Yuko AshikazeChief Technology Officer

Personal correspondence

Time returned to the drugstore counter

Chief Technology Officer Japan

In a drugstore, good technology returns time to the counter and leaves the necessary conversations in place.

On a Saturday evening in 1999, at a dispensing counter in Kagoshima city, I watched a colleague check one prescription three times because the label printer and the medicine-history record disagreed about a dose. Neither error reached the patient; the printer had been fed from an older master file. Establishing that took forty minutes while eleven people waited on the benches. I still think about that evening. In a pharmacy, technology is judged at the moment a qualified person must decide whether to trust what the screen says.

A system that saves a minute at the till is worth having only if we know where that minute goes. In our stores it should go to a pharmacist's question, a restocked chiller or an older customer who needs help with the app. I will automate ordering, payment and data work readily. I will not automate away the moment when a person must decide.

Drugstores
214
Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Kumamoto and Oita; 78 with dispensing pharmacies
Annual revenue
¥172bn
Year to February 2026; operating profit ¥6.4bn
Technology employees
71
With about 120 partner-company engineers

I judge every store system by whether it returns staff time to the counter without removing a conversation that a customer, a pharmacist or the law still needs.

I am chief technology officer of Kusunomi Drug, a privately held chain of 214 drugstores in Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Kumamoto and Oita prefectures. Food is now 49 per cent of our sales, and 78 stores have a dispensing pharmacy at the back. In the year to February 2026 we recorded ¥172 billion of revenue and ¥6.4 billion of operating profit. My title is executive officer; I hold no seat on our board. My division of 71 employees, working with about 120 engineers from partner companies, runs store systems, payments, the points programme and app, pharmacy systems, data and information security.

I qualified as a pharmacist in 1998 and spent five years at dispensing counters in Kagoshima before I wrote a line of specification. That order still shapes my work. I know what a queue looks like from behind the counter on a Saturday evening, and I know which interruptions a pharmacist can absorb and which are unsafe. When I later learnt software delivery at a pharmacy-software company in Fukuoka, I took that knowledge with me, and I brought its release discipline back when I returned to Kusunomi Drug in 2012.

The three decisions on this site each cost something visible. I postponed code payments by four months in 2019 so that refunds would reconcile under two consumption-tax rates. I let store staff overrule our daily-food ordering forecast for a year, which slowed the labour saving our merchandising team expected. In 2025 I kept medicines and sensitive health products out of a supplier data service and gave up most of a projected ¥270 million. I try to explain those costs as plainly as the benefits.

Code payments arrived late and reconciled

We launched code payments in February 2020 rather than with the October 2019 tax change. Integration through the tills cost ¥340 million against ¥95 million for standalone tablets; in the first six months, 3 of about 41,000 code-payment refunds needed correction.

Daily-food disposal fell while staff kept the final word

Disposal of bread, milk, tofu and prepared dishes fell from 3.6 to 2.6 per cent of daily-food sales within a year, and ordering time from 74 to 31 minutes a store each day. The reduction was smaller than the supplier projected for full automation.

Health purchases stayed outside supplier offers

Our supplier data service started in September 2025 without medicines or 41 sensitive product groups. It earned ¥352 million in twelve months against a ¥640 million plan, and two medicine makers declined to take part.

Current focus

I am replacing the in-store servers in all 214 stores over three years while keeping every store able to sell for a full day without a network connection. In a region where autumn typhoons regularly cut power and data lines, that capability matters more than the saving a thinner design would bring.

Conversations I welcome

I would consider one outside director role at a listed Japanese company serving consumers or patients, outside drugstores and supermarkets, with about twenty-four days a year, subject to my president's consent and a review of supplier and payment relationships.

The leadership record

Trusted with consequential decisions.

Formation

  • Bachelor of pharmaceutical sciencesSatsunami College of Pharmacy · 1998
  • Master of informatics (part-time)Tenmaguri Graduate School of Informatics · 2007
I wanted automatic ordering in every store that autumn and said so in front of the president. Yuko held to her reason codes, and the reports they produced taught my buyers more about our towns than anything I had commissioned.
Ryota KanezumiMerchandising director, Kusunomi Drug
The full record ↗

Contact

I would consider one outside director role at a listed Japanese company serving consumers or patients, outside drugstores and supermarkets, with about twenty-four days a year, subject to my president's consent and a review of supplier and payment relationships.

  • Board appointments
Write to Yuko Contact page