It has been 10 years since he stepped down as president! Akira Takata, founder of Japan Net Takata, talks about the company’s origins in the sale of commemorative photos.

Unchanging Beliefs

I run a small camera store here. Early in the morning before the store opened, while we were taking care of a customer, my son (the current president) woke up, looked around for his parents, and fell down this staircase on the second floor twice.

An elaborate model of the former home and store (center photo) is placed in front of him. Pointing to the small staircase, Akira Takata, 77, founder of “Japanette Takata” and the face of the TV shopping business, happily tells his story.

This year marks exactly 10 years since he stepped down as president. Mr. Takata established “Takata Corporation” in 1986, spinning off from his father’s camera store. The company’s business started with the sale of compact cameras on local radio stations, which led to the expansion of the company’s nationwide network, and in 1994, the company entered the TV shopping business. After that, he developed media strategies such as print media and the Internet as needed. In 1999, the company changed its name to the current “Japanet Takata” and laid the foundation for its mail-order business.

I believe that a company has to be ‘timeless. While it is necessary to be sensitive to current trends, it is also necessary to have a corporate belief that will never change.

The phrase “fūyō fad” means that a company should be sensitive to both the unchanging essence (fūyō) and the ever-changing trends (fad), and Mr. Takada has made this concept the foundation of his management philosophy. The origin of this belief lies in his 16-year experience of selling commemorative photos in the banquet rooms of tourist hotels until the age of 40.

Until I was 40, I was always going around the banquet halls of hotels and selling the photos I took to the guests staying there,” he says. After the evening banquet, I would rush back to the store and develop the photos throughout the night, and the next morning I would arrange them in the breakfast room for the guests to buy. It was not uncommon for me to get two or three hours of sleep on those days, but if the photos remained unsold, we lost all the money. This experience was the starting point for me, and there are many things that I use today at Japanet.

How can we sell photographs? After accumulating sales, Mr. Takada realized the essence of this question.

Customers are very demanding (laughs). If the picture doesn’t have a good face for the customer, it’s not worth 500 yen. So when I would show them a picture of someone saying, ‘That’s your wife,’ they would say, ‘That’s not me.’ And when her friend would say, ‘That’s you,’ they would get grumpy and say, ‘I don’t look like this. So I would say, ‘Please look at me! If there are five of you, all five of you will look at me. If there are five people, all five people will look at me, and then they will buy all five prints. I learned the hard way that this is the most important thing.

Mr. Takada is now a well-known and highly skilled businessman. It all started with selling photos for 500 yen a piece.

In the December 12 issue of “FRIDAY” and the paid version of “FRIDAY GOLD,” both of which went on sale on November 27, Takada candidly explains the background to his resignation as president and the reasons why “Japanet” did not dare to go public.

For more details and multiple photos, click here↓.

From the December 12, 2025 issue of FRIDAY