Company history

Life began not as a shop but as a wholesaler. Its founder, Nobutsugu Shimizu — born in 1926 in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, and raised in an Osaka family that dealt in dried goods and canned foods — made the capital to restart his life trading goods in the postwar black markets. In October 1956 he set up Shimizu Jitsugyo in Nihonbashi-Honcho, Tokyo, a small $13,889 (¥5m) trading house importing and reselling canned pineapple and bananas — a business built in the gaps of postwar food distribution. Shimizu belonged to the same postwar-grocer generation that produced Isao Nakauchi’s Daiei (1957) and the merchants who would become Jusco.

The turn into supermarkets came five years later. Having seen self-service food stores on a tour of the West, Shimizu opened the Toyonaka store near Osaka in November 1961, converting an import wholesaler into a chain retailer; a second store followed in 1963, with the head office set above it. Working off the buying network built over a decade of importing, and moving cautiously — roughly ten stores in ten years before accelerating — he kept early financial risk low while spreading through Osaka and Hyogo.

In October 1971 the Itabashi store carried Life into the Tokyo metropolitan area, and the company ran on twin Osaka and Tokyo head offices; it was renamed Life in 1973. The strategy that hardened here would define the company for good: pare the assortment down to food plus a little daily-necessity clothing and sundries, build mid-sized stores of about 2,500 square metres, and concentrate them in the two great metros. While the general-merchandise stores of the 1970s and 1980s widened into apparel and household goods, Life deliberately stayed narrow — a food supermarket that chose reach over breadth.

Life listed on the Osaka Securities Exchange’s second section in 1982, reached Tokyo the next year, and was promoted to the first section in both cities in 1984 — a nationally listed food supermarket twenty-eight years after its founding. At the listing Shimizu handed the presidency to his younger brother, Mitsuo Shimizu, and stepped back to the chairmanship.

Then the bubble arrived. In the late 1980s Mitsuo turned the company’s attention from retailing toward stock speculation, in an era when Japan’s marquee firms chased financial-engineering gains and “a manager who does not do zaiteku is unfit” was common wisdom. Alarmed, Shimizu convened a snap board meeting in March 1988, dismissed his own brother, and returned as chairman-president — reining in kin while the share price was still climbing, before speculation could damage the core trade. It was the same instinct that would later make him refuse to pass the company to his own family.

Back at the helm, Shimizu took up the succession question directly. In 1992 Life formed a business tie-up with Mitsubishi Corporation; in 1994, on a London retail tour, he was won over by a thirty-year-old Mitsubishi man, Takaharu Iwasaki, and pressed the trading house to second him to Life. Over the late 1990s the company roughly doubled its store network — 132 new stores between fiscal 1993 and 2000 — while Shimizu spent twelve years raising his successor on the shop floor. In 2005 he transferred 20% of his shares to Mitsubishi Corporation, ceding the top-shareholder seat outside the founding family and giving his anti-dynastic principle an institutional form.

In March 2006 Takaharu Iwasaki, then thirty-nine, became president and COO while Shimizu stayed on as chairman and CEO — a founder and a young professional running the company in tandem. Iwasaki spent his first years less on new stores than on repair: closing unprofitable branches, refurbishing the rest, and lifting the returns of existing stores. Life held its earnings through the post-Lehman downturn, a plain demonstration of how resilient food retail can be, then re-accelerated its openings in the Tokyo metro.

The distinctive moves came next. In 2016 Life opened Bio-Ral, a natural-and-organic supermarket in Osaka — a format built expressly to step off the price battlefield where location and loss-leaders line every grocer up side by side. In 2020 it launched a matching BIO-RAL private brand, deepening the organic push in both stores and products. In 2017, separately, Life opened a net-supermarket partnership with Amazon Japan, supplying fresh food for Prime Now — an early move to sell beyond its own shelves.

The pandemic’s grocery boom pushed Life’s results to records. In May 2021 Nobutsugu Shimizu retired as a representative director at ninety-five, handing full control to Iwasaki after a spell as active top leader that ran to sixty-four years — the longest such tenure in Japanese corporate history. The founder-manager had, in the end, done exactly what he preached: equipped his successor and let go.

Iwasaki has bet the next decade on differentiation carried all the way upstream. The 2023 medium-term plan targets a $6.7B (¥1tn) group by fiscal 2030; Bio-Ral’s organic-produce sales have already grown roughly tenfold in five years, from about $2.8M (¥300m) to $20M (¥3bn). In April 2025 Life took a 66.7% stake in the organic-vegetable aggregator World Delica and a capital stake in the fish wholesaler Kamekichi Shoten — pulling procurement itself under its own capital to feed the private brand and the natural-food format.

A company that began in 1956 as a trading house, switched to supermarkets within five years, and grew over sixty-eight years into one of Japan’s larger listed food chains now faces the question its own strategy set. Whether the mid-store, food-focused, differentiate-with-Bio-Ral model can carry Life to a group twice its founding-era ambitions by 2030 — without straying from the narrowness that has always been both its edge and its ceiling — is the open problem of Iwasaki’s tenure.