Chambers Global Practice Guides - Agribusiness 2025 (Japan: Trends and Developments)

Yasunari Sugiyama is a partner in the firm's Asset Finance Group and Agri-Food Practice Group. In the finance area, his major and unique areas include financing of movables (lease, installment purchase and secured loan), supports for overseas expansion by financial institutions, acquisition finance and domestic and cross-border real estate transactions. In particular, he has extensive experience in proposing and implementing business plans and schemes available for each target jurisdiction taking into consideration the specific civil and commercial laws and financial regulations regarding the movables and real estates in Asian, European and North and South American countries and their entity-based and geographical applicability and coverage in terms of the overseas expansion of Japanese financial institutions. Further, in the agri-food area, he aims to provide legal services for the purposes of the introduction of smart agriculture, business expansion and diversification of financing sources, development and scaling of new business such as solar-sharing and onland aquaculture business, in each case while organizing the various laws and regulations applicable to each process of value chains of the agricultural, forestry and fishery business.

Miki Tsubono is a LPC partner and the head of our Sapporo Office. He established our Sapporo office in April 2023 and has supported clients mainly in Hokkaido.

Leveraging the extensive and specialized skills of over 900 professionals at Nishimura & Asahi across 22 offices in Japan and abroad, he offers comprehensive business law services tailored to each client’s specific needs. His experience encompasses a broad range of business law areas including M&A, general corporate, finance, corporate crisis management, restructuring and insolvency, dispute, competition law, intellectual property law, information law, labor law, and wealth management.

Recently, he has handled numerous projects in the GX/energy and agribusiness sectors in Hokkaido, including business development, investment, and corporate/project finance.

He has extensive experience in M&A transactions including cross-border transactions and carve-out transactions as well as business succession transactions in Hokkaido.

He also has experience working for a new business development division of a Hokkaido company and provides services related to general corporate matters including daily legal consultations, support for contract drafting and review, business decisions, and general meetings of shareholders, as well as company internal training.