Billionaires under 50 in Japan 2017

To be a Billionaire is a dream for many people in the world.
There are around 2,000 billionaires in the world, and around 500 of them are american.
On the other hand, there are only 28 billionaires in Japan.
The reasons why there are no so many billionaires in Japan maybe as follows.

1. In contrast to American people who respect for individuality and consider a pursuit for American dream as a virtue, Japanese people tend to feel envious for someone who became extraordinary rich.
Japanese society was once referred to as "Middle class hundred millions". Japanese people love to be uniform and exclude anomalies.


2. Japanese entrepreneurs tend to try to exit their company at comparatively cheap value. Japanese venture capitals also often give pressures to entrepreneurs to exit as soon as they can.
IT behemoths such as Facebook or Google became successful thanks not only to founders' skill but also to investors' understanding to their dream.

For the reasons above, It is quite difficult for Japanese entrepreneurs to be come billionaire.

But still there are 28 billionaires in Japan. They made their wealth through Pachinko gambling, real estate business, telecommunications and IT company.
3 of them are under 50 years old and all of them made their wealth through IT related industry.

Now, Let me introduce you about these 3 billionaires.

Yoshikazu Tanaka was born at Mitaka city, Tokyo. He entered Sony Communication Network after graduating from Nihon University.
Afterword he moved on to Rakuten, Inc. and worked on C2C suctions and blogs.

He started to build his own SNS "GREE" from the winter of 2003. He opened GREE to public at Feb 2004 and quitted Rakuten at Oct 2004.

The registered member of GREE grew exponentially and he decided to found new company "GREE, Inc." to manage his own service.

He has his company go public at June 2010 to First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
When GREE has gone public, he was 33 years old and 3 months which was the youngest in the history at that time.

On 2012, he recorded 4.3 billion dollars which was his highest record so far.
But since the new law restriction for social games damaged GREES's business, company's estimated value plunged and so is his personal wealth.

His current net worth is 1.1 billion dollar.

Yusaku Maezawa has very unique career.
Even though he attended Waseda Jitsuhyo high school in 1991, he did not go to college. In stead, he went to USA with his girl friend started to buy and collect his favorite CDs and records. After he returned to Japan in 1995, he started to sell these CDs and records. That is the start of his business of EC website.

In 1998, Maezawa launched his new business and named new company Start today.
Start Today shifted its form of business to an online platform and started to sell clothing.

In 2004, he opened his new retail clothing website Zozotoen and he had his company go public in 2010.
In 2012, Started Today was listed in the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Kenji Kasahara was born on Dec 6, 1975 in Minoh, Osaka prefecture.

He started a job recruiting web service "Find job!" at 1997 when he was 21 years old which still is online now under the management of mixi, Inc..

He also found eMercury Inc. which runs EC auction website, eHammer at 1999.
He sold eHammer business on 2000.
On 2004, he started his game changing business Mixi at the age of 28.
Mixi was the first big SNS website in Japan, and became popular quickly.
Afterword, Mixi users grew exponentially and company. And he had his company go public on 2006 to Mothers Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

However after Facebook started its service in Japan in 2008. Mixi was lost in competition and withered very quickly.

He retired his job as CEO in 2013 and designated Yusuke Asakura as his successor.

Everybody thought Mixi died.

But surprisingly Mixi came back to life thanks to the mega hit of smartphone game app, "Monster Strike" in 2013. This success has elevated the company value and so was his own wealth. And as a result he successfully listed as one of the billionaires in Japan.