Written by Yu Taguchi | Originally published in Bunshun Online (文春オンライン), August 8, 2025
Photographs by Shigeki Yamamoto / Bungeishunju (photographs not reproduced — see original article)
Original article (Japanese):
「女のケツばっか追ってるからだ」「あいつは頭がおかしい」と言われ…発達障害男性（39）が職場で直面した”生きづらさ”
“I don’t want to use ADHD as an excuse, but I’ve been summoned to court over unpaid student loans. I was late on rent almost every single month.”
Kenichiro Iwakiri is a financial planner who specializes in serving people with developmental disabilities. He has ADHD himself. He has carried hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. He has been called crazy by colleagues. He has been denied professional opportunities because of his diagnosis.
This is the story of how he got here.
(This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. Part 2 covers his debt and his path to becoming a financial planner.)
A Family Torn Apart by Debt
Iwakiri grows up restless. He is careless, forgetful, always making mistakes — especially in math. He watches his younger brother and sister breeze through the things he cannot, and thinks: Everyone else is so effortless.
His family, at least, is comfortable. His mother comes from a samurai lineage. His father’s side are merchants who own several buildings. It is a good life.
Then one day, he comes home from elementary school to find the storm shutters closed in the middle of the day. The whole family is gathered inside. His maternal grandfather sits before them, weeping.
“I’m sorry,” the old man says.
An uncle’s event company has gone bankrupt. Iwakiri’s father had signed on as a guarantor for the company’s loans. The total debt: roughly 200 million yen — about two million dollars. The family home is seized and put up for auction.
Iwakiri says the memory is hazy, as though the shock erased most of it. What remains: a dark house, and everyone crying. After that day, there are no more dinners out. He stops asking his parents to buy him things.
He attends a public high school. For university, private schools are out of the question — the application fees alone are too expensive. He sits for the entrance exams at national universities and is admitted to Niigata University, far from his family’s home in Miyazaki.
The Scholarship That Disappeared
The distance from Miyazaki to Niigata is vast. Iwakiri takes out student loans totaling roughly five million yen — about fifty thousand dollars — to cover tuition, living expenses, and everything in between.
The loans require annual renewal. In his third year, he puts off the paperwork. He keeps meaning to do it. He does not do it. The funding is cut.
He cannot ask his family for money. He researches frantically and finds a separate scholarship program through the city of Niigata. He applies, and it saves him.
Then comes graduation. Iwakiri’s thesis is due. He plans to print it on the day of the deadline. The copier breaks. He barely misses the cutoff and has to beg his professor to accept it.
He gets through. But a pattern has already taken shape: everything happens at the last possible second, balanced on the thinnest edge of disaster.
A Job That Made Him Cry Every Night
The year is 2008 — just before the Lehman Brothers collapse sends the world economy into freefall. Iwakiri gets a job at a company that provides financial consulting to small and midsize businesses. He enters as a salesman.
The company is, as he puts it now, “super black” — the Japanese term for exploitative workplaces that extract everything from their employees and give nothing back. He arrives early. He leaves on the last train. He works weekends.
Within weeks of starting, he is expected to deliver two-hour presentations to company executives. The pressure is crushing. He goes home and cries every night.
He does not know how to manage money. His starting salary is decent, but he eats every meal at restaurants — breakfast, lunch, dinner. Stress drives him to overeat. He gains significant weight.
His inattentiveness follows him into the driver’s seat. He causes so many traffic accidents that he is banned from using the company car.
“It’s Because You’re Chasing Women”
His sales numbers, for the first two years, are terrible. His boss threatens to transfer him to the Nagoya office — a posting notorious for breaking every new hire sent there.
He makes mistakes constantly: paperwork errors, missed details, forgotten tasks. One day, a senior female colleague sends him an email: Your performance is bad because you spend all your time chasing women.
At twenty-four, he begins looking for another job. He receives an offer from Recruit, one of Japan’s most prestigious companies. He is ready to leave.
But someone he meets at a business seminar says something that stops him. “You’re twenty-four. You keep talking about gratitude — but are you really showing it? Have you actually given everything you can to the place you’re at?”
He turns down the Recruit offer. He stays.
In his third year, he becomes the top salesman. The turning point is partly circumstantial: staff reshuffling after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake moves him to a new department where no one knows him as the guy who can’t do anything. He starts fresh, and he delivers.
A college friend’s senior colleague at a foreign life insurance company notices his results and recruits him. At twenty-five, Iwakiri changes jobs. It is at this company that he will eventually earn his financial planner certification.
The Diagnosis
The foreign insurance firm operates on a full-commission model. Iwakiri does well — his income eventually reaches ten million yen a year, roughly a hundred thousand dollars. But his old patterns persist.
He forgets appointments. One day, he gets the time of a meeting wrong and is savagely reprimanded. After that, he cannot bring himself to go to the office. Cold sweat breaks out every time he tries. A doctor diagnoses him with adjustment disorder and restricts his attendance.
Then his boss calls. “I was watching TV and saw someone who reminded me of you. They said it’s called ADHD. Maybe you should get checked.”
Iwakiri goes in for testing. The result: ADHD.
His reaction surprises even himself: I knew it. What a relief.
Everything clicks. The carelessness, the forgotten deadlines, the inability to manage time or money — it all has a name. He stops trying to force himself into a shape that doesn’t fit. What he cannot do, he cannot do. He accepts it.
“He’s Crazy — Don’t Buy Insurance From Him”
The acceptance does not come from the world around him.
A securities company invites Iwakiri to lead a seminar. The event is canceled at the last minute — upper management blocks it after learning about his diagnosis.
Worse still: after leaving the insurance company, he discovers that a former colleague has been telling clients not to buy policies from him. The colleague’s words, relayed back to Iwakiri by others: That guy is crazy. Don’t trust him.
In Part 2, Iwakiri describes the five million yen in debt he accumulated, his summons to court, the spending habits his ADHD fueled — and how he turned his failures into a career helping others navigate the financial system that nearly destroyed him.
Author’s Note
Kenichiro Iwakiri is one of the few financial planners in Japan who openly identifies as a person with ADHD. He spoke candidly about his debts, his accidents, and the letters from the court.
After this article was published, Iwakiri received a flood of hateful comments and discriminatory replies on social media. Bunshun Online is one of the largest news platforms in Japan, with over 300 million monthly page views on its own site and roughly 600 million including external distribution. The impact of publication is enormous. I explain this to every person I interview beforehand, but in Iwakiri’s case, the backlash was particularly severe. His editor and I provided ongoing support for his mental health in the aftermath.
In Japanese media, articles about social minorities frequently attract accusations of “personal responsibility.” This tendency is especially pronounced when the subject is male. Articles about women with disabilities tend to draw empathetic responses; articles about men draw “it’s your own fault” and “stop making excuses.” The more interviews I conduct, the clearer this structural asymmetry becomes.
There is another structure at work. When media portrays people with disabilities, it almost always uses one of two frames: “inspirational triumph” or “tragic downfall.” Successful disabled people are consumed as inspiration porn; those who struggle are consumed as tragedy. Both frames prevent the audience from seeing disabled people as ordinary human beings. Iwakiri is not an activist. He is not campaigning to change attitudes toward disability. He is simply a person living his life. The same is true of every person I have interviewed for these articles. None of them agreed to speak because they wanted to change the world. They simply shared their experiences. I write them as they are. That is all.
This interview was originally published in two parts on Bunshun Online. All photographs were taken by Shigeki Yamamoto of Bungeishunju and are not reproduced here due to copyright. Please see the original articles for the full photo essay.
— Yu Taguchi