Kimi Takura quit his fast-paced job as a deliveryman when he was 22 after he was hospitalized for a month with exhaustion. Out of work, he sold his much-loved Jaguar car, bought a secondhand bus and started a one-man business driving Taiwanese tourists around Japan.
He worked every day he could for the next year, ferrying passengers between Tokyo and Osaka, and to Kyoto and other sightseeing spots, when a travel agent offered to lend him money to buy three more buses. Takura’s business boomed so much he found he needed even more.
For a country boasting multinational giants, including Toyota Motor Corp. and Sony Corp., there are comparatively few people like Takura in Japan willing to spurn the security of lifetime employment for a riskier, but potentially more lucrative, career as an entrepreneur. Only a quarter of small Japanese companies have been in business for less than a decade, compared with more than half in most countries in the developed world.
“I loved driving,” said Takura, chief executive officer of Heisei Enterprise Inc., who dropped out of high school after his father’s business went bankrupt and worked to earn the money for his own car.
He recalls being told that if he was going to drive around, he should at least carry some paying passengers. “I thought it was a great idea,” Takura said in an interview in Fujimi, northwest of Tokyo. “I could drive and earn some money at the same time.”
The company Takura set up in 1992 now operates a fleet of 400 buses for sightseeing, overnight services across Japan and daily school runs. Heisei gets about 60 percent of bus bookings online, compared with about 30 percent at competitors, according to Takura. It’s posted a profit for 20 straight years, supporting about 800 employees.
Going Public
Still, the 51-year-old is far from satisfied. Around December next year, he plans to list Heisei on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in a 10 billion yen ($87 million) initial public offering to ensure the company will continue even after he retires.
“Usually bus companies don’t do IPOs,” he said. But “we’re seen as an IT bus company because we get so much of our money through the Internet.”
Part of the reason Japan has fewer startups is it lags behind other countries in venture-capital funding. The level of venture investment is below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development median and far short of the U.S. and Canada, according to an April 2015 OECD report.