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Tokyo Otaku Mode Acquired by Shogakukan — Reflections From Someone There Since the Early Days

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Tadashi Shigeoka · Wed, November 22, 2023

Tokyo Otaku Mode has been fully acquired by Shogakukan, one of Japan’s largest publishers. Tokyo Otaku Mode set out to bring Japanese anime and manga to the world, and over the years it grew from a media business into e-commerce and cross-border logistics.

I was part of this company for about eight years from its early days, working as an engineer and holding shares as a small shareholder. So this news was not something I could read as just another industry headline. As someone who was inside it, let me look back on the journey from the founding to this day.

Starting From “Japanese Otaku Culture, to the World”

Tokyo Otaku Mode was founded in March 2011. Its CEO, Naomitsu Odaka, came from the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch and later served as CFO of Gaiax. The year after founding, in April 2012, the company set up a US entity with global expansion in mind. From the very start, it was built to take on the world rather than the domestic market alone.

It began as a media business. The company published the latest news about Japanese anime and manga in English, gathering fans around its Facebook page. The following eventually reached 20 million. For a service originating in Japan at that time, that number was exceptional, and it was proof that the idea — delivering Japanese content in English, directly to fans of otaku culture abroad — genuinely resonated.

I got involved right around the time this media operation was still finding its footing. We spent our days building, measuring, and fixing, watching the data to learn what got read and what took off. The audience was fans all over the world, so the scale of the responses and the time-zone spread were nothing like a domestic service. For an engineer, that environment — where a global audience was the premise from day one — was itself a rare experience.

From Media to E-Commerce, Then Cross-Border Logistics

After building a connection with fans worldwide through media, the business expanded into character merchandise and e-commerce. The next challenge was clear: how do you actually get products to people who love Japanese content but live overseas, where it is hard to buy?

One answer was Sekai Logi, a cross-border logistics service. It was a logistics outsourcing operation that let products bought through e-commerce or crowdfunding be shipped anywhere in the world. From media that delivered content to infrastructure that delivered physical goods, the center of gravity of the company quietly shifted. The engineering problems shifted too — from presentation and distribution toward the grittier realities of inventory, shipping, and payments.

In September 2014, Tokyo Otaku Mode also became the very first investment by the Cool Japan Fund, Japan’s public-private fund. It was a moment where the national policy goal of taking Japanese pop culture to the world lined up exactly with what Tokyo Otaku Mode was trying to do.

Watching the Funding Journey as a Shareholder

On the financing side, Tokyo Otaku Mode raised a meaningful amount over the years. Adding up the disclosed Series A and Series B rounds, the total came to more than 1.8 billion yen. Most recently, the company raised funds from Nissay Capital in January 2018, and its estimated valuation as of August 2022 was reported to be around 3 billion yen.

I was an engineer and, in a very small way, also a shareholder. So every time funding news came out, I was looking at this company from two sides at once: the side that builds the technology, and the side that watches the company’s value grow. Seeing the things I had built with my own hands get recognized as a business and accumulate as numbers — being a party to that process was a special experience even within my career as an engineer.

Why Shogakukan?

The terms of this acquisition have not been disclosed. Still, the very fact that the buyer was Shogakukan says a lot about how well this deal fits together.

Shogakukan is, needless to say, a publisher that holds a vast catalog of popular content. For taking that in-house IP abroad, Tokyo Otaku Mode — with its years of connection to English-speaking fans and its hands-on know-how in cross-border e-commerce and logistics — was a clean complementary piece. One side holds the content; the other holds the route to deliver it to the world. By becoming one, Shogakukan is expected to strengthen the overseas expansion of its own IP by a notch.

The leadership reflects that too. Odaka stays on as CEO and Motoi Ataka continues as Vice President. Nobuhiro Oga, CEO of Shogakukan, becomes chairman, with directors and auditors dispatched from Shogakukan. Rather than being absorbed and disappearing, the company moves forward on the foundation it had built, now with a larger backer. That is how the landing looked to me.

One Chapter Closes, a New One Opens

Startup stories tend to be told as a binary: an IPO, or extinction. In reality, though, there is also this kind of ending — becoming part of a larger company and going on to expand what you set out to do. The journey of Tokyo Otaku Mode showed one shape of that.

For me, simply having spent those roughly eight early years alongside this company, as an engineer and a shareholder, is something I treasure. Taking on the world from the start, building everything ourselves from media all the way to the infrastructure that delivers physical goods — getting to be on the ground for that was a truly valuable experience.

A new chapter is beginning, and I am looking forward to what comes next for Tokyo Otaku Mode, now as a fan.

This article draws on the reporting by THE BRIDGE.

That’s all from the Gemba, looking back on the news of Tokyo Otaku Mode being acquired by Shogakukan as someone who was there from its early days.

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