Yoshikazu Tanaka
| Yoshikazu Tanaka | |
|---|---|
| Born | 18 February 1977 Mitaka, Tokyo, Japan |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Education | Nihon University Tsurugaoka Senior High School; Nihon University, Faculty of Law, Department of Political Economy |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur, businessman |
| Employer | Gree, Inc. |
| Title | Founder; representative director and president, Gree, Inc., from 2004 |
| Known for | Founding the social networking service GREE and the company Gree, Inc. |
Yoshikazu Tanaka (born 18 February 1977) is a Japanese entrepreneur, best known as the founder of the social networking service GREE and of the company that developed it, Gree, Inc. Tanaka built GREE from a personal side project into a listed company, and press coverage around 2009 and 2010 described him as one of the youngest self-made billionaires in Asia.
Tanaka's career before GREE included stints at two established Japanese internet and technology companies, Sony Communication Network and Rakuten, before he left salaried employment to run his own service full time. In later years he was also the subject of a widely repeated but disputed quote about Nintendo, which he has denied making.
Early life and education
Tanaka was born in Mitaka, a city in Tokyo, on 18 February 1977. As a junior high school student he read Power Shift by the American futurist Alvin Toffler, and the book left him keenly interested in the changes that informatization and information and communication technology were bringing to society. During a short study period at a university in the United States, Tanaka used the internet for the first time and became convinced that its spread would drive dramatic social change; watching new internet companies such as Netscape and Yahoo! emerge, he concluded that a similar internet industry would take shape in Japan and decided to pursue a career in internet-related business.
Tanaka attended Nihon University Tsurugaoka Senior High School and went on to Nihon University's Faculty of Law, where he studied in the Department of Political Economy.
Career
Sony and Rakuten
After graduating from university, Tanaka joined Sony Communication Network, now Sony Network Communications, as part of the company's first class of new graduate hires. He worked in a department responsible for management strategy and service planning, where his duties included supporting overseas business and negotiating with telecommunications carriers.
In February 2000, Tanaka moved to Rakuten, where he planned and developed a range of new consumer internet services, including a person-to-person auction service, the blogging platform Rakuten Blog, an affiliate advertising network and a product review service.
Founding GREE (2003 to 2004)
From the winter of 2003, at the age of 26, Tanaka began developing a social networking service called GREE as a personal hobby alongside his work at Rakuten. He opened GREE to the public in February 2004 as a personal website, and by March 2004 it had attracted more than 10,000 users, a rate of growth that made the service difficult for him to manage alone. Tanaka left Rakuten in October 2004, and in December 2004 he established Gree, Inc. to run the growing service, becoming its representative director.
Japanese-language sources describe Tanaka as continuing to hold the titles of representative director and president of Gree, Inc., but the most recent such source available here dates from 2018. His current status at the company could not be confirmed against more recent company disclosures and should be checked before publication.
Stock listings (2008 to 2010)
In December 2008, Gree, Inc. listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's Mothers market for high-growth and emerging companies; its shares closed at their highest value of the day on the first day of trading. In June 2010, five years after the company's founding, it moved to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Tanaka was 33 years and three months old at the time, making him the youngest founder of a company listed on the exchange's first section.
Wealth rankings and recognition (2009 to 2013)
In February 2009, Forbes Asia ranked Tanaka 24th on a list of "Japan's 40 Richest Billionaires", with an estimated net worth of 850 million dollars; at 32, he shared the youngest-ever position on that list with Takafumi Horie, who had ranked 40th in 2005, and Kenji Kasahara, who had ranked 37th in 2008. In 2010, Forbes Asia estimated his net worth at 1.6 billion dollars and named him "Asia's Youngest Self-Made Billionaire" among billionaires under 35, describing him as the world's second-youngest self-made billionaire after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Forbes Asia put Tanaka's estimated net worth at 2.2 billion dollars in 2011, ranking him 13th in Japan and 540th worldwide, and at 4.3 billion dollars in 2012, ranking him fifth in Japan and 248th worldwide. By 2018, Forbes reported his total assets at 123 billion yen, placing him 42nd on its list of Japan's wealthiest people.
Tanaka received a number of other media honours in this period. In December 2011 he was named to GQ Japan's "Men of the Year 2011". In April 2012 Fortune included him among "Asia's 25 hottest people in business", and in October 2012 the magazine named him to its "40 Under 40" list of young business stars, the only Japanese figure included that year. In March 2013, Forbes listed him among the "World's 12 Most Eligible Billionaire Bachelors". In June 2010, Tanaka also appeared on the Japanese television programme Cambria Palace on TV Tokyo, in an episode about the frontline of the IT business.
Comments on the games industry
Tanaka's public image was affected by a quotation he denies making. A freelance journalist reported in the newspaper Yukan Fuji that a young job applicant had told an interviewer, "You don't know how to beat Nintendo, do you? We already know", and this line came to be attributed to Tanaka himself as it spread. In an interview with Nikkei MJ published on 23 March 2018, Tanaka said he had never made such a remark, adding that he had grown up playing Nintendo's games and liked the company. He reflected that the comment gained traction partly because Gree, Inc. was not well liked by users at the time; had the company enjoyed more public goodwill, he said, people would have assumed he could not have said such a thing. According to reporting by KyariKone News, the "how to beat Nintendo" line continued to be raised online whenever news of strong Nintendo results appeared, even after Tanaka's denial.
On the broader games business, Tanaka said users in various countries had grown accustomed to the high production values of leading American studios, and argued that this had led to a re-evaluation of the distinctive worldviews and storytelling of Japanese-made games. Asked about the proliferation of similar social games, he said developers should not change direction too quickly and should focus on giving users what they currently wanted, adding that once a particular type of game became popular, it was reasonable for developers to make similar titles.
Publications
Tanaka wrote Until I Build a Company in Roppongi (2005) and co-authored, with Kazuaki Mori, Why Don't Japanese People Succeed Overseas? The Key to Raising International Competitiveness Lies in Developing Global Talent (2012). He also supervised a 2005 book on building personal networks through social networking services, written by Kazuhide Harada.
The company was subsequently reorganised as GREE Holdings, Inc. Tanaka has served as its chairman since September 2014 and resumed the presidency in October 2024, and he remained founder, chairman and chief executive in 2026.
Assessment
Tanaka's central achievement was turning a side project built in his spare time into a public company within five years, and doing so at an age, 33, that made him the youngest founder of a Tokyo Stock Exchange first-section company at the time of listing. The wealth rankings compiled by Forbes and Forbes Asia between 2009 and 2012, whatever their precision as estimates, reflect a period in which outside observers treated Tanaka as one of the more prominent young entrepreneurs to emerge from Japan's internet sector, alongside comparisons to figures such as Mark Zuckerberg.
Set against this, Tanaka's own account of the "how to beat Nintendo" episode is a rare piece of self-criticism in the available material: he attributed the durability of a remark he says he never made to Gree, Inc.'s weak public standing with users at the time, rather than dismissing it purely as a media distortion. The available sourcing on Tanaka is also unevenly current. The fullest account of his role at Gree, Inc. comes from Japanese-language material that describes him in the present tense as the company's representative director and president, but the newest of these references is from 2018, and no more recent confirmation of his position could be established here.