'You Can Have All the Capital in the Treasure Box — Without a Jedi Knight, Nothing Moves': The Catalytic Funding Panel Recap (T4IS 2026)

The most quoted line of the Catalytic Funding panel didn’t come from the audience expectation that it would be about money. It came from Ken Shibusawa — great-great-grandson of the man on the 10,000 yen note — and it was about people.

“If you’re talking about catalytic capital,” he said, “you need catalytic human capital. Somebody that says — some Jedi knight says — this is important. You can have all the catalytic capital in the world in the treasure box. But it’s not going to be deployed.”

That tension framed the entire conversation. Japan has the largest pension fund on earth (the GPIF, $1.7 trillion). Japan has been the world’s largest creditor nation almost every year for forty years. NISA is now hoovering up dormant household savings into investment vehicles. And yet, as moderator Tim Kelly (Reuters) opened the session by noting, the gap between Japanese capital and Japanese deployment into climate, development, and crisis financing remains structurally wide. With Shibusawa (founder of Commons Asset Management), Jesper Koll (one of the longest-running Japan economists on the global circuit), and Anastasiia Dieieva (Ukraine, Tokarev Foundation) on stage, the panel turned into a working argument about what it would actually take to close that gap.

Defining the term — and rejecting one premise

The four panelists could not initially agree on what “catalytic capital” meant. Shibusawa offered the cleanest working definition: it’s money that, by entering first, makes other money willing to follow. He divided the universe into financial investors (allergic to risk without a track record) and strategic investors (chasing returns through corporate strategy or new-business creation), and argued that catalytic capital exists primarily to bridge the gap between them.

Koll, in classic Jesper fashion, pushed back: Japan is already an impactful catalytic investor — has been for decades. He pointed to GPIF’s leadership a decade ago on ESG investing, to the recent $10 billion Japanese government fund for medical supply continuity across Southeast Asia, and to a deeper cultural root — sanpō yoshi (三方よし), the Ōmi-merchant doctrine that good business serves seller, buyer, and society. “If you look objectively,” Koll said, “Japanese public money is actually quite diligent in being mindful of not just going for shareholder returns, but spreading things out so that you do have catalytic, impactful investment that actually builds communities.”

Shibusawa wasn’t having it. He named the case study that punctures the optimism: the Keizai Dōyūkai Africa Impact Fund. He spent months pitching about a hundred Japanese corporates and every major financial institution. Not a single bank, insurer, or pension fund came in as lead. “It was a corporate,” he said. “It was Japan Tobacco.”

That dissonance — between Japan’s structural capacity and its institutional inertia — is the real subject of the panel.

Anastasiia Dieieva: capital that arrives when everyone flees

Dieieva reframed the question from the front line. “To Ukraine, catalytic capital actually looks like patience in the very urgent time,” she said. “It’s the capital that arrives when everyone flees, when everyone leaves.”

She laid out three design principles Ukraine has stress-tested under fire. First: invest in human capital before infrastructure, inverting the conventional reconstruction pyramid. “If you invest into the capacity of a woman in a remote area close to the front line where there’s no hospital, and you help her become a health-tech entrepreneur, she will introduce telemedicine which will reach more people.” Second: fund ecosystems, not projects. Projects have end dates; in wartime, when one element collapses, an ecosystem can compensate. Third — and the most provocative line of the evening — abandon the framework theatre: “We are so obsessed with measurement of impact, like we have so many frameworks, but those frameworks crash and they don’t work in societies where you cannot apply these metrics.”

She was, she said, “really sick and tired of this empathetic part of impact — that impact should always be soft, it should be nice, social and environment should play together in the sandbox.” Catalytic capital, in her view, is forward-looking and pragmatic, not emotionally detached but also not paralysed by sentimentality. The proof: Ukraine’s DIA national app is on more than 30 million phones, providing digital access to public services through a wartime state — corruption-reducing, friction-killing infrastructure built when no one would have lent the project capital on a conventional risk model.

Koll picked up the thread with a concrete bridge to Japan: Nippon Cyber Defense, the firm he sits on, opened a Kyiv office last year. Ukraine is the world’s best at applied cybersecurity for the brutal reason that four years under attack tends to clarify things. Japanese capital, in this read, doesn’t go to Ukraine out of charity; it goes because the practical expertise that Japan needs — for its own future — is being forged there now, in real time, under live fire. “The courage for a CEO to actually commit while the going is tough,” Koll said, “I think that courage is going to become more and more valued.”

Pax Nipponica — and the price of getting it wrong

The middle section of the panel turned to Japan’s geopolitical positioning. Koll has been arguing for three years that we are entering an era he calls Pax Nipponica — a moment in which neither the United States nor the People’s Republic of China can be fully trusted by any middle power, and where Japan, by virtue of being rich, admired, and structurally non-threatening (because demographically ageing), becomes the natural honest broker. “Japan is no longer threatening because Japan is old,” he said. “You’re not really worried about Toyota being the next big game changer in the transportation industry. Toyota will be a perfectly fine corporation.”

That observation — half joke, half geopolitical doctrine — has real capital-flow consequences. It positions Japan as the credible counterparty for catalytic capital flowing into developing economies, for global health financing, for post-conflict reconstruction. The role is available; the question is whether Japanese institutions will step into it.

Shibusawa connected this to his ancestor’s philosophy. Eiji Shibusawa, founder of more than 500 Japanese companies and the face of the new 10,000 yen note, argued 150 years ago that business and public good should be integrated — not balanced as competing forces, but woven together as one fabric. The genesis was defensive: Japan had to industrialise or be colonised. The modern interpretation, Shibusawa argued, is different. “Japan will never be a superpower like the US or China. They have vast territories. But what Japan could show is resilience.” Resilience, in his framing, isn’t measurable through ROE or capital efficiency. It’s the very characteristics that look inefficient in normal times — redundancy, multi-stakeholder accountability, slow integration — that prove load-bearing when the environment shifts.

“If your business environment changes and you’re really efficient, you might be really fragile because you’re so efficient,” he said. Western capital markets have spent forty years optimising away exactly the things that make Japanese capitalism resilient. Catalytic capital, in this telling, is the financial expression of sanpō yoshi: it accepts lower short-term efficiency in exchange for an environment that compounds over generations.

The one ask: tax incentives, Jedi knights, and the GPIF question

When Kelly closed the panel by asking each speaker for the one change Japan should make over the next three to five years, the answers were unusually concrete.

Jesper Koll: tax incentives. Specifically, structural tax incentives for Japanese corporations that deploy capital into social-impact ventures. Right now, Koll argued, mobilising private capital for an Africa impact fund requires two years of pitching, a charismatic CEO, and a Jedi-knight middle manager who survives a transfer to Hokkaido — and even then it usually fails. Tax policy is the lever that converts moral consensus into deployable capital. He noted that as Prime Minister Takaichi’s administration shifts more public resources into armaments and defence, the squeeze on civilian social-infrastructure budgets will only intensify. Private capital will have to fill the gap. The question is whether the tax code will let it.

Shibusawa: find and unleash the Jedi knights. The 2025 change to the JICA law — allowing Japan’s overseas development agency to deploy first-loss catalytic capital, a move long advocated and finally enacted — was, in his view, the structurally most important shift in Japanese impact-capital policy in a generation. At TICAD last August, JICA invested first-loss capital into three African impact funds with established track records. The instrument is now legal. What’s missing is the catalytic human capital — the people inside institutions willing to push these deals through layers of risk-averse middle management.

Dieieva: build the dialogue, share the language. Catalytic capital fails when the giver and receiver use the same word to mean different things. Her ask of Japan was the slowest and most underrated — patient bilateral institution-building, embassies and intermediaries on both sides who understand what counts as risk in Kyiv versus what counts as risk in Tokyo.

What this means for 2027

The next Tech for Impact Summit returns to Tokyo on May 18–19, 2027. The themes of this panel — Japan as catalytic counterparty, the tax-policy lever, the resilience-versus-efficiency debate, post-conflict reconstruction financing, and the search for catalytic human capital inside institutions — will be the spine of next year’s investor-track programming.

The panel said something unfashionable: that the most important variable in catalytic capital is not the financial instrument, the framework, or the metric. It’s whether the person with signing authority is willing to act before consensus arrives. Tax incentives can lower the cost. The JICA law can derisk the structure. But somebody, somewhere, has to be the Jedi knight.

T4IS 2027 is built for those people.

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This recap is part of the Tech for Impact Summit 2026 retrospective series. Read the spotlight posts that preceded the panel for each speaker: Ken Shibusawa on patient capital and long-term value creation, Jesper Koll: why the smart money is moving to Japan, Anastasiia Dieieva on rebuilding Ukraine through technology and education, and Tim Kelly on covering Japan’s tech transformation.

Tech for Impact Summit 2027 is invitation-only. Search “Tech for Impact Summit” to explore membership and learn how senior leaders across finance, policy, and impact are joining the next cohort.