Looking Back After 10 Years: Japanet Takata Founder Akira Takata Shares the Story of His Humble Beginnings

Unchanging Convictions

“At the time, we were running a small camera shop here. Sometimes customers would come very early, before opening hours, and while we were busy helping them, my son (the current president) would wake up and go looking for his parents—he actually tumbled down these stairs on the second floor twice.”

Before him sits a finely detailed scale model of what was once his combined home and shop (center photo). Pointing to the tiny staircase and speaking with delight is the familiar face of TV shopping, Mr. Akira Takata (77), founder of Japanet Takata.

This year marks exactly ten years since he stepped down as president. In 1986, Mr. Takata struck out on his own from the camera shop run by his father and established Takata Co., Ltd. After selling compact cameras on local radio, he expanded his network nationwide and entered television shopping in 1994. He then rolled out media strategies across print and the internet as well. In 1999, the company changed its name to the current Japanet Takata, laying the foundation for its mail-order business. As giant e-commerce companies such as Amazon have risen to prominence, why has Japanet continued to focus on TV shopping and still managed to grow?

“I believe a company must embody fueki ryūkō. It’s important to be sensitive to the trends of the times, but it’s equally important to have corporate principles that never change.”

The term fueki ryūkō means recognizing both what is unchanging in essence (fueki) and what continually changes with the times (ryūkō). Mr. Takata has positioned this way of thinking at the core of his management philosophy. The origin of this belief lies in his 16 years of experience selling commemorative photographs at banquet halls in tourist hotels until the age of 40.

“Until I was 40, I went from one hotel banquet hall to another, selling the photos I had taken to guests during their stay. After the evening banquets, I’d rush back to the shop, spend the entire night developing photos, and lay them out at the breakfast venue the next morning for guests to buy. There were many days when I slept only two or three hours. But if the photos didn’t sell, the loss was entirely ours. That experience is my starting point, and there are many things from it that are still reflected in today’s Japanet.”

How can you get photos to sell? Through repeated trial and error, Mr. Takata realized a fundamental truth.

“Customers are tough (laughs). If they don’t think they look good in the photo, it’s not worth 500 yen to them. So even if I showed a photo and said, ‘This is you, ma’am, right?’ they might reply, ‘That’s not me.’ Even if a friend said, ‘It is you,’ they’d get upset and say, ‘I don’t look like that.’ That’s when I decided to keep calling out in a bright, energetic voice while shooting, ‘Please look this way!’ If there are five people, all five will look toward me. Then I can print five photos, and they’ll buy every one of them. Whether we are truly providing the value the customer is paying for within that 500 yen—that’s what matters most. That lesson really sank into me.”

Now known nationwide as a forceful and decisive business leader, Mr. Takata’s beginnings trace back to selling photographs for 500 yen each.

In the November 27 release of FRIDAY (December 12 issue) and the paid edition FRIDAY GOLD, he speaks candidly about the background behind stepping down as president and the reasons Japanet has deliberately chosen not to go public.

For more details and additional photos, click here ↓

From the December 12, 2025 issue of “FRIDAY”