Akira TsugenamiChief Product Officer

Personal correspondence

A tariff a household can remember

Chief Product Officer Japan

I design tariffs, power-saving rewards and an app for Japanese households who should be able to explain their own energy bill without calling us.

The first complaint I answered properly came from a retired schoolteacher in Matsumoto in 1998. Her cable television bill had risen by ¥840, and she had read the enclosed notice twice without finding the reason. The reason was there, in the fourth paragraph, behind a phrase about revised channel packages. I was a billing analyst at Shiokuma Cable Television, a year out of Minakaze University with a degree in economics, and my job was to confirm that invoices matched contracts. Her letter taught me that a correct invoice can still fail the person who receives it.

A household should be able to state the rule of its tariff from memory and predict, roughly, what next month will cost. When that fails, the customer is not careless; the product is unfinished. I would rather sell a simpler product to people who understand it than a cleverer one that only our engineers can follow.

Household electricity contracts
94,000
March 2026; LP gas serves a further 176,000 homes
Households on the two-band tariff
33,400
One cheaper window, 10:00–15:00 daily
Solar-and-battery subscriptions
5,200
Homes whose feed-in tariff contracts ended

A household tariff works only if the people paying it can remember its rule on an ordinary winter evening.

I am chief product officer of Kiriyasu Energy, a family-controlled company in Matsumoto that supplies LP gas to 176,000 households and electricity to 94,000 across Nagano and Yamanashi prefectures. Group revenue for the year ended March 2026 was ¥58.6 billion. My team of fifty-two designs the tariffs customers see, the household app, our power-saving rewards and a solar-and-battery subscription for homes whose feed-in tariff contracts have ended. Prices are approved by the president with our supply and trading team; I am accountable for each product's structure, the evidence behind it and the way it is explained.

Japan opened household electricity retail to new suppliers in April 2016, and hundreds of companies registered to sell. Many of us learnt during 2021 and 2022 that wholesale prices can move far faster than a family budget. Our customers are older than Japan's average, and many live in detached houses through long, cold winters. When a bill rises, they rarely blame the fuel-cost adjustment, the renewable energy surcharge or the end of a government relief payment. They blame the company whose name is printed at the top of the page.

I came to energy after seventeen years designing broadband and mobile plans in Tokyo, where I saw how much revenue can quietly depend on customers misunderstanding what they pay for. I now test our products with the people least likely to read a chart: customers over seventy-five, sons and daughters who manage a parent's account from another city, and households without a smartphone. If they can explain a product back to us in their own words, it is usually ready to sell.

A tariff with two bands, not four

Our supply team's four-band design followed wholesale costs more closely. In a winter trial, 38 per cent of households on it could name their cheapest hours after six weeks, against 81 per cent on two bands. We launched the simpler tariff and accepted a smaller modelled procurement benefit.

Rewards that do not punish frugal homes

Our power-saving events pay a small amount for taking part as well as for measured reduction, because baseline methods give almost nothing to households already using the minimum. That design cost about ¥15 million more in one winter than paying for reduction alone.

A battery comparison our sales team disliked

Solar owners leaving the feed-in tariff see the battery subscription net of its monthly fee, calculated from their own half-hourly data. For most, it costs more than it saves. Sales reached half the plan, and first-year cancellations fell to 1.2 per cent.

Current focus

I am redesigning our winter bill notices so that each change in the total is attributed to its cause, whether that is our own price, the fuel-cost adjustment, the renewable energy surcharge, a relief payment ending or the household's own consumption.

Conversations I welcome

I would welcome a first outside directorship at a company that serves households through long-term contracts, with about twenty-four days a year available, subject to my president's consent and a careful review of commercial relationships.

The leadership record

Trusted with consequential decisions.

Formation

  • Bachelor of economicsMinakaze University · 1997
I argued for four bands and still think the cost signal mattered. Akira did not dismiss the model; he brought trial results by age group and asked me to price the difference. He then asked that my team's estimate of what the simpler tariff costs be published every year, which not every product head would invite.
Ryohei SakuramineHead of supply and trading, Kiriyasu Energy
The full record ↗

Contact

I would welcome a first outside directorship at a company that serves households through long-term contracts, with about twenty-four days a year available, subject to my president's consent and a careful review of commercial relationships.

  • Board appointments
  • Advisory roles
Write to Akira Contact page