Hiroshi Mikitani

When the Great Hanshin earthquake flattened Kobe on January 17, 1995, Hiroshi Mikitani went looking for his aunt and uncle and found their bodies at a makeshift morgue in a local school. The internet-shopping idea he had sketched in a Harvard Business School classroom in 1992 and filed away stopped being something he would get to later: "We have only one life, and it must be lived to the fullest, not someday, but now."¹

Mikitani is the founder, chairman, and chief executive of Rakuten Group, a Tokyo-based internet and financial-services conglomerate anchored by Rakuten Ichiba, Japan's largest e-commerce marketplace. Around that marketplace he has assembled banking, credit cards, insurance, securities, and Rakuten Mobile, Japan's fourth wireless carrier, along with the messaging app Viber, the e-reading platform Kobo, and stakes in companies including Pinterest and Lyft. He has run the company as a single loyalty-points ecosystem spanning more than 70 services.

Background

Mikitani was born on March 11, 1965, in Kobe, Japan. His father, Ryoichi Mikitani, was an economist and Japan's first Fulbright Scholar to the United States, teaching as a visiting professor at Yale from 1972 to 1974; his mother, Setsuko, was a Kobe University graduate who worked at a trading company. At age seven, Mikitani lived in New Haven, Connecticut, while his father taught, and became fluent in English within roughly two years, remaining bilingual for life. His paternal grandfather was a New York-based businessman and a co-founder of Minolta, and the family repeats a genealogical claim of descent from the samurai general Honda Tadakatsu, though that lineage is not independently corroborated.

Mikitani earned a commerce degree from Hitotsubashi University in 1988, then an MBA from Harvard Business School between 1991 and 1993, sponsored by his employer. He has said the experience reshaped his ambitions: "Before HBS, I never would have considered being an entrepreneur."¹ He married Haruko, a colleague from his bank, who ran Rakuten's back office in its earliest days.

Getting started

Mikitani joined the Industrial Bank of Japan in 1988 and worked as a career banker in project and corporate finance. In 1992, in a Harvard Business School classroom, he sketched an early internet-shopping concept with classmates, then shelved it and returned to the bank in 1993.

The forcing event came on January 17, 1995, when the Great Hanshin earthquake devastated Kobe and killed more than 6,400 people. The loss reordered his sense of urgency without supplying the idea, which he had been carrying since the Harvard classroom. He resigned from the bank in 1996, a move colleagues reportedly called eccentric, and on February 7, 1997, founded MDM, Inc., later renamed Rakuten, with three co-founders and roughly $250,000 of pooled money and no outside investors.

Mikitani's founding insight was that the internet-department-store model larger Japanese companies had already tried and abandoned was not conceptually wrong. As he framed it, the problem was not the concept of online shopping but the execution. Rather than a controlled catalog, he built a marketplace that let small shop owners keep their own customer relationships and storytelling while Rakuten supplied the technology.¹

What he built

Rakuten Ichiba launched on May 1, 1997, with six employees, one server, and 13 merchants, each paying about $650 a month for a customizable storefront.¹ The company was renamed Rakuten in 1999 and listed on the JASDAQ exchange in 2000. In 2004 it acquired what became Rakuten Card and founded the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles baseball team.

Through the 2010s Mikitani expanded by acquisition, adding Kobo in e-reading, the video platform Viki, the cash-back service Ebates for roughly $1 billion, Viber for about $900 million, and the US operations of Buy.com, alongside banking, insurance, securities, and travel businesses. In 2015 Rakuten acquired the Vissel Kobe football club, which Mikitani chairs. In 2016 the company lost its position as Japan's top e-commerce operator to Amazon Japan. In 2018 it launched Rakuten Mobile as Japan's fourth carrier, a capital-intensive build-out widely reported to have driven several years of consolidated losses in the early 2020s.²

By 2017 Rakuten counted more than 14,000 employees, over 42,000 shops, and around $6 billion in sales. For the 2024 fiscal year the group reported consolidated revenue of about ¥2.279 trillion, roughly $15 billion, with around 29,000 employees and operations in more than 30 countries.² Mikitani wrote Marketplace 3.0 in 2013 and co-authored The Power to Compete with his father in 2014.

How he operates

Mikitani has stated his marketplace philosophy consistently: rather than control the whole commerce stack, empower the merchants at its endpoints. He has contrasted the two models directly: "Amazon is like a vending machine; a hyper-efficient supermarket. Rakuten is like a bazaar."¹ His pitch to shopkeepers was that they did not have to understand the internet, only talk to their customers as they always had, while Rakuten handled the technology. He grew through broad diversification by acquisition, folding banking, telecom, sports, and media under one Rakuten Super Points loyalty ecosystem rather than concentrating on a single product. Around 2010 he began requiring English as Rakuten's official internal language, a policy he framed as consistent with his own bilingual origins and with an ambition to run the group as a global rather than a Japanese ecosystem.³

Where things stand

As of the most recent figures reviewed, from 2024, Mikitani remains founder, chairman, and chief executive of Rakuten, with no succession event reported. The group operates at multi-trillion-yen scale, but the Mobile segment has weighed on group profitability for several years since its 2018 launch, an ongoing test of the diversification approach.² Mikitani also sits on the board of Lyft and chairs the board of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. He is widely reported to be a billionaire.

Key facts

• Started Rakuten with about $250,000 of pooled money and no outside investors, launching on May 1, 1997, with one server, six employees, and 13 merchants.
• Found his aunt and uncle's bodies at a school-turned-morgue after the 1995 Kobe earthquake, then resigned from his bank job within about a year.
• Sketched the entrepreneurial idea at Harvard Business School in 1992 and carried it for two years before the Kobe earthquake ended the waiting; the earthquake supplied urgency rather than the idea.
• Is still quoted for the positioning line "Amazon is like a vending machine; a hyper-efficient supermarket. Rakuten is like a bazaar."
• Grew from 13 merchants to a group with revenue over ¥2.2 trillion and around 29,000 employees spanning commerce, banking, a baseball team, a football club, and a mobile carrier.
• Lost Japan's top e-commerce ranking to Amazon Japan in 2016.