Funworld November 2009

CEO Einosuke Sumitani and KidZania’s Japanese success story
by Jody Godoy

It’s 9:35 a.m., and the shopping mall Lalaport Toyosu won’t be open for another 25 minutes. But children are rushing in, up escalators, following the guidance of smiling staff, to get into KidZania Tokyo for the first shift of the day. Inside the park it is early evening, and the kid-sized city has already come to life. Excited kids and their parents make their way through busy streets to the miniature Mitsubishi car rental, BSFuji television station, and ever-popular MOS Burger shop as fire engines, delivery trucks, and sightseeing buses trundle past. The bustle is audible in the background as Einosuke Sumitani, CEO at Kids City Japan K.K., tells how he founded the first of the international KidZania franchises.

In 2003, he retired from his position as the CEO of WDI Corp, a restaurant franchise company he had been with for more than three decades. Soon after, he heard about the KidZania concept from a friend. Already planning a trip to the United States to see the famous Ichiro Suzuki play in a Seattle Mariners baseball game, the energetic Sumitani decided to make a detour to Santa Fe, Mexico, to see the original park for himself. “I was impressed and surprised to see kids enjoying job experiences at KidZania Santa Fe,” he says. “You have this situation in Japan where a large part of the younger generation is avoiding finding an occupation. So I thought that if children had a chance to get this kind of hands-on experience from a young age it would be a good thing for the country.”

Returning to Japan, he called on friends to gather the initial funds, founding Kids City Japan K.K. in 2004. When it came to creating pavilions, the essential component of the park, Sumitani and staff drew up a list of the industries necessary to a Japanese KidZania and contacted the five bestknown representatives of those industries in Japan, taking advantage of connections Sumitani made over the course of his career.

Though the company estimated 500,000 visitors in the first year, KidZania Tokyo brought in more than 800,000 visitors after it opened in 2006. In the 2008 fiscal year, the park saw more than 900,000 visitors. A second park opened in May 2009, and four more locations are on the drawing board. You could say Sumitani stumbled on franchise gold in Mexico, but this kind of success takes more than just luck.

“Basically, there’s a need for us, for our concept,” Sumitani says. He attributes the park’s success to the fact that children in Japan lead busy, study-focused lives, and parents are starting to look for places where their children can have fun, hands-on learning experiences in a safe environment.

Another factor in the success of the park was the way the company spread the news of its opening. In lieu of paid advertising, Kids City employees visited the local PTA meetings and boards of education to introduce the park and explain the concept. The company made sure to inform media organizations around the country, and because the concept was a unique one in Japan, KidZania Tokyo’s opening received widespread coverage. KidZania was even featured as a topic of current interest in an English textbook.

Sumitani may have found an untapped market, but he didn’t stop there. After working with sponsors to tailor KidZania to the cultural setting, Kids City Japan is holding activities that take visitors beyond the park’s walls and plans to expand while preserving the take-home value at its core.

One of a Kind
Sumitani got his start in the leisure industry before launching his career in the restaurant business at WDI Corp in 1969. The company opened Kentucky Fried Chicken and Tony Roma’s franchises in the 1970s when Japan had few Western dining establishments. “It was a new market back then; we had great timing,” he says. “Nowadays there are a lot of fast-food restaurants, but there’s really only one KidZania. In the broad sense, we have competition as a theme park, but nobody [in Japan] has a concept like ours.”

Having little competition, Sumitani says, lets the company focus on internal goals, like training the staff members who run the park’s more than 80 activities. “We call them supervisors, but we really think of them as mentors. Their training is crucial to our success.” Besides personnel development, Kids City Japan is concentrating on connections with the companies and groups that sponsor its pavilions.

Sponsors want to get involved in KidZania because they “become representatives of their respective industries to our visitors,” says Yoshihiko Nakada, KidZania’s public relations manager. “Another incentive is, of course, their desire to be socially responsible. They want the public to know they support children’s education.”

Into Society
This year Kids City Japan went beyond realism within the park’s walls to create activities connected with actual society. One example is the Kodomo Gikai (Kids Congress), a group of children who meet to give their opinions on the park and its operations. Besides serving as a focus group for the park’s planning team, the Kodomo Gikai has participated in volunteer projects such as translating picture books into Braille, gathering used clothing for donation, and participating in town clean-up days.

Other events have been inspired by KidZania Japan’s “ecofriendly nation” theme. The park has held annual candle nights, a stamp rally giving away reusable shopping bags, and a national environmental art contest. When the G8 summit was held in Japan in 2008, KidZania held its own eco-summit where youngsters presented essays on the environment.

“I think we are a little ahead of the curve in terms of our activities that connect with actual society. Ecology is one of the areas in which Japan is trying to move ahead, and so we thought it would be appropriate to make it a part of KidZania also,” says Sumitani.

In summer 2009, Kids City took its educational ambitions beyond the walls of the park to conduct learning experiences at locations around Japan. Children learned about forestry at a three-day camp in Iwate, got a taste of traditional lifestyle in Kyoto, and became journalists for a day at the national high school baseball championships in Nagoya.

Location, Location, Location
Kids City Japan is thinking beyond park confines even as it plans to open new parks across the country. Sumitani is taking the “location is everything” mantra from the restaurant business and applying this lesson to KidZania. The parks in Tokyo City and Hyogo prefecture serve local markets, but by incorporating different attractions at each location, they also create a national market for repeat visitors. “We have a lot of kids who visit KidZania Tokyo who then come and visit the other park in Hyogo, so we hope that this effect will continue,” he says.

With both local visitors and domestic tourists in mind, the company plans to open four more parks—in Yokohama, Nagoya, Fukuoka, and Kyoto. Sumitani sees Kyoto in particular as a location catering to the national market: “As the old capital of Heian Japan, Kyoto has a lot of historical sites, and a lot of school trips visit there. And a lot of families also visit on holidays. We hope that by opening a KidZania in Kyoto, people will be able to enjoy visiting our park as well as the many sightseeing opportunities Kyoto has to offer.”

Planned locations will feature not only unique pavilions but will highlight regional industries as a further enticement to visitors from around the country.

Take-Home Value
One of KidZania’s major draws is the variety of things for kids to collect, make, and take home. Pizza chefs in training get to devour their work, and DJs on KidZania’s radio station receive a CD of the program they created. Aspiring designers take home posters, and comic book artists receive their own comics with their names printed on the front.

For Sumitani, KidZania’s biggest value is the chance to try something new and get a firsthand idea of how society works. “Now children are made to focus on studying and miss out on a lot of real-life experiences,” he says. “Here they play not only a part, but every part in KidZania’s society, so they learn the functions and importance of various occupations by experience.”

According to Susan D. Holloway, adjunct professor of cognition and development at University of California, Berkeley, these experiences are a potential starting place for deeper parent/child interaction: “The children seem to be having fun and learning something about the responsibilities and activities that go along with certain jobs. If parents are paying attention while the child is engaged in these activities, they can learn things about their child’s interests and can extend those interests in other activities, such as reading books together or visiting a real pizza restaurant.”

Another recently added benefit of a trip to KidZania is exposure to English. Since 2008, employees use basic English while supervising activities. Sumitani says he wanted to give children not only the chance to use English but to “become aware of other cultures. If they realize these things as children, they will be much more open to other cultures as adults.”

Jody Godoy is a Tokyo-based freelance writer specializing in culture, entertainment, and the arts. www.jodygodoy.com