Japanese Business Leaders with Distinctive Operating Philosophies

Shibusawa helped found around 500 companies in the Meiji era, including Japan's first modern bank and stock exchange, but refused to build a family conglomerate of his own. His idea, set out in his book on the Analects and the abacus, was that profit should serve public good and that businesses should be joint-stock companies open to outside investors. He died in 1931 and appears on Japan's 10,000-yen note.

Toyoda, a carpenter's son, invented power looms and in 1924 an automatic loom that stopped itself when a thread broke, so one worker could watch many machines and faults were caught at once. That principle, building quality checks into the machine, became jidoka, one of the two pillars of the later Toyota Production System. The sale of his loom patents helped fund his son's car company. He died in 1930.

Ohno, a Toyota production engineer, developed from the late 1940s the methods now called the Toyota Production System: making only what the next step needs, signalled by kanban cards, and treating overproduction, waiting and excess stock as waste. It let a cash-poor company compete with American mass producers. The approach depended on close supplier relationships and a stable workforce, which made it harder to copy than its tools suggest.

Matsushita founded the company that became Panasonic in 1918 making electrical sockets, and in 1932 announced a 250-year mission to make goods as cheap and plentiful as tap water. He divided the company into semi-independent divisions in 1933, paired a wide dealer network with mass production, and founded a school to train future politicians. His later years saw the company grow slower and more bureaucratic. He died in 1989.

Honda, a mechanic who started by fitting small engines to bicycles in 1946, ran his company on engineering and racing rather than political connections, defying the trade ministry's wish to limit the number of carmakers. He split the work with his partner Takeo Fujisawa, who handled finance and sales, and both retired together in 1973 without handing the company to their sons. He died in 1991.

Morita co-founded Sony with Masaru Ibuka in 1946 and insisted on selling under its own brand abroad, turning down a large 1955 order from an American retailer that wanted to put its own name on Sony radios. He moved to New York to learn the market and pushed products such as the Walkman over doubts from his own staff. His brand-first, global-from-the-start approach was unusual for postwar Japan. He died in 1999.

Yamauchi took over his family's playing-card firm, Nintendo, in 1949 at 22 and, after failed ventures from taxis to instant rice, steered it into toys and video games. His rule was that hardware should be cheap and the games decisive, so he backed internal designers such as Shigeru Miyamoto and kept tight control over which third-party games reached the Famicom and NES. He died in 2013.

Inamori founded Kyocera in 1959 and ran it with amoeba management: the company split into small teams that each tracked their own revenue and costs per hour, so every employee could see their contribution to profit. He later founded the telecoms company that became KDDI, and in 2010, aged 78, took over bankrupt Japan Airlines without pay and returned it to profit within about two years. He died in 2022.

Suzuki brought 7-Eleven to Japan in 1973 as a licence from the American owner, over sceptics who said small shops could not survive against supermarkets. He built the chain on hypothesis-led ordering, with each store's staff placing several orders a day and checking them against sales data, and on frequent small deliveries of fresh food. Seven-Eleven Japan grew so strong that it bought its American parent. He died in 2026.

Yanai took over his father's tailoring shop in Yamaguchi and opened the first Uniqlo in Hiroshima in 1984. He adopted the model of controlling design, manufacture and sale in one company, kept the range to well-made basics, and developed fabrics such as Heattech with the materials company Toray. He describes his own record as one win in nine attempts, citing failed ventures abroad and into food. He still leads Fast Retailing.

Mikitani left the Industrial Bank of Japan to found Rakuten in 1997 as an online mall where merchants ran their own shop pages, the opposite of Amazon's single storefront, and tied it together with loyalty points used across banking, travel and phones. In 2010 he made English the company's official working language, a much-debated experiment in a Japanese firm. Rakuten's costly move into mobile networks has tested the model.

Son founded SoftBank in 1981 as a software distributor and turned it into a holding company that makes large, concentrated bets on technology, from an early stake in Alibaba to the Vision Fund. He publishes a 300-year vision for the group and openly embraces risk, with huge swings: very large gains, very large losses such as WeWork, and a return to big bets on artificial intelligence. He remains chairman and chief executive.