One interesting thing about learning a new language is that sometimes a single word unlocks an entire way of thinking about the world. A year and a quarter into living and working in Japan, I stumbled across such a word. ベタやり (pronounced “beta yari”).
I learned this word from our CEO, Tsuji-san, who used it in a Money Forward morning all-hands. It translates loosely to ”all in, all the way,” but that’s just the dictionary definition. It’s deeper than a slogan; it’s an attitude, a mindset, a way of living life, especially when building something that matters.
All In, All The Way
The first person who comes to mind when I think of ベタやり is Shohei Ohtani. If you follow baseball at all, you know his name.
Ohtani is a two-way player in a sport that decided, roughly a century ago, that such a thing shouldn’t exist. Modern baseball is built on specialization. You pitch or you hit. You develop one skill to its absolute limit and ignore everything else. Ohtani looked at this system, but decided to master both.
This isn’t a story where a talented kid follows his dreams and everything works out. This is the story where someone commits to something so difficult that most sensible people would call it impossible, then does it anyway.
When being asked what drove him to challenge the seemingly impossible, Ohtani mentioned something his father taught him as a child: the attitude of “giving your all in everything you do.” That’s ベタやり.
But here’s what matters: Ohtani didn’t do this alone. He had teammates who thought the same way. Take Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Dodgers’ MVP pitcher from Japan. During this year’s World Series, something happened that shouldn’t be possible by conventional baseball wisdom.
In Game 6, Yamamoto pitched 96 pitches with zero days of rest, something that would normally disqualify him from pitching the next game, let alone in high-pressure situations. But Game 7 arrived, and in the 9th inning of a critical game, Yamamoto came out of the bullpen anyway. He pitched through the 9th, into the 10th, and into the 11th inning, and then secured the final eight outs of the World Series.
When asked afterward, Yamamoto admitted he wasn’t sure he could do it. He pushed past both physical and mental limits he didn’t know he could transcend. This is ベタやり in its purest form: a fundamental willingness to exhaust yourself completely in service of something larger than yourself. All in. All the way.
Care About The Details Nobody Else Sees
You might think ベタやり is something you see only in professional sports, but this is where I discovered something unexpected about working in Japan.
I work on Money Forward Cloud Accounting Plus, an accounting software product. The work is about as far from professional baseball as you can get, but the same principle shows up everywhere.
Building accounting software in the cloud creates a fundamentally different problem than the desktop software of decades past. When only one person used your accounting system, on their own machine, offline, the complexity was manageable. Now, multiple people in an accounting department use the same system simultaneously. They work at different speeds, make conflicting changes, use features in ways you never anticipated.
What struck me most about the Japanese engineers I work with is their attention to the edge cases. They’ll think of scenarios I would never have considered. They’ll trace through combinations of inputs that seem absurdly unlikely. They’ll say things like, “What if someone in accounting uses this feature at the exact moment another person deletes this related data?”
They were thinking about what actually happens when you ship something. They were thinking about all the people who depend on the software working correctly, not just the 85% of cases that seem obvious.
That’s ベタやり applied to software engineering: delivering the best possible quality software, all in, all the way to the end user. It’s the difference between software that works and software that inspires trust.
Go Big And Go Home
Here’s where I need to be honest about something. When people hear the word “Japanese work culture,” many think of 過労死 (karoushi, death from overwork). They think of the infamous “996” schedule prevalent in other parts of Asia: 9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week.
They think of the trade-off between success and life, where you pick one and sacrifice the other. ベタやり sometimes gets lumped into this narrative, and I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding.
At Money Forward, the culture is different. It’s not “go big or go home.” It’s “go big and then go home.”
During work hours, people genuinely commit to the work. They think deeply. They solve hard problems. They care about quality the way Yamamoto cares about pitching. But then the work day ends. People leave the office. They rest. They spend time with family. They have lives outside of work.
There’s something that happens when you rest properly. Your mind consolidates what it learned. You see problems differently the next day. You come back with creativity you didn’t have when you were exhausted. But more importantly, it’s something elite athletes have known forever.
In one of his interviews, Shohei Ohtani mentioned that the single most important thing he does besides play baseball is sleep. He prioritizes it so heavily that custom sleeping pillows and sleeping masks are on his list of ten essential items. He treats recovery like it’s part of his sport, because it is.
Professional baseball understands something that many software companies haven’t figured out: you can’t give your all if you’re running on empty. The best performance comes not from exhaustion but from the combination of total commitment during the work and genuine rest after.
This is the version of ベタやり I’ve experienced at Money Forward. It’s not “work until you break.” It’s “work with intention, then recover completely.” It’s the understanding that your career and your personal life aren’t a trade-off. They’re complementary. One actually enables the other.
If you’re someone who cares about doing things well. And if you want to do all that while having an actual life outside of work? Then maybe you should consider joining Money Forward.
Check out our career page for openings. We’re looking for people ready to go all in, and then go home ready for tomorrow.
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