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):
「住民税を滞納して差し押さえ」「奨学金も打ち切り」お金の管理が苦手だった”年収1000万”のADHD男性（39）が「発達障害専門のFP」になったワケ
This is Part 2 of a two-part interview. Part 1 covers Iwakiri’s childhood, his family’s bankruptcy, and the workplace discrimination he faced after his ADHD diagnosis.
The Letters Keep Coming
Before Kenichiro Iwakiri knows he has ADHD, the consequences of it are already piling up on his doorstep.
He cannot keep up with his student loan payments. He means to deal with the notices, but they sit unopened, and then more arrive, and then the phone calls start. He does not answer those either. Eventually a brightly colored envelope appears in his mailbox — the kind you cannot ignore, because it comes from the court.
He is summoned. A clerk makes him sign a written pledge specifying exactly how much he will repay each month. He signs.
He falls behind on his residence tax. The government seizes his life insurance policy as collateral. He can no longer cancel it.
He lets his car insurance lapse — not deliberately, but because he forgets to renew it. Then he causes an accident. The repair bill runs to several million yen, and he pays it out of pocket because there is no policy to cover it.
Rent is late almost every month. Not by choice. Not from poverty. Simply because the task of paying it on time, every time, is the kind of task his brain will not hold.
Five Million Yen in the Hole
The debt accumulates fastest during his years at the foreign life insurance company.
The firm operates on full commission. Before joining, Iwakiri hears that going independent will make it harder to get credit cards or loans, so he opens several accounts in advance. This turns out to be a mistake.
The company culture is aggressive, extravagant. Colleagues spend freely. Iwakiri falls into the rhythm. He eats dinner at the same Italian restaurant every night, ordering the chef’s choice. He buys a bed for 500,000 yen. He buys watches that cost hundreds of thousands. All of it on credit, on borrowed money, on the unspoken assumption that more will keep coming.
At its peak, when he is twenty-eight, the total debt reaches roughly five million yen — about fifty thousand dollars. One million in revolving credit card balances. Two million from consumer lenders. One million borrowed from a friend. The student loans sit on top of all of it.
His income is not small. In his first year at the insurance company, he earns seven to eight million yen. By his third year, it surpasses ten million. But the money flows in and out so fast, through so many channels, that he loses track entirely. He cannot tell you, at any given moment, whether he is above water or below it.
The Day He Stopped
He pays it all off at thirty-one.
After that, he does not borrow a single yen. Not once.
What changes is not his income but his relationship to spending. The anxiety of carrying debt — the constant, low-frequency hum of owing — becomes something he refuses to feel again. He rewires himself: the pleasure of spending becomes the pleasure of saving. He begins sending money to his parents.
The shift is not gradual. It is a decision, and it holds.
Building Something New
In May 2020, at thirty-four, Iwakiri founds Hinata LLC — a financial planning practice built specifically for people with developmental disabilities.
The name is deliberate. Hinata means a sunny place.
He starts with insurance consultations. His own experience — the policies he was shut out of after his diagnosis, the premiums that doubled, the rejections that came without explanation — gives him a map of the terrain his clients are navigating.
But the work expands quickly. People come to him not just about insurance but about everything: housing loans, savings plans, the basic mechanics of not spending more than you earn. Many of them remind him of his younger self — the reckless spending, the unopened bills, the sense that money is something that happens to you rather than something you control.
He also begins working with parents. Families come to him asking how to manage assets on behalf of a child with a disability. How to plan for a future they may not be around to oversee.
What People Ask Him Most
The most common question, Iwakiri says, is this: I’ve been diagnosed with a developmental disability. Can I still get insurance?
After that: anxiety about housing loans. The fear that money will never accumulate no matter what they do. The sudden drop in income that comes when a person switches from standard employment to disability-category work — and the bewilderment of not knowing what to do next.
These are not exotic problems. They are the ordinary machinery of adult life — insurance, mortgages, taxes, savings — made vastly harder by a brain that processes time, urgency, and executive function differently from what the system assumes.
“I Won’t Tell You That You Can Do It Too”
Near the end of our conversation, I ask Iwakiri what message he wants to send to other people living with developmental disabilities.
His answer is immediate: he does not have one.
“I just want to support them,” he says. “A lot of people with developmental disabilities spend their whole lives feeling like they don’t fit in. I want to cheer them on. That’s it.”
He pauses, then adds something sharper.
“There are people who say, ‘I have a disability and I made it, so you can too.’ I never want to say that.”
I ask him why.
“Because I was just a little bit lucky,” he says. “Think about it this way. A fashion model who’s 175 centimeters tall would never say to someone who’s 168, ‘I worked hard and became a model, so you can too.’ Height is different. Bone structure is different. It would be absurd.”
“But in society, people make that mistake all the time. ‘I did it, so you can.’ Even though our genes are different, our environments are different, everything is different. You don’t need to believe someone else’s success story. Because at the end of that logic is the idea that if you fail, it’s your own fault. And I don’t accept that.”
He is quiet for a moment.
“People who are struggling right now — it’s not because they aren’t trying hard enough. There are so many factors: environment, circumstances, luck. I refuse to reduce it all to personal responsibility. I want more people to be able to live as themselves, without forcing it. And since money is inseparable from that — you can’t live freely if you’re drowning in financial chaos — supporting that part is what I see as my role.”
Author’s Note
Iwakiri published a book in September 2025 through Diamond, Inc., titled “I Might Have a Developmental Disability, but I Want to Get My Finances Together.” It is, to my knowledge, the first personal finance book in Japan written by a financial planner who openly identifies as having ADHD.
What makes Iwakiri’s practice unusual is not the financial advice itself — budgeting, insurance review, loan planning — but the premise that these standard tools must be adapted for brains that work differently. The financial industry assumes a baseline of executive function: the ability to track due dates, open mail promptly, compare options without becoming paralyzed, and follow through on administrative tasks. For people with ADHD, autism, or other neurodevelopmental conditions, these assumptions are the first barrier, not the financial products themselves.
In the Author’s Note for Part 1, I wrote about the harassment Iwakiri received after publication. Behind that reaction are the two frames that media uses for people with disabilities: “inspirational triumph” and “tragic downfall.” Readers open an article expecting one or the other — either an uplifting story of overcoming, or a tragedy that lets them feel “at least I’m better off.” Iwakiri’s article fits neither. ADHD, ten million yen a year, debts paid off, a company founded, a book published. Not an activist, not an inspirational hero — just a person living his life. For some readers, that disrupts the comfortable hierarchy, and disruption becomes the source of anger.
I dislike what is called “inspiration porn” — the structure in which the suffering of disabled people is consumed so that non-disabled people can feel reassured. So I write about people with disabilities as they are: ordinary people, living ordinary lives. 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