This time, we interviewed Ayumi Sakuno, an employee in the Global Business Department. Please read on to learn how Ms. Sakuno encountered Green Carbon and what her day-to-day work involves!
Name: Ayumi Sakuno
Department/Position: Global Business Department
Areas of Expertise/Responsibilities: Ayumi holds concurrent roles in three teams: Global Business Department – Research Team, Development Team (Vietnam), and System Development Team.
Reason for Joining: There are two main reasons Ayumi joined the company. First, she wants to create things that are gentle to all life on Earth—not just humans, but also nature, animals, and plants—to create a better future. Second, she was drawn to the appeal of a startup company where she could take on new challenges through trial and error.
University: Tokyo University of Pharmacy and Life Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, Department of Biomedical Sciences
Graduate School: Institute of Life Science and Technology, Institute of Science Tokyo (formerly Tokyo Institute of Technology), Life Engineering Course
Major/Studies:Both during my undergraduate and graduate studies, I focused on life sciences. Life science is the study of elucidating life phenomena at a molecular level and applying that knowledge. Specifically, I studied inflammation and immunology in university. In graduate school, I learned about intestinal diseases and breast cancer from the perspective of the biological clock.
Hobbies/How She Spends Her Days Off: I love traveling, driving, walking, and photography! When I travel, I enjoy trying new dishes and having new experiences.
Q. Please give us a brief self-introduction, including your career so far.
Nice to meet you! I’m Ayumi Sakuno, and I joined Green Carbon this April.
I absolutely love visiting new places and discovering unseen landscapes through drives and walks. Capturing those moments of inspiration in photos is also one of my cherished hobbies. Amazingly, I have about 3,000 places saved on Google Maps that I’ve visited or want to go to! I plan to keep exploring more unfamiliar countries, cities, and towns in the future!
My professional career officially began at Green Carbon, but I gained diverse experiences during my student days. In college, I spent a summer on a working holiday in the US, working at a grocery store in a national park. During graduate school, I took a year off to participate in a long-term internship at a pharmaceutical company in Ireland. Furthermore, in Japan, I balanced my studies with a part-time job in a hospital’s nutrition department and even launched a university student public relations organization, dedicating my efforts to PR activities.
I will leverage the challenging spirit and strong curiosity I’ve cultivated through these experiences to engage in various tasks at Green Carbon and grow day by day. I look forward to working with you!
Q. What kind of work are you involved in? Please tell us about your job responsibilities.
I am currently a member of three teams: the Research Team (①) within the Global Business Department, the Development Team (Vietnam) (②), and the System Development Team (③).
① In the Research Team, my primary role is creating the documentation required for project credit issuance. ② With the Development Team (Vietnam), I collaborate with local staff to manage and support projects in Vietnam. ③ For the System Development Team, I am involved in developing a new rice paddy management application for international use.
Q. What do you find most rewarding about your job?
The most rewarding experience so far was supporting the successful seminar in Vietnam from behind the scenes. Receiving positive feedback via email from participants saying “it was very useful” gave me a great sense of accomplishment.
While I wasn’t responsible for the entire seminar planning from the very beginning, I proactively got involved in various tasks midway through and worked closely with the local staff to prepare. Collaborating across borders towards a single goal, seeing it take shape, and ultimately making the participants happy was an invaluable experience. Of course, conducting the seminar for the first time also revealed various challenges and areas for improvement. Still, I strongly feel that I can use this experience to make future seminars even more successful.
Q. What has been the happiest experience for you working at Green Carbon?
The most memorable thing for me has been hearing directly from a collaborating university that “farmers are genuinely happy with the projects Green Carbon is undertaking.”
Currently, Green Carbon’s primary focus is on projects that reduce methane gas emissions using a method called AWD (Alternate Wetting and Drying). Unlike traditional rice farming, which keeps paddy fields constantly flooded, AWD is a water management technique known as “intermittent irrigation,” where water is temporarily drained, the fields are dried, and then re-flooded in a repeating cycle.
Some time ago, when a university partner who collaborates on our projects visited our headquarters, we had a deep discussion about job satisfaction. It was then that I heard how “farmers are experiencing various benefits by introducing AWD to their paddy fields and are extremely pleased.”
Honestly, working at Green Carbon HQ means we don’t often get to hear directly from farmers on the ground. However, hearing concrete feedback like this, even indirectly, that what we are doing as a company is contributing to the happiness of farmers, was truly heartwarming and brought immense joy.
Q. What do you want to challenge next?
Moving forward, what I want to challenge at Green Carbon, in addition to further project expansion, is to focus on establishing internal rules and strengthening our team structure.
About three months into my role, my understanding of operations has deepened, and my bond with colleagues and teammates has grown stronger. Of course, there’s still much to learn, and I aim to improve daily, but I feel there’s room for improvement in our current internal system.
My reason for feeling this way is that even with the current number of projects, the individual workload is very heavy. I believe that expanding projects further under the current circumstances carries a high risk in terms of maintaining quality and ensuring members’ work-life balance.
That’s why I want to take this opportunity to challenge myself to establish sustainable team structures and task management for the future. By building efficient workflows and creating rules that clarify roles and responsibilities, I aim to develop an organization that can advance projects more smoothly. I am confident that this is an indispensable step for Green Carbon to continue growing and for the sake of our current and future colleagues.
Q. Finally, please give a message to those who want to work at Green Carbon.
I feel that Green Carbon is a company that respects the individual opinions and presence of its employees and interns. If you have specific goals or want to challenge many different things, I think this is an excellent environment. Let’s enjoy creating a new market together while growing both the company and ourselves!
