I’m Nicolas Ishihara. I live in Osaka, where I help AI and developer platforms succeed in Japan.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been captivated by languages and their power to bring cultures together. I taught myself English at 10, earned a degree in literary and specialized translation in Buenos Aires, studied Japanese and Chinese, and taught Japanese at the University of Buenos Aires’ language center before moving to Japan, which I now call home.

I started out in Osaka in customer support for ZenMarket, a cross-border e-commerce platform, and grew into directing its multilingual marketing across 12 markets. Building internal tools along the way pulled me into engineering, and I went on to ship React, Next.js and TypeScript interfaces for enterprise SaaS as a frontend engineer at Synergy Marketing.

In 2021 I joined Vercel as its first Japanese-speaking Customer Success hire and built the Japan customer success practice from the ground up. I went on to lead the APJ customer success team, and today I own Japan go-to-market end to end as Interim Country Manager, working with enterprises like MUJI and DeNA and helping large Japanese organizations adopt generative-AI development tools like v0.

I still build every week, with Claude Code as my daily driver. Away from the keyboard I’m a certified professional mahjong player with the Japan Professional Mahjong Association, and you’ll often find me at the piano or singing.