Takuya Okada

Takuya Okada is a Japanese businessman and honorary chairman of AEON Group, which he built from his family's kimono shop into a leading retailer.

Born on 19 September 1925 in Yokkaichi, Mie, he is the seventh head of the Okada family, whose shop, Okadaya, had sold kimono fabric in the city for generations. His father died when he was two. At school he played catcher on the baseball team, and as a commerce student at Waseda University he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in the wartime student mobilisation.

He came home in September 1945 and set about rebuilding Okadaya. The shop reopened in March 1946, and that June, still a student, he became president of the newly incorporated company. He advertised it around Yokkaichi on a red bicycle, won customers with low prices, graduated in 1948 and grew Okadaya into a general supermarket.

In 1969 Okadaya merged with Futagi of Himeji and Shiro of Suita to form JUSCO, with Okada as its first president. He moved to Osaka to run it nationally and absorbed retailer after retailer, later saying that "the history of a company is the history of its mergers." The group was renamed AEON in 1989. By early 2016 it had about 300 subsidiaries, ¥9.55 trillion in consolidated sales and some 560,000 employees.

Pollution in his home city, where Yokkaichi asthma became a national scandal in the 1960s, turned him towards environmental work. He founded the AEON Environmental Foundation in 1990 and started the tree planting the group still carries out. He stepped down as chairman in 2000 and has led the foundation since.

His honours include the international retailer award of the US National Retail Merchants Association (1985), British and Brazilian decorations (1989), honorary doctorates from Waseda University (2002), Mie University (2009) and Korea University (2009), and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun (2023). He wrote two books on retail management, "Put Wheels on the Main Pillar" (1983) and a 1996 sequel, and chaired the Tokyo supporters' association of the sumo champion Takanohana.

His eldest son, Motoya Okada, is president of AEON; his second son, Katsuya Okada, is a politician and former Deputy Prime Minister of Japan.