New games! PlayTrivia andBirthle.

The Most Famous

BUSINESSPEOPLE from Japan

This page contains a list of the greatest Japanese Businesspeople. The pantheon dataset contains 601 Businesspeople, 18 of which were born in Japan. This makes Japan the birth place of the 10th most number of Businesspeople behind India and Switzerland.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Japanese Businesspeople of all time. This list of famous Japanese Businesspeople is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Japanese Businesspeople.

1. Soichiro Honda (1906 - 1991)

With an HPI of 67.58, Soichiro Honda is the most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 42 different languages on wikipedia.

Soichiro Honda (本田宗一郎, Honda Sōichirō, 17 November 1906 – 5 August 1991) was a Japanese engineer and industrialist. In 1948, he established Honda Motor Co., Ltd. and oversaw its expansion from a wooden shack manufacturing bicycle motors to a multinational automobile and motorcycle manufacturer.

2. Kiichiro Toyoda (1894 - 1952)

With an HPI of 63.64, Kiichiro Toyoda is the 2nd most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 29 different languages.

Kiichiro Toyoda (Japanese: 豊田喜一郎(とよだきいちろう), Hepburn: Toyoda Kiichirō, June 11, 1894 – March 27, 1952) was a Japanese businessman and the son of Toyoda Loom Works founder Sakichi Toyoda. His decision to change Toyoda's focus from automatic loom manufacture into automobile manufacturing created what would become Toyota Motor Corporation.

3. Akio Morita (1921 - 1999)

With an HPI of 63.12, Akio Morita is the 3rd most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 36 different languages.

Akio Morita (盛田昭夫, Morita Akio, January 26, 1921 – October 3, 1999) was a Japanese entrepreneur and co-founder of Sony along with Masaru Ibuka.

4. Hiroshi Yamauchi (1927 - 2013)

With an HPI of 59.84, Hiroshi Yamauchi is the 4th most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 31 different languages.

Hiroshi Yamauchi (山内溥, Yamauchi Hiroshi, 7 November 1927 – 19 September 2013) was a Japanese businessman and the third president of Nintendo, joining the company on 25 April 1949 until stepping down on 24 May 2002, being subsequently succeeded by Satoru Iwata. During his 53-year tenure, Yamauchi transformed Nintendo from a hanafuda card-making company that had been active solely in Japan into a multibillion-dollar video game publisher and global conglomerate. He was the great-grandson of Fusajiro Yamauchi, Nintendo's first president and founder. Hiroshi Yamauchi owned the Seattle Mariners baseball team from 1992 until his death. In April 2013, Forbes estimated Yamauchi's net worth at $2.1 billion; he was the 13th richest person in Japan and the 491st richest in the world. In 2008, Yamauchi was Japan's wealthiest person with a fortune at that time estimated at $7.8 billion. At the time of his death, Yamauchi was the largest shareholder at Nintendo.

5. Iwasaki Yatarō (1835 - 1885)

With an HPI of 59.34, Iwasaki Yatarō is the 5th most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 29 different languages.

Iwasaki Yatarō (岩崎弥太郎, January 9, 1835 – February 7, 1885) was a Japanese industrialist and financier known as the founder of Mitsubishi, one of Japan's largest conglomerates.

6. Masayoshi Son (1957 - )

With an HPI of 58.15, Masayoshi Son is the 6th most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 35 different languages.

Masayoshi Son (Japanese: 孫正義, romanized: Son Masayoshi, Korean: 손정의, romanized: Son Jeong-ui; born 11 August 1957) is a Japanese billionaire technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. A third-generation Zainichi Korean, he naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 1990. He is the founder, representative director, corporate officer, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp. (SBG), a strategic technology-focused investment holding company, as well as chairman of UK-based Arm Holdings. As an entrepreneur, he achieved notability in PC software distribution, computing-related book and magazine publishing, and telecommunications in Japan, starting in the 1980s and booming throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Poor investment decisions of Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group led to a panoply of losing investments across the history of the company. Since Son founded SoftBank in 1981, he has made many investments, but the vast majority of those deals failed, and his reputation as an investor rests almost solely on his $20 million initial investment in Alibaba Group in 2000, a stake that had grown to a paper valuation of about $50 billion just before the Alibaba IPO in 2014. SoftBank's 27 percent stake in Alibaba was worth $132 billion in 2018, including additional purchases of the stock since 2000. The morphing of his own telecom company SoftBank Corp. into an investment management firm called SoftBank Group Corp. made him noted worldwide as a stock investor. However, after a number of high-profile setbacks, Son's investing strategy in the first and second SoftBank Vision Funds established in 2017 and 2019, has been described as one reliant on the greater fool theory. A controversial figure, Son has been called a gambler, mocked by some specialized media and dubbed the worst investor ever. Known for his eccentricity and criticized because of his hubris, his sanity has been questioned in the media prompting him to reply with humorous assent. In 2013, Son was placed 45th on the Forbes magazine's list of the World's Most Powerful People. In the 2018's ranking, he was placed on the 55th position. As of 2023, Son ranks 69th on the Forbes's list of The World's Billionaires and is #239 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He had for many years the distinction of being the person who had lost the most money in history (more than $59bn during the dot com crash of 2000 alone, when his SoftBank shares plummeted), a feat surpassed by Elon Musk in the following decades.

7. Torakusu Yamaha (1851 - 1916)

With an HPI of 57.84, Torakusu Yamaha is the 7th most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 19 different languages.

Torakusu Yamaha (山葉寅楠, Yamaha Torakusu, 20 April 1851 – 8 August 1916) was a Japanese businessman and entrepreneur known as the founder of the Yamaha Corporation. Yamaha was the first Japanese manufacturer of the reed organ and established Nippon Gakki Co Ltd in Hamamatsu to produce organs and other musical instruments including pianos and harmonicas. Nippon Gakki was later renamed the Yamaha Corporation in his honor.

8. Fusajiro Yamauchi (1859 - 1940)

With an HPI of 57.76, Fusajiro Yamauchi is the 8th most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 25 different languages.

Fusajirō Yamauchi (山内房治郎, Yamauchi Fusajirō, 22 November 1859 – 1 January 1940), born Fusajirō Fukui (福井房治郎), was a Japanese entrepreneur who founded Nintendo Koppai, the company now known as Nintendo. Yamauchi lived in Kyoto, Japan and had a wife and a daughter, Tei Yamauchi, who later married Sekiryo Kaneda. We

9. Eiji Toyoda (1913 - 2013)

With an HPI of 53.70, Eiji Toyoda is the 9th most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Eiji Toyoda (豊田英二, Toyoda Eiji, 12 September 1913 – 17 September 2013) was a Japanese industrialist. He was largely responsible for bringing Toyota Motor Corporation to profitability and worldwide prominence during his tenure as president and later, as chairman. He was succeeded as the president of Toyota by Shoichiro Toyoda.

10. Mikimoto Kōkichi (1858 - 1954)

With an HPI of 52.35, Mikimoto Kōkichi is the 10th most famous Japanese Businessperson. His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Kokichi Mikimoto (Japanese: 御木本幸吉, Hepburn: Mikimoto Kōkichi, 25 January 1858 – 21 September 1954) was a Japanese entrepreneur who is credited with creating the first cultured pearl and subsequently starting the cultured pearl industry with the establishment of his luxury pearl company Mikimoto. He was inducted into the House of Peers by imperial decree and posthumously awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure. On 18 April 1985, the Japan Patent Office selected him as one of Ten Japanese Great Inventors. The company was ranked as one of the world's most luxurious brands by Women's Wear Daily Magazine and Mikimoto was considered one of the best Japanese financial leaders of the 20th century by Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He is also known as the founder of Mikimoto Pharmaceuticals, a company specialising in beauty products containing pearl calcium. Mikimoto Pearl Island is named after him. In addition, the "Phoenix Mikimoto Crown" used by Miss Universe winners as well as the pageant crown used by Miss International is credited to his patented work.

People

Pantheon has 18 people classified as businesspeople born between 1835 and 1966. Of these 18, 7 (38.89%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living businesspeople include Masayoshi Son, Tadashi Yanai, and Tatsumi Kimishima. The most famous deceased businesspeople include Soichiro Honda, Kiichiro Toyoda, and Akio Morita. As of April 2022, 2 new businesspeople have been added to Pantheon including Hiro Matsushita and Joi Ito.