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Michael Stuempel
President |
I was born in Toronto, Canada but grew up just south of the Arctic Circle in Iqaluit on Baffin Island. I went to St. Andrew's College in Aurora, Ontario for high school and received my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Psychology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Soon after I started work at IBM Canada.
During University I became interested in Yoshinkan Aikido and in 1993 I moved to Japan to study and train as part of an intense International Instructor's Course taught in conjunction with the Tokyo Riot Police. This course, known as the Senshusei Course, is portrayed by Robert Twigger in his book, "Angry White Pyjamas".
I am President and Co-Founder of Emissary Computer Solutions in Tokyo. One of my fellow senshusei and I formed this company as a way to work while continuing to train and teach at the Yoshinkan hombu dojo. Emissary was formed in 1997 with the goal of providing professional and quality IT solutions to offices in Japan.
I am married with two children and live in Kawasaki, Japan.
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Andrew Hamilton
Emerging Technology Specialist |
I was born in Guelph, a city about 50km southwest of Toronto, Canada. As a kindergartner, I was curious about electricity and magnetism. In an attempt to stem the tide of taken-apart household appliances, blown fuses, and injures (only one fire though!), my parents steered me towards computing and my career path was pretty much locked into place.
In 1995, I wrote the world's first online stock trading simulation, that allowed trading equities, options, commodity futures, and mutual funds at real-time on all major North American exchanges. The following year, I localized the Open Text Index, an early Web search engine, for Japanese users. During that time I also earned a Computer Programming diploma from Seneca College in Toronto, and passed licensing exams for Canadian securities dealers.
Since coming to Japan, my projects have included a membership and event attendance system for a major Chamber of Commerce, a data archive tracking system for an international bank, ERP implementation for an auto manufacturer, and a full inventory and ticketing system for a hardware services company.
In addition to my development projects, I have extensive experience in Network Implementation, Hardware break/fix, and UNIX systems administration.
I live in Nerima, Tokyo, Japan.
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Saori Watanabe
Business Administration Manager |
I was born in Tokyo and made the conscious decision to learn to speak English fluently when I was 15. With that goal in mind I spent a year in Vancouver, Canada after high school at the age of 18.
Spending a year in Canada gave me an excellent start to being an English speaker, however I wanted to keep studying. After returning from Canada I studied at Otsuma Junior College in Tokyo and started looking for work which would give me the opportunity to use and grow my English. I was shocked to discover that 22 year old junior college graduates were not wanted by any major Japanese corporation and I instead decided to prepare for the Japanese CPA exam.
After 3 years of intensive study, I started working as an accountant for a small global start-up company. This company did not have an existing financial support structure and I was able to learn the beauty of the database by setting everything up from scratch. It took a couple of years to create the structure in real life according to what I learned from my studies and exams. That is where I first started to organize accounting flow using simple databases and had the dream to create an ERP for environments such as this.
In my 20 years of work experience, I have had the great luck of experiencing work from several viewpoints. I have worked in entry level positions and management positions. I have used small databases and the largest ERP systems and have worked in small firms and mid-sized global corporations.
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