Hirotake Yano — BrandWiki

Hirotake Yano (矢野博丈; April 19, 1943 – February 12, 2024) was a Japanese businessman who was the founder of the Daiso discount retail chain.

Biography

Hirotake Yano was born Koro Kurihara in Beijing, China in 1943.[1][2] He came from a family of five brothers and three sisters.[1] His father and two brothers were doctors.[1]

Yano's family moved back to his father's home town Higashi-Hiroshima when World War II ended.[2] Yano took up boxing while at Hiroshima Kokutaiji High School in Hiroshima, and became a Hiroshima Prefectural representative.

Daiso

Yano established his first company named Yano Shoten (Yano Store) in 1972 when he was 29, selling items from the back of a truck and displaying his goods on a mobile wooden stand.[2]

In 1977 he changed the company name to Daiso Industries and introduced the universal price of ¥100. Yano has stated that having to tag many different products with different prices was becoming too time-consuming for him and his wife, so they just decided to make things simpler by pricing every item at ¥100.[1] Yano was one of the first retailers in Japan to adopt a single-price model. This coincided with the start of a shift in Japanese consumer culture after the oil crisis and economic downturn of the mid-1970s, leading to success for the company.[5]

In 1987 Yano developed the 100 Yen Daiso company and in 1991 the company opened its first directly managed shop in permanent premises, in Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture.[1][5][2]

Yano was noted for his live-for-the-moment attitude, which comes from his varied experiences and failures, particularly the bankruptcy of his father-in-law's fishery, which Yano took over in his 20s.[1] In 2001 he stated: "I have failed many times, and I thought that whatever I tried, nothing was going to succeed. [...] But I kept going because I thought there was nothing else I could do."[1] Yano was also quoted in 2001 as saying: "I am not a smart person. I have no talent. I just try my best and work hard to sell my products."[6] In 2016 Yano said that he doesn't see himself as a "cool" or "modern" manager. He said he doesn't have any clear vision or strategy, and that he just likes to try things out and makes decisions based on gut instinct.[7]

Yano's busy lifestyle led to him suffering a stroke in 2018.[8] In 2018 Yano named his younger son Seiji Yano as president of Daiso, stating that he had become too old and that "the times and myself do not match".[9] Yano noted that the retaiI industry makes heavy use of technology and computing but said he did not have the skills to do this.[9] In 2019 he won the EY Entrepreneur of the Year national award for Japan.[10]

birth name	Koro Kurihara
birth date	April 19, 1943
birth place	Beijing, China
death date	February 12, 2024
death place	Higashihiroshima, Japan
occupation	Businessman

Biography

Daiso

References