Takaya Awata is president and CEO of Tokyo-listed Toridoll Holdings, Japan's largest operator of udon noodle restaurants.
Awata opened his first yakitori grilled-chicken restaurant in 1985, after dropping out of the Kobe City University of Foreign Studies.
Toridoll has over 1,900 restaurants in Japan, China, Singapore, Europe. and the U.S.
In October 2021, the firm listed its Tam Jai International, an operator of Chinese noodle restaurants that it acquired in 2018, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
The company posted $1.5 billion in revenue in the fiscal year through March 2024, a 23% jump from the previous year.
The company’s chairman and CEO, Yozo Shimano, one of five newcomers to the ranks of Japan’s richest, is the third-generation member of a family-run business that was set up by his grandfather, Shozaburo, in Sakai city near Osaka in 1921.
After shutting down a quarter of its 126 Ito-Yokado supermarkets in the past two years, the company completed the sale of its struggling department store unit Sogo & Seibu Co. in September to U.S.-based Fortress Investment Group.
Amid Japan’s push to reboot its global standing in semiconductors, Tokyo-based Disco, which makes equipment to slice, grind and polish chips, has become a red-hot stock.
Overseas investors, led by Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway has poured billions of dollars into Japan, helped propel the Nikkei 225 benchmark stock index to a 35-year high.
The classic manga and anime 'Guyver' has had a slew of excellent action figures over the years, but this new figma Guyver 1 Ultimate Edition is something else entirely.
Architect Kengo Kuma's first U.S. project at Portland's Japanese Gardens mimics Japan's mozenmachi, gate-front towns that protect nearby sacred shrines and temples.
The American College of Cardiology announced the lineup of late-breaking clinical trials for its upcoming annual meeting in Washington, DC. The opening session will include the most eagerly anticipated trials-- the main results of Symplicity HTN-3 and the comparison of Corevalve and surgery in high risk patients. Subsequent sessions will include several [...]