Company history

Oracle Corporation set up Oracle Japan in October 1985 in Shinjuku, Tokyo, wholly owned and capitalised at ¥1 million, for a single purpose: to sell the parent’s relational database and the software around it. No development function was placed here. The company was, by design, a supply window for software written elsewhere — which is the fact that explains almost everything that follows. Japanese corporate IT was industrialising fast, and the core database market belonged to IBM Japan, Fujitsu and NEC; Oracle’s only weapon on entry was the relational model itself. Full-scale trading did not begin until October 1990, five years after incorporation.

What the company built in the decade after was not product but reach. West Japan (Osaka) opened in 1992, Chubu (Nagoya) in 1993; in 1994 the head office moved to Chiyoda-ku and a western office opened in Fukuoka; Sapporo followed in 1996 and Kanazawa in 1997. This was a nationwide enterprise salesforce assembled from a very small base — Shintaku Masaaki, an IBM Japan man who would later run the company, joined in 1991 as employee number 62.

In June 1997 Oracle Japan merged with a shell company to cut its par value from ¥50,000 a share to ¥50 — pure legal groundwork for a stock listing. The listing had not been asked for by the parent. Sano Tsutomu, president since 1990, had met Larry Ellison when Oracle Corporation was itself short of cash, offered to raise money in Japan, and then kept arguing the case long after the immediate need passed: a Japanese listing, he insisted, was how a foreign subsidiary earned the trust of Japanese customers, shareholders and staff.

In February 1999 Oracle Japan registered its shares over the counter on JASDAQ. A wholly owned subsidiary of a US corporation floating on its own account in Tokyo was close to unheard of, and the debut was violent: a market capitalisation of about $4.3B (¥495bn) on day one, displacing the pachislot maker Aruze as the largest name on the OTC market. Sano’s framing was not financial. “I wanted to declare,” he said, “that Oracle Japan is a company rooted in Japanese society, a company working for Japan.” In April 2000 the shares moved to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, capital reaching ¥22.1 billion. In the offering that accompanied the move, the US parent sold down part of its holding and took roughly $8.1B (¥870bn) in cash.

Four months after the TSE listing, in August 2000, Sano stepped up to chairman and CEO and Shintaku Masaaki, then managing director, became president and COO. Shintaku had graduated from Waseda in 1978 into IBM Japan, worked under Sano in the Fukuoka sales office in the mid-1980s, and been recruited across in 1991; Sano kept new business, legal and administration while Shintaku took software and consulting. The same year the company set up its first subsidiary, Miracle Linux (55% owned), to push Linux in Japan and reduce the platform dependence on Microsoft.

The model’s central tension was stated plainly by the parent itself. For the year to May 2001, sales rose 33.4% to $721.7M (¥88bn) and net profit 64% to ¥18.3 billion, held up by telecoms and financial-sector IT spending even after the dot-com collapse. Oracle Corporation’s CFO Jeff Henley called the listing’s greatest benefit “a stronger local identity in Japan,” then added that the parent still owned 75% and would not be losing control — below 66%, he noted, control becomes difficult under Japanese law. Local legitimacy above, undisturbed ownership below: that was the arrangement, and it held. Meanwhile the branch network was finished off — Sendai and Okinawa in 2000, Hiroshima in 2005 — and in 2006 the products of the sibling company Oracle Information Systems were routed through Oracle Japan, consolidating the group’s Japanese sales into one channel.

In July 2008 the company completed its own building, the Oracle Aoyama Center, and moved its head office to Minato-ku that September — a foreign subsidiary putting its name on a Tokyo skyline. Two years later the business itself widened. In June 2010 Oracle Japan opened a Hardware Systems division selling servers, storage and related services, a direct consequence of the parent closing its acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010. A pure software distributor now had iron to sell, and the vertical-integration strategy — hardware and software engineered together — arrived in Japan as a sales problem rather than a technology one.

Leadership passed through four hands in this period, and the pattern of hiring from Japan’s IT establishment held. Shintaku carried the listing years through FY2006; Endo Takao (FY2007–FY2011) converted the company to a board with statutory committees and pushed the shift from database licences toward applications; Kaneko Tadahiro served a short FY2012 interim; Sugihara Hiroshige (FY2013–FY2019), another IBM Japan alumnus, brought the parent’s cloud-first strategy into the Japanese salesforce in earnest. The Akasaka office, opened in 2013 as the business expanded, was closed in 2023 in the post-pandemic contraction — a small marker of how much the selling model had changed underneath.

In April 2020 Garrett Ilg took over Oracle’s Asia Pacific and Japan region, and that December Misawa Toshimitsu became representative executive officer and president in Tokyo. Misawa is a returnee: Fujitsu first, then Oracle Japan from 1995, rising to executive vice-president, then out to IBM Japan in 2016 as a director and senior managing executive officer, then back to Oracle Japan in October 2020. The circuit among Japan’s three big IT houses is itself the point — the job on offer was not technical but commercial, and it required someone who knew this particular salesforce.

In April 2022 the shares moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Standard market rather than the top-tier Prime. The reason was arithmetic rather than performance: with the parent holding about 74%, the free float could not meet Prime’s tradable-share thresholds. The structure Sano had won in 1999 — a Japanese listing with the parent’s stake untouched — was still intact, and the exchange’s reorganisation turned it, for the first time, into a ceiling. The company chose not to move the parent’s shares to clear the bar.

The commercial task under Misawa is a conversion, not an expansion: shifting revenue from perpetual database licences, the mainstay since 1985, to monthly subscriptions for OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) and Fusion Applications. It is visible in the numbers — cloud and licence together accounted for 85% of revenue in the year to May 2025. Forty years after incorporation, Oracle Japan remains what it was set up to be, a Japanese subsidiary selling the parent’s software, but it carries two things no branch office would have: a national sales network built through the 1990s, and its own listed-company disclosure. Whether the customer base accumulated by selling licences transfers cleanly to a subscription business is the open question of the current decade.