When he was starting out in business in the 1960s, Etsuo Miyoshi, who would inherit the major glove maker Swany Corp. from his family, crisscrossed the globe trying to introduce the brand to new markets. (...)

The 83-year-old former president of Swany is pumping hundreds of millions of yen (millions of dollars) into efforts to popularize Esperanto, an artificial language created more than a century ago that has long struggled to really take off. (...)