Stepping out

By K.N.C. | TOKYO

WHEN Hiroshi Mikitani, one of Japan's most successful entrepreneurs and richest men, considered leaving Japan's prestigious business association, Keidanren, he announced it via Twitter—symbolically bypassing the old guard. This morning he followed it up by sending the group a formal letter of resignation.

"This is not what I should belong to. I am doing business to drive Japan to new Japan, and they want to protect old Japan. So I felt that for fundamental issues, I don't share the values of the current Keidanren," he said in a telephone interview. Mr Mikitani is the founder and chief executive of Rakuten, an innovative retailer and by now an established household name in Japan. "Rakuten is a very value-oriented company, and we challenge many things," he says. "If they were trivial issues, I could live with it. But if it is a fundamental philosophical difference, I don't think it's right to stay there."

Though Keidanren's opposition to energy-market liberalisation is high on his list of reasons why, it goes beyond that, he says. The problem extends to a variety of areas, from accounting standards to the way Keidanren protects big business. It is not the same organisation that he joined in 2004, he says.

When Rakuten became a member, the country was racing forward under a bold reform agenda spearheaded by Junichiro Koizumi, then the prime minister. The Keidanren, too, had adopted a stance of modernising the Japanese business community by undoing old protections and liberalising industries. But since then, the reforms have stalled or gone in reverse.

Mr Mikitani is a prominent symbol of the new Japan: a Japanese Jeff Bezos. Armed with an MBA from Harvard, he left his job at the staid Industrial Bank of Japan in the 1990s to set up Rakuten. The company acts as the online shopping mall for tens of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses. Rakuten handles almost one-third of e-commerce transactions in Japan.

"Maybe we will start a new industry group, but I don't think that will have a strong impact," he says. "We feel trying to start a new trend through our business is the most effective." By being successful and being global, Rakuten can be a role model for other companies, and shift core Japanese values and the educational system to be more globally oriented, for example.

"Most business people fundamentally agree with me," he says. Though his tweet received thousands of replies, almost all of them encouraging him to leave the Keidanren, few business leaders have had the courage to publicly back him. Mr Mikitani is not surprised. "That's Japan and that's what we need to change. Anybody should be able to stand up and say whatever they think."