Top 50 Business Influencers in Japan to Know in 2026

Affiliation: Representative director of SMG菅原経営株式会社 (SMG Sugawara Management) and representative tax accountant of SMG税理士事務所 (SMG Tax Accountant Office); born 1975 in Mie Prefecture; his stated specialisms are attendance at tax audits and financing support · Last post: 23 September 2026.

1.78M YouTube subscribers. A practising tax accountant, he explains business, entrepreneurship and management strategy through a firm’s own numbers: labour cost against gross profit, how much retained earnings is enough, inheritance tax and where whole industries stand, from convenience stores to life insurance. His audience is owners and presidents checking the ratios in their own accounts.

Affiliation: Founder of りらくる (Rirakuru); chairman of 株式会社T’sインベストメント (T’s Investment); born 1977 in Osaka Prefecture · Last post: 21 September 2026.

294K YouTube subscribers. The founder of Rirakuru talks management know-how and business expansion from the operator’s side: franchise recruitment, a new shop in Shibuya, a post-mortem on a koppepan store that failed and hands-on reviews of AI video editing. Much of his recent output also follows the Reiwa no Tora investment programme and the people around it.

Affiliation: Representative of アル株式会社 (Alu Inc.), which operates Pody, a service that turns podcast audio into articles · Last post: 23 September 2026 (note).

99,191 note followers and approximately 26,000 Voicy followers, with 1,894,000 plays across 94 broadcasts. An internet-industry essayist, he writes about AI-era work and products: what not to build, whether detailed instructions make AI worse, how much first-mover advantage carries in AI markets, and how an attention economy becomes an attachment economy. He also runs a salon under the handle alu.

Affiliation: Representative director of エリア・イノベーション・アライアンス (Area Innovation Alliance), which runs the 都市経営プロフェッショナルスクール (City Management Professional School); author of 『まちづくり幻想』 and 『地方創生大全』 among others · Last post: 23 September 2026 (note).

Approximately 23,000 Voicy followers with 15,144,000 plays across 2,426 broadcasts, plus 19,074 note followers. He writes and speaks on regional economy and business: petrol-station closures and land use, the end of new-build houses in the regions, fifteen years of Tohoku reconstruction and local lodging businesses, alongside AI tools for regional operators. He started his first business in his third year of high school.

Affiliation: Representative director of 株式会社わざわざ (Wazawaza), operating わざわざ and 問tou in Tōmi, Nagano Prefecture · Last post: 16 September 2026.

52,914 note followers, and note is her only platform. She writes long-form, first-person pieces on running her shops in rural Nagano (why people gather at a bakery on a hill, the president as engineer, the year after her book reached a fourth printing) alongside a personal essay sequence on work and living.

Affiliation: Representative of AGRIST; Forbes official columnist, NewsPicks picker, part-time lecturer at Keio University, MBA · Last post: 22 September 2026.

16,633 note followers. Head of the agricultural company AGRIST, he writes about regional revitalisation and farming in numbered case studies with the figure in the headline, such as 17.5 billion yen generated in a village of 4,600 people. Around them run operator arguments: build a reason to stay before handing out subsidies, employee equity, consolidating on ChatGPT, and agriculture as something designed.

Affiliation: Entrepreneur (実業家); runs the online salons HIU and neoHIU · Last post: 23 September 2026 (YouTube).

3,284,122 X followers, 2.14M YouTube subscribers and approximately 212,000 Voicy followers with 11,306,000 plays across 2,232 broadcasts. His feed is interviews, reactions and site visits on current affairs, AI, technology and business: AI and the entertainment industry, a dental-aligner company five years on, a private shinkansen cabin, a driverless taxi, a foldable phone and news round-ups recorded on the road.

Affiliation: Certified public tax accountant, running an accounting firm of just over ten people in Umeda, Osaka, and stating more than twenty years in the tax profession · Last post: 21 September 2026.

427K YouTube subscribers. He covers corporate tax reduction, depreciation and asset management at news speed, often built around a dated change: the October 2026 furusato-nozei change, the National Pension Fund and iDeCo ceilings, and share-valuation reform for owner succession. Other videos cover tax-audit responses, automating invoices through to accounting entries, and what a tax accountant’s retainer costs.

Affiliation: Representative partner and certified public tax accountant at Zeirishi-hōjin Gransurs, after Yamada & Partners and then the Kakehi accounting office · Last post: 23 September 2026.

254K YouTube subscribers. A tax corporation’s channel fronted by its representative partner, it runs one fixed formula: most titles close with “a tax accountant explains”. The subjects are owner-operator finance at close range: raising a president’s take-home pay, entertainment expenses in tax audits, director housing, depreciating art and cars, social-insurance contributions, lending and succession.

Affiliation: Former national tax inspector; graduate degrees from Tohoku University and the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies; former career official at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology; author of 『節税の超･裏ワザ』 · Last post: 23 September 2026.

112K YouTube subscribers. He explains tax from the inspector’s side of the desk, fast and in running series. His recent run is a numbered daily series on the tax authority’s new AI system: how audits change, what happens to bank-account data and My Number, and whether differences between inspectors disappear. Part of his output promotes his members-only community and a paid tax-planning seminar.

Affiliation: Certified public accountant and certified public tax accountant; chairman of Geinō Bunka Zeirishi-hōjin; outside auditor at companies including Bushiroad Inc. · Last post: 20 September 2026.

1.16M YouTube subscribers, the largest channel in this group. He explains changes to work and money line by line, with effective dates in the titles: an eleven-hour rest interval, overtime pay for managers, a right to disconnect, the end of the 1.06-million-yen threshold and the food consumption-tax cut. He also runs a twice-monthly money-news live show.

Affiliation: Representative attorney of Koshimizu Law Office, Dai-Ichi Tokyo Bar Association; outside director of Geniee, Inc. (TSE Growth, 6562) · Last post: 23 September 2026.

47.9K YouTube subscribers. Born in 1998 and a University of Tokyo graduate who passed the bar examination as a student, he publishes daily for owner-managers on cash flow and staff: embezzlement, dismissal for poor performance, the return from remote work, consumption-tax arrears, what to read before accepting investment, and keeping experienced staff in their forties and fifties.

Affiliation: Attorney Matsuzaki Motonori, Tokyo Bar Association, practice centred on labour law · Last post: 22 September 2026.

276K YouTube subscribers. Most of his uploads are Shorts built as a question and its answer on everyday working-time disputes: time spent changing into work clothes, thirty minutes of early-start overtime, travel after meeting at a site, standby on a care-work night shift and night work under flexitime. The channel also ranges into wider debates, such as whether superintelligent AI is a threat.

Affiliation: Representative of Sharōshi-hōjin ONE HEART and a certified social insurance and labour consultant, taken from the podcast feed’s own show description, which names the firm’s official site · Last post: 17 September 2026.

A fixed ten-minute podcast on labour administration, now at episode 225 and published in unbroken sequence. Written for in-house labour and HR officers, it teaches in basics-then-practice pairs: evaluation systems, family-care leave, shift work, overtime for short-hours staff, childcare short-time working and bonuses, plus episodes on how an HR officer should study and what AI means for the role.

Affiliation: Specified certified social insurance and labour consultant; thirteen years running a company in a different industry, and experience of labour litigation as the plaintiff company’s representative conducting the case himself · Last post: 16 September 2026.

11.9K YouTube subscribers. He makes long, dated payroll and social-insurance explainers under loud warning-style titles: the October 2026 coverage expansion, 2026 minimum wages across all 47 prefectures, wage garnishment, standard-remuneration filing and labour audits for companies preparing to list. His audience mixes payroll practitioners with people training to become labour consultants, and he has appeared in Shūkan Bunshun, TOKYO MX, Tokyo Shimbun and Shūkan SPA!

Affiliation: Certified administrative scrivener, stating passes in ten qualifications all by self-study, and publishing takken examination preparation daily at 18:00 · Last post: 23 September 2026.

312K YouTube subscribers. The channel is preparation for the takken, Japan’s real-estate transaction specialist exam: topic-by-topic lessons, scoring strategy and last-minute study methods, plus a seminar for people who plan to qualify and open a brokerage. His audience is candidates working towards a dated exam, and one recent video was a paid collaboration with an exam publisher’s mock-test product.

Affiliation: Kodato Accounting, a corporate channel; Morio, born in Kanagawa in 1976, graduated from Hosei University’s Faculty of Business Administration, passed four tax accountant examination subjects (bookkeeping, financial statements, corporate tax and income tax) and joined Kodato Accounting in 2006 · Last post: 23 September 2026.

83.4K YouTube subscribers. Kodato Accounting’s channel, presented by Morio, has one subject: bank lending seen from the lender’s side. Videos cover drawing a non-guaranteed loan, recovery after rescheduling, how a bank reads a cut in director pay, real-estate lending, inventory against net assets, the equity ratio of a growing company and in-family M&A as the simplest form of succession.

Affiliation: Representative director of Zukai Sōken; author of 『政策図解』, 『会計の地図』, 『ビジネスモデル2.0図鑑』 and 『パーパスモデル』 · Last post: 31 December 2025.

25,299 note followers. He explains accounting and business models through diagrams, or zukai: contribution margin, the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s market restructuring, impact-weighted accounting, a ten-trillion-yen university fund, the business model of the modern Olympics and his own lecture material on what diagramming is. His most recent note post is a year-in-review dated 31 December 2025.

Affiliation: Doctorate in economics (University of Tokyo, 2009); after Komazawa University and Osaka University, president of Yasashii Business School since 2021; management scholar · Last post: 21 September 2026.

76.9K YouTube subscribers. A management scholar who heads the school that publishes the channel, he runs fixed strands: current-affairs explainers, interviews with successful applicants to Japanese MBA programmes, new-book segments on management titles, a numbered onboarding-theory series and announcements for his own school.

Affiliation: Professor, Waseda Business School (management scholar) · Last post: 16 September 2026.

A long-running, numbered podcast, past episode 319, applying management theory to whatever is being discussed: the next Apple chief executive, Uniqlo’s rise to second place in global apparel, Disneyland beyond children, short-video literacy, young people drinking less and too little corporate culture in Japanese companies. The show is the audio edition of his paid Business Insider Japan column, and the publisher owns the programme.

Affiliation: Consultant at KEARNEY (A.T. Kearney) with thirty years of corporate advisory experience in Japan and the United States; led the launch and operation of CIC Tokyo, described as Japan’s largest concentration of startups.

7,123 Voicy followers with 1,078,000 plays across 190 broadcasts. His channel runs multi-part guest interviews: a former prefectural governor on policy and career, a serial entrepreneur on AI-era management, an energy specialist on the Strait of Hormuz and a mobility writer on CES and physical AI. It took first place in the Voicy FES ‘23 overall ranking.

Affiliation: CEO of IGPI (経営共創基盤); research activity at 地経学研究所, its geoeconomics institute; corporate investment in Europe · Last post: 18 September 2026.

A young, numbered podcast in which each episode explains a single management term: sports broadcasting rights, mission-vision-values, software-defined vehicles, roll-up strategy in M&A, burn rate and runway, activist investors, representation-and-warranty insurance, sovereign AI and the difference between VC and PE. Episodes are aimed at corporate-development and strategy listeners.

Affiliation: Held positions at Google, McKinsey and Rakuten, the last as executive officer; author (obarakazuhiro.jp); based in Singapore and Bali · Last post: 23 September 2026.

3,644 note followers. He publishes near-daily on note, with a numbered newsletter series past issue 500. His subjects are AI in practice (business prompts, turning an assistant into a strategist, intelligence versus judgement in AI startups), career and growth theory, and case readings such as a museum turned profitable in four months.

Affiliation: Representative of Shikigaku Inc., a company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, from his own YouTube profile · Last post: 18 September 2026.

19.4K YouTube subscribers. The channel carries his company’s named management method, Shikigaku: a recurring series of client interviews, a full explainer of its recruitment-system service, and manager-facing topics such as why subordinates do not grow, what pressure really is and the company’s own work-life stance, discussed on camera with his employees.

Affiliation: Inoue Kenichiro × CK PRODUCTION; organisation-building and HR-development support for more than 200 companies, from listed corporates to SMEs, disclosed by him in the show description · Last post: 18 September 2026.

A consultative podcast answering managers’ problems, now at episode 595 in unbroken sequence. Episodes take listener questions, such as a nursery head’s stalled relationship with a colleague, and bring in guests on topics like question-based selling. Recurring themes are team language, developing subordinates, a leader’s bearing, consistency as the basis of respect and direction-setting for department heads.

Affiliation: Representative Director and Chief Executive Officer, Tomorrow Gate Inc., from his own YouTube profile · Last post: 18 September 2026.

207K YouTube subscribers. He films the inside of his own company: a former teacher’s move into sales, an in-house presentation contest, staff on which benefits and side jobs they value, and a manager coaching a new graduate. Straight sales coaching and candid episodes on organisations that fell apart also feature.

Affiliation: COO of the Yamada Shintaro D&I Foundation; enrolled in the later doctoral programme of Keio University’s Graduate School of Media and Governance; five books, from his own note profile · Last post: 22 September 2026.

11,920 note followers. He writes HR theory for practitioners: a numbered series on self-determination and expectancy theory, why hires who look strong on paper underperform, the 30-, 50- and 100-person walls, and how to deliver a demotion. The same feed launches his services, including an HR data-analysis team and 1-on-1 organisational consulting, and covers the foundation’s work with working women.

Affiliation: MIMIGURI Inc.; author of 『問いのデザイン』 (Toi no Design) and 『ルールのデザイン』 (Rūru no Design).

8,134 Voicy followers with 2,040,000 plays across 844 broadcasts. He talks facilitation and question design: running a workshop that changes internal rules, team-building in the AI era, whether broken trust can be repaired and why community is being re-valued. Reflective episodes on his own work, and his daughter’s school project read as lessons in facilitation, sit alongside them.

Affiliation: Representative of Cross River Inc., formerly an executive officer at Microsoft Japan; publishes work-style findings based on data from 170,000 people.

Approximately 24,000 Voicy followers with 17,047,000 plays across 1,896 broadcasts. He builds his broadcasts on work-style data: action triggers, time reform, dropping vague replies, praise that grows a colleague and when to give up. Some episodes come with document downloads, and his listener community, Pen-Pens, has eleven chapters across Japan.

Affiliation: The corporate channel of Knowledge Work Inc., stated in the channel’s own profile, not an individual · Last post: 19 September 2026.

195K YouTube subscribers. Knowledge Work’s own channel mixes sales careers and earnings routes, selling technique (enterprise selling, finding the internal champion, cold calls, a roleplay pitching a replacement tool to a satisfied department head) and product reviews of gadgets and business-casual clothing. The publisher is itself a software company selling to sales organisations.

Affiliation: Representative of Eigyo Hack Inc., from his own YouTube profile · Last post: 30 October 2025.

14.7K YouTube subscribers. He specialises in telephone appointment setting: talk scripts, follow-up, what new graduates get stuck on, cold-calling a software product and a recurring weekly call-analysis report, with a few general working-life pieces. His company provides outsourced sales.

Affiliation: CMO of Cerebrix Corporation, and Director of its Sales Research Institute and Sales Evangelist, from his own note profile · Last post: 10 September 2026.

4,799 note followers. He writes for the sales-planning and enablement function: its shift from supporting sales to changing it, where plain speaking ends and lying begins, what strong questioners do differently, how top sellers handle “too early” objections, and what he would do in his first days in a new sales job.

Affiliation: A sales consultant who describes himself as an absolute-attainment consultant; the profile names Attax Sales Associates.

1,782 Voicy followers with roughly 880,000 plays across 700 broadcasts. His expertise is hitting sales targets without exception, though recent broadcasts lean towards personal effectiveness: sensory-preference models, a well-known book on effectiveness, managing your own mood and sceptical takes on AI and de-skilling. He also holds in-person listener meet-ups in Nagoya.

Affiliation: Representative of Tribal Media House, Inc.; his own note profile states support for more than 300 large companies and names Uriage no Chizu among his books · Last post: 10 June 2026.

18,419 note followers. He argues one cluster of ideas repeatedly: category entry points and first recall, including why B2B marketing cannot win on awareness alone. Some posts are written to be saved and forwarded to a boss, and he also runs a free fourteen-session marketing-theory programme and has a book on marketing patterns by industry on the way.

Affiliation: Representative director of Nazoru Inc. (nazoru.jp), host of the marketing experiment community Marketing Trace, and author of Marketing Shikouryoku Training (Forest Publishing), from his own note profile · Last post: 23 September 2026.

35,692 note followers. He writes as a marketer working in public: why strong brands lose momentum, the limits of user research, how to divide a new-product project, why brand strategy should not start from words, and how buying is shifting from searching to consulting an AI. He also runs a note membership.

Affiliation: Representative director, HIRED Inc.; operates Agent no Madoguchi and Tenshoku Antenna; author of Tenshoku to Fukugyo no Kakezan and WORK · Last post: 25 August 2026.

14,499 note followers. He writes the mechanics of changing jobs from the operator’s side: a template-backed strategic CV, reading the review site OpenWork, the first month of a new service, selling a career media property to a listed company, and the “self as a company” stance. His own company runs agent referral and careers media, so recruitment advertisers would be competitors.

Affiliation: Representative director, Axxis Inc.; a working recruitment agent · Last post: 18 September 2026.

85.8K YouTube subscribers. A working recruitment agent, he explains the hiring process on camera: CV screening, reverse questions, why candidates fail at the final stage, what an agent needs before showing good vacancies, salary negotiation and casual interviews. He also covers what agencies do not tell candidates, from inside an agency himself.

Affiliation: A former IT company president with two exits; now works in football-related roles and serves as outside director at several companies · Last post: 28 August 2026.

41,928 note followers. She writes career and organisation essays: a definition of talent, why sports-business entrants should learn English, eight years outside Tokyo and why she returned, becoming a foster carer, what a sports team really sells and the cost of attention. She also publishes a paid magazine.

Affiliation: No corporate name disclosed; self-describes as a salaryman · Last post: 26 August 2026.

826K subscribers on the main channel and 176K on the second. The main channel explains business books and news (AI and robotics in the 2030s, putting things into words, the year’s best books, founder interviews), and the second channel covers job-changing practice. The channel discloses more than 1,000 offer reports from candidates he has supported.

Affiliation: Former representative of LinkedIn in Japan; engineer to director to executive at a Japanese company, then country manager at a foreign firm · Last post: 22 September 2026.

5,960 note followers. He writes short posts that take one figure or development from the week’s news and ask what it means for working people: retirement-benefit deductions, not answering Slack at night, flat pay for permanent staff, new-graduate hiring and AI, and wider economic stories such as the matcha boom and data-centre power bills.

Affiliation: Unicorn Farm; author of 『起業の科学』, from his own YouTube channel profile · Last post: 18 September 2026.

11.7K YouTube subscribers. He runs two numbered series: a full explanation of his book 『起業の科学』, and business-model teardowns that each take one model, from comparison sites and upcycling to vertical AI agents, industry-specific BPO, D2C and roll-ups. Founder interviews and an AI-versus-human startup-advice episode fill out the feed.

Affiliation: Vividgarden Inc., representative director and president; Tabechoku, a direct-from-producer marketplace with 10,000 producers, from her own note profile · Last post: 11 September 2026.

2,636 note followers. She writes a founder’s operating log with public relations as a recurring subject, including, by her own account, how her 70-person company sustained 150 national TV appearances a year, and her features on Cambria Palace and Seven Rules. She has also shared a free Notion template for managing work and personal projects and published the opening of a book.

Affiliation: Goodpatch Inc. CEO; listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market, now Growth, in June 2020, the first design company to do so; from his own note profile · Last post: 1 September 2026.

15,214 note followers. He reports his own decisions as CEO: the listing, fifteen years of the company, a design-and-AI acquisition, a new HR and organisation company, organisational resilience, and a company-wide Claude Code mandate that, by his account, produced 200 apps and 300 pieces of internal knowledge in one month.

Affiliation: Voicy Inc., representative director; certified public accountant, from his own note profile · Last post: 14 September 2026 (note).

Approximately 20,000 Voicy followers with 215,000 plays across 209 broadcasts, plus 4,391 note followers. He runs the company behind Voicy and broadcasts on it. About half his recent note posts are about audio media and Voicy itself; the rest cover AI for people who do not build software, such as Genspark, customising Gemini and AI learning as a new literacy.

Affiliation: SKILLS Inc. / BrainOwners representative; visiting professor at 情報経営イノベーション専門職大学; author of 『人生攻略ロードマップ』; from his own YouTube channel profile · Last post: 22 September 2026.

15.8K YouTube subscribers. His profile states revenue of one billion yen within four years of going independent, and he operates Brain, a marketplace for paid know-how. The channel runs a management-sparring series in which a real client’s business is worked through on camera, alongside AI video-editing tests, self-management pieces and vlogs from a founder’s life.

Affiliation: Representative Director, 株式会社デジライズ; corporate AI training · Last post: 23 September 2026.

201,305 X followers and 54.6K YouTube subscribers. He publishes Japanese explainers within days of model launches, often headed 速報 (breaking), and covers agent-coding tools by name: Codex, Claude Code, CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md and MCP. His profile discloses AI-advisory roles with the GMO group, the PERSOL group and Google Gemini.

Affiliation: Representative of SHIFT AI; AI-utilisation adviser at GMO AI&Web3 · Last post: 8 October 2026 (X); 21 February 2024 (YouTube).

151,035 X followers; X is where his audience is, while his Shorts-only YouTube channel has 792 subscribers. His X profile states that SHIFT AI has more than 30,000 members and 200 instructors, and that he founded SAMURAI ENGINEER and sold it to a listed company. His YouTube Shorts were quick ChatGPT tips.

Affiliation: Notion business-improvement consultant, with eleven corporate clients and more than 200 individuals consulted, from his own channel description · Last post: 23 September 2026.

9.29K YouTube subscribers. Everything he publishes is about Notion: downloadable templates, prompt packs, a PR firm’s year-long move from Google to Notion as a case study, Notion AI alongside a Claude integration, and a meeting-notes test of Notion AI against Gemini and an iPhone voice memo.

Affiliation: 株式会社レクター · Last post: 4 February 2026.

6,599 Qiita followers. Writing for CTOs, VPoEs and engineering managers, he covers how software gets built: development productivity, technical debt and the cost of capital, flow against resource efficiency, why adding people does not finish a project sooner and microservice economics. He has published tools of his own, and his latest articles are about working with AI agents in 2026.

Affiliation: Representative Director, 株式会社TwinRing; runs the online school 『KYOKO先生のビジネス学園』 · Last post: 21 July 2026.

135K YouTube subscribers. Born in 1987 in Gifu Prefecture and a single mother of three by her own account, she teaches home-based work, web skills and side income. A few videos cover AI, such as ChatGPT tasks for home working and side jobs AI is removing; most are about earning, self-investment, avoiding side-business scams and the economics of working from home.