Yoshimoto Kogyo Co. of Japan has teamed up with Yunus Centre and Yunus Shiiki Social business Research Centre at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, to launch a joint venture social business company in Japan to address social problems of Japan in innovative ways by mobilizing comedians and other entertainers in their respective prefectures.

Yoshimoto Kogyo is a major Japanese entertainment conglomerate with its headquarters in Osaka. It was founded in 1912 and has since grown to be one of the most influential companies in Japan, employing most of Japan’s  popular comedy talents, producing and promoting the shows they appear in.

Among the social problems the new company yySA wishes to address are: aging population, depression  and loneliness, declining birth rate, poverty, depopulation, outflow of young adults from rural areas, lack of successors for special local products, etc. Yoshimoto is a company which manages the entertainment talents for radio, television, and media in general. Among them they manage 6,000 comedians located in 47 prefectures. Through the new social business company, named as  yySA (Yunus Yoshimoto Social Action Company) founded last month, February 2018, with Mrs. Yuka Kobayashi as the President. Yoshimoto talents throughout Japan will explore social business solutions for social problems in their own areas. The new company will build up a network of social businesses and provide investments to make local ideas translated into reality. Entrepreneurs will use the power of entertainment and state of the art technologies to design solutions. The company will name the network of all idea generators, entrepreneurs, technology providers, producers, and consumers, who will be engaged in solving social problems as “Yunus Family Network”.  yySA aims at engaging the consumers by making social business as an integral part of their daily life, making it a core part of their culture. The vision of the company is  to create a society and an ecosystem where social problems are solved by local people by their creative social business initiatives. yySA will provide the talent, entertainment power, finance, and technologies.

The first “Yunus Family Conference” will be held  in Tokyo on March 28. Professor Yunus will be the chief guest at the conference. Besides holding a competition of social business ideas a common tag and brand design for all social business products and services will be introduced in this conference. From this mark the consumers will be able to identify the yySA products and services.