Company history

Bookoff opened in May 1990, when Takashi Sakamoto put up a single store in Sagamihara, west of Tokyo. The old secondhand-book trade priced each book by a connoisseur’s eye — rarity, first editions, the state of the binding — a closed market only seasoned specialists could work, on either side of the counter. Sakamoto threw that appraisal culture out and ran on three rules instead: buy at 10% of the cover price and sell at 50%, polish every book until it looked new, and clear stagnant stock on a flat $1 (¥100) shelf. Pricing a book by how dirty it was rather than what it contained meant a part-timer, not an expert, could staff the buying counter.

That was the move that made everything else possible. In August 1991 Sakamoto incorporated an operating company in Sagamihara — capital $74,344 (¥10m) — and that October began franchising BOOKOFF across the country, handing every franchisee a buying manual, a store manual, a POS system and a logistics network in one package. Because judgment had been reduced to a rule anyone could apply, the model loaded cleanly onto the franchise as a copying device, and the chain grew at a pace exceptional for 1990s retail, passing 800 stores by the late decade. In 1992 the company took the name Bookoff Corporation.

The same logic — anything with a cover price that could be refurbished and resold — kept widening the goods on the shelves. Bookoff added used CDs and videos in 1994, riding the shift from CD rental toward a growing used-software market, then children’s goods in 1999, and that year set up BOOKOFF U.S.A. to run stores in the United States, its first step abroad. What had started as a used-book counter was becoming a general secondhand chain.

Around 2000 Bookoff pushed the same de-skilled buyback into new categories — used sporting goods, then clothing and accessories — and in December opened its first complex store, gathering books, CDs, videos, children’s and sporting goods and clothing under one roof, the format that would later become BOOKOFF SUPER BAZAAR. A logistics subsidiary set up in 2002 built the distribution backbone that let head office, franchisees and directly-run stores shuffle inventory between them as both the store count and the range of goods kept growing.

In March 2004, fourteen years after the first store, Bookoff Corporation listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Second Section, and it moved up to the First Section in 2005 — the first listed company in Japan’s reuse industry. Consolidated sales had passed $462.3M (¥50bn), resting on two pillars: franchise fees and royalties on one side, directly-run store sales on the other. In 2006 Mayumi Hashimoto, who had supported the shop floor since the early days as a part-time employee, became president and COO under founder-CEO Sakamoto.

Then the founder’s own conduct broke the arrangement. In June 2007 Sakamoto stepped down, after resigning the chairmanship, over rebates he had taken from several suppliers; an outside investigation committee under the audit board drew a line under the affair through his exit. Hiroshi Sato, a McKinsey alumnus who had joined in 1997, took the presidency on a platform of a “second founding” built on complex stores — and pushed into new books, taking over the Aoyama Book Center and Ryusui Shobo chains in 2008. Bolting new books onto used goods signalled a turn toward a comprehensive reuse trading house.

In 2009 the first store carrying the BOOKOFF SUPER BAZAAR name opened in Kamakura — a big-box format of some 3,300 square metres stocking used books, CDs, games, clothing, and sporting and hobby goods together. Under Nobukazu Matsushita, who became the fourth president in 2011, “LOVE USED” became the unifying brand, and reuse widened again into used mobile phones and a run of moves to bring franchisees in-house and to operate reuse beyond the physical store.

The bet on new books, though, barely paid. Across 2014 and 2015 Bookoff sold its thirty-one TSUTAYA stores to the distributor Nippan and closed or exited more than twenty unprofitable outlets, writing off the losses; it overhauled its promotions, shifting from per-store discounting to group-wide campaigns, but margins were slow to mend. The comprehensive-reuse push had a structural cost — the more categories and stores it added, the more loss-making ones it had to keep clearing.

In 2014 Bookoff signed a capital and business alliance with Yahoo Japan, which took new shares and a convertible bond; the aim was a store-plus-EC reuse business that would feed goods bought over the counter onto Yahoo’s auction and shopping platforms. It never came together as planned. In October 2018 Bookoff Group Holdings was created by a sole share transfer as the parent of Bookoff Corporation, and at the same time the roughly four-year Yahoo alliance was unwound — the bond redeemed, shares bought back. Yasutaka Horiuchi, president since 2017, kept clearing loss-making stores and codified when to pull out of one.

Under Horiuchi, Bookoff pursued “One BOOKOFF” — knitting stores and EC into a single omnichannel — and diversified its revenue by acquisition. It entered jewellery reuse in 2019 with Jewelry Asset Managers, set up BO Chance in 2021 to run Japan TCG Center trading-card stores, and widened the buying counter from books to jewellery, trading cards and living-support goods. In 2020 it shifted its fiscal year-end from March to May, to pull the spring peak — the new-life-season rush of April and May — inside a single reporting year.

Overseas, the model moved from franchising to direct operation. After Malaysia, Bookoff reached Kazakhstan with a franchise store in 2022, then in 2024 set up the J&K Trading joint venture there and opened its first directly-run store abroad, raising the overseas contribution to group earnings. By the year ended May 2025 consolidated sales reached $796.5M (¥119bn), about 1.5 times the level of the year ended March 2019, now spread across three legs: the domestic Bookoff business, a premium-service business, and overseas.

The old governance question then returned. In August 2024 Bookoff disclosed fraud at several subsidiary-run stores — fake buybacks and improper inventory accounting by employees — and published a special-committee report in October. The committee found no organized wrongdoing and limited financial impact, yet twenty-nine cases had surfaced across twenty-six stores at once, hard to pin on individual character when the pressure to avoid book-versus-actual discrepancies was widely shared on the shop floor. A $3.6M (¥550m) investigation bill, far above the losses, was the tuition — and an echo of 2007. Horiuchi meanwhile set a new medium-term plan running to the year ending May 2028, making M&A-led portfolio change its theme; how a store-based reuse chain holds its edge against flea-market apps and C2C marketplaces is the question the plan leaves open.