Using Shigeta's mammoth databank, Hikari has begun convincing small Japanese enterprises to get wired.
In a year, Hikari managed to quadruple the unit count to 2, 000 by franchising.
After the March 15th announcement, some analysts put out buy recommendations on Hikari Tsushin's stock.
Hikari Tsushin and Yasumitsu Shigeta's other companies are symbolic of a new international Japan.
Shigeta's Internet ventures are doing much to send the stock of Hikari Tsushin ("light-speed communications") heavenward.
Hikari Tsushin had forecast that it would sell 3.6m mobile phones in the year ending August 2000.
Hikari Tsushin collects a large proportion of its commissions only if it hits an agreed sales target.
Runs Hikari Tsushin, cell phone retailer, office equipment supplier and telecom services provider.
Visitors to Hikari may also be surprised that no one serves them tea.
Shigeta, a college dropout, started shilling phones via his Hikari Tsushin in 1988 and rapidly grew with the bubble economy.
FORBES: Fifteen Years of Ups and Downs for Yasumitsu Shigeta
The generous explanation is that Hikari Tsushin's accountants and administrators have simply failed to keep pace with the firm's growth.
Company officials say that Hikari Tsushin's sales contracts are complicated and that it did not hide anything intentionally from shareholders.
Tokyo's star performers are firms such as Hikari Tsushin, a mobile-phone retailer whose shares have risen 70-fold in four years.
No one is surfing this giant wave like Yasumitsu Shigeta, 34-year-old president of Hikari Tsushin, Japan's hottest wireless phone vendor.
Unlike Softbank, Hikari focuses more on companies that have some sort of synergy with its ongoing ventures than on the overall Web.
For a fee, Hikari leases PCs and connections to servers located off-site.
Some of Hikari's units are no bigger than a typical U.S. bathroom.
Meanwhile, Hikari has put money into at least four Japanese Internet companies that have already created new billionaires, following market listings this year.
In March Hikari Tsushin reported a net gain for the first nine months of fiscal 2012, stemming losses in the same period the prior year.
FORBES: Fifteen Years of Ups and Downs for Yasumitsu Shigeta
Shigeta won't live grandly or dilute his 62% ownership of Hikari.
As Mr Shigeta admits, Hikari Tsushin has misjudged the market badly.
One of them, MTI, 17% owned by Hikari and set up by Shigeta's childhood friend Toshihiro Maeta, lets mobile phone users do things like maintain interactive "personals" ads.
Hikari Tsushin also bears some of the franchise agents' risks.
At Hikari, Chinese and other foreign nationals fill the ranks.
Speed being the defining characteristic of Hikari Tsushin, it not surprisingly has made the fastest rise in history--within 12 years of being founded--to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Stockmarket analysts took this as a rebuttal of a vicious article in February in the Bungei Shunju, a monthly Japanese magazine, which pointed to various problems with Hikari Tsushin's sales targets.
"Companies that are growing quickly and those that are not are different in every imaginable way, " says a poster displaying one of the founder's favorite sayings on the walls of Hikari's lobby.
Docomo in a sense is racing with Shigeta--it has half the domestic wireless market and Hikari, as a retailer for most of the remaining carriers, gets a big chunk of the rest.
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