2012, everything was simply there. The UN Global Compact existed. The frameworks existed. The SDGs arrived three years into my journey. I had taken it all for granted — as if the infrastructure of sustainability had always existed, rather than being built, argument by argument, by people like him.

"Based on the former generations' experiences and endeavors, we can say something — we have the right to make a voice. The circumstances were totally different four or five decades ago." — Kanji Tanimoto

He watched Japan's own version of this history up close. The 1995 Kobe earthquake — his home region — brought an outpouring of volunteers so unprecedented that it is remembered as Japan's "first year of the volunteer," leading to the country's first NPO law in 1998. Around 2000, the global CSR movement arrived from outside like a black ship, knocking on the door of Japanese multinationals: are you doing responsible business? By 2005 the first CSR boom was on — reports, directors, departments.

2010 · "I am nobody" — the hardest choice

By the mid-2000s, Tanimoto was one of the most visible CSR scholars in Japan. He chaired government committees, advised companies, appeared constantly in the media. Prestige, influence, income — all of it came easily. And then, at an international conference, a European researcher listened politely to his ideas and asked whether he could send along his papers. He had none to send. He had never published in English, never presented abroad.

"I just recognized myself: I am nobody in the international academic community. Famous — just inside Japan." — Kanji Tanimoto

He was around fifty years old. What he did next is, to me, the most instructive act of his career: he declined nearly everything. The committees, the media appearances, the comfortable authority of being Japan's go-to commentator — he set it down, and went back to his office to read papers and run data, day after day. "You are just like a graduate student," his own students teased him. He took it as a compliment.

The second act that followed reshaped the field around him. He accepted an invitation to the Free University of Berlin — at an age when most careers are hardening, his first extended stay abroad — and he says it totally changed his mindset. He began publishing internationally. And in 2011 he founded the Japan Forum of Business and Society (JFBS), the first academic association in Japan devoted to this field, deliberately conducted in English, deliberately international — a room where Japanese scholars, business people and NGOs would have to meet the world's arguments face to face. He served as its president for a decade and remains its honorary president.

2015 · The critique he never softened

For all his warmth, Tanimoto's assessment of corporate practice has never gone soft. Japanese companies, he told me, are skilled at picking up only the information they prefer — adopting the vocabulary of responsibility while leaving the core of the business untouched. CSR became compliance. Then the SDGs arrived and made superficiality even easier: pick one goal or two, attach a technology and a marketing story, and nobody criticizes you.

"They introduced new institutions, published reports. But they didn't want to change the core of their business. The SDGs are easy — just pick up one goal. Nobody criticizes them." — Kanji Tanimoto

He reaches for one ironic example: Toshiba, a company that once sat at the very top of Japan's CSR and governance ratings — right up until its accounting fraud scandal. Systems, ratings and reports, he warns, are not the same thing as change. The lesson he draws is not cynicism but depth: responsibility has to be embedded in how a company is managed, not bolted on beside it.

Yet — and this is what I treasure about his thinking — the critique cuts both ways. When I told him my generation of changemakers is learning to challenge capitalism while honoring what it has genuinely delivered, he pushed the thought further: hold the light side and the dark side at once. I said that sounded like yin and yang. He laughed: "It looks like Oriental theory." Fifty years in, his conclusion is neither optimism nor pessimism, but the discipline to carry both.

The teacher: basics first, then debate

Ask him what students of sustainability should study, and the answer is disarmingly unfashionable: management, accounting, finance. CSR is an applied subject, he insists — you cannot understand ESG investment without understanding investment. Social issues, human rights, geopolitics? Nobody will teach you; study them yourself. Business students should learn how NGOs actually work, and NGO people should learn the disciplines of business — not to criticize from outside, but to collaborate from knowledge.

Every summer, he made his seminar students debate — voluntary versus mandatory approaches, pro and con, assigned to argue positions they did not hold. Most Japanese students had never once been asked to do this. And for those who would lead corporate sustainability, his advice is patience itself: spend ten years inside the real functions of a company first. Passion without experience, he warned, ends in disappointment — a lesson we have built directly into how DOMI hires.

He teaches in print, too. At the DOMI office he showed me one more book: Our Lives Are Connected to the World — Building a Sustainable Global Society (『わたしたちの暮らしは世界とつながっている——持続可能な地球社会をつくる』), illustrated by Sakurai Tomoka (さくらいともか) and published by Chikura Shobo. Pointing at a flow chart on one of its pages, he explained it to me across the table — a professor still teaching, retired or not.

2016 · Taiwan, tennis, and a book with our photo in it

Taiwan has been part of his story for a decade — visiting professorships at National Taipei University in 2016, 2018, 2019, and again from 2022, arriving at the tail end of COVID and cheerfully serving a week in quarantine to get here. He lectured across the island, visited seven universities, and every weekend played tennis on the Sanxia campus with local players. His students in Taipei got the same medicine as his students in Tokyo: basics first, both sides, debate.

That is the professor. But I owe this piece to the friend. We first met around 2018, at Jin Ji Yuan (金雞園), a small, famous dumpling shop in old Taipei — No. 3-1, Alley 8, Lane 316, Section 3, Roosevelt Road. Over the years since, he has invited me into his classrooms and onto the JFBS stage, introduced me to entrepreneurs and scholars, and always, always made time to talk — really talk. "Not just exchange messages," as he put it that afternoon. "Let's talk and talk. Between two people, something is created — beyond what we imagined before we met."

Jin Ji Yuan on Google Maps

At lunch he pulled a book from his bag: Management Scholar in Taiwan (『経営学者の台湾』, 2025), a scholar's memoir of his years in Taiwan, written weekend by weekend from the photos on his phone. He flipped to a page — and there was the dumpling shop we were sitting in. Another page: there was me, in the chapter on social entrepreneurs. And there, printed, was the photo of our very first meeting, taken in this same shop seven years earlier. We stood up, found the same corner, and took the photo again. Then we told the shop's owner, who posed with us, delighted.

He ate almost everything with relish — "ninety-eight percent I can eat," he grinned, declining only the tofu, "and I enjoy it so much better with some friends." We forgot to photograph the meal until only half a dessert was left, so we photographed that. Before dropping him at the concert hall, I handed him our white paper on what companies can do for sustainability — English and Chinese in print, Japanese edition prepared by our partners in Tokyo. It felt like handing homework to one's teacher. It always will.

2026 · What we inherit

Professor Tanimoto spent fifty years on a question the world kept telling him was out of fashion — until the world caught up and discovered it was the question of the age. That is what a pioneer does: keeps a question alive until everyone is ready to ask it.

From him, we at DOMI inherit more than frameworks. We inherit the knowledge that our work is a continuation — that every right we have to stand in a boardroom and talk about responsibility was earned by generations before us. We inherit the discipline of studying the basics before critiquing the system, of holding light and dark together, of challenging institutions while honoring what they deliver. And we inherit the most demanding lesson of all: that it is never too late to walk away from comfortable authority and become a student again.

Retirement has not slowed the question. His newest book, published in 2026 by Chuokeizai-sha, is Do Corporations Have Political Responsibility? — Capitalism and Responsible Business (『企業に政治的責任はあるのか——資本主義と責任あるビジネス』): the question he has carried for fifty years, asked once more.

Find it in the library catalogue (CiNii)

Tanimoto-sensei — thank you. For the decades of scholarship that built the ground we now stand on. For every door you opened in Tokyo and Taipei. For the debates, the dumplings, and the reminder that a conversation between two people can create something neither imagined alone.

Retirement, in your case, is clearly just another sabbatical for the question. We will keep it alive with you. 続 — it continues.

Kanji Tanimoto 谷本寬治 — in brief

• Professor Emeritus, Hitotsubashi University (professor 1997–2011). Former Professor, School of Commerce, Waseda University (2012–2026). Retired end of March 2026.
• Founder of the Japan Forum of Business and Society (JFBS) — President 2011–2021, now Honorary President.
• Ph.D. and MBA, Kobe University; B.B.A., Osaka City University.
• Visiting professor: Free University of Berlin (2010, 2014, 2017); National Taipei University (2016, 2018, 2019, 2022–2026); Cologne Business School (2017–2018).
• Research: business & society, CSR and sustainability management, social innovation, responsible investment.
• Journal editorial service: Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society, Associate Editor (2015–); Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal, Editorial Advisory Board (2014–), among others.