Meet Tadashi Yanai, the richest person in Japan and the founder of Uniqlo, who's worth nearly $25 billion and owns 2 golf courses in Hawaii

Fast Retailing has thousands of stores worldwide and reported a yearly revenue of $16.9 billion in August 2017, according to Bloomberg.

Yanai's father owned a men's clothing shop called Men's Shop Ogori Shoji. The store was on the first floor and the family lived above it. By the 1970s, the business had several locations.

Yanai graduated from Waseda University with a degree in economics and politics.

"My preference was not to work my entire life, that's how I was," he told ABS-CBN. "My father demanded that I need to find work at Jusco. So regretfully I got a job."

He said he joined his father's business because he had nowhere else to go, but he actually ended up finding it fun.

A few years later, he changed the name of his father's clothing company to Fast Retailing.

Uniqlo's $15 fleece jacket was the brand's most popular product, with an estimated one in four Japanese people having bought one by 1998.

The property, which includes a guard house, a driving range, and a separate thatched-roof teahouse, was estimated to be worth about $50 million in 2017. Yanai bought the land in an auction for $78 million in 2001.

Shibuya is an exclusive Tokyo neighborhood that government officials and CEOs call home, according to the Japan Times. Living there is "a symbol of status," Yukiko Takano of Sotheby's told the Times in 2014.

Yanai bought the Plantation Golf Course in Hawaii from Maui Land & Pineapple for $50 million in 2009, according to Bloomberg. In 2010, he bought another course, Kapalua Bay, for $24.1 million.

Fast Retailing is now the third-largest global clothing retailer, after H&M and Inditex, the parent company of Zara, according to MoneyWeek.

Uniqlo — Fast Retailing's most successful brand — has more than 2,000 stores globally, with 825 in Japan.

Only 50 of those are in the US, and the vast majority are scattered throughout Asian countries including Japan, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and the Philippines.

"[Uniqlo's] staples—versatile black pants, reliable oxfords, crisp cotton socks — are available month after month, year after year," Write wrote.

Yanai himself has said Uniqlo's clothes are "geared to all types of people," according to MoneyWeek.

Yanai has always named H&M and Zara as Fast Retailing's biggest rivals. He told Forbes Asia in 2017 that his goal is to have the company's revenue up to $29 billion by 2020.

"Information and digital innovation will determine the winner," Yanai said. "And that's the area we are in."

In addition to its more than 2,000 global stores, Uniqlo has plans to open up its first stores in India, Vietnam, Denmark, and Italy later in 2019.

"Select stores have AI-powered UMood kiosks that show customers a variety of products and measures their reaction to the color and style through neurotransmitters," Blake Morgan wrote in Forbes. "Based on each person’s reactions, the kiosk then recommends products. Customers don’t even have to push a button; their brain signals are enough for the system to know how they feel about each item."

And last year Uniqlo launched GU Style Studio stores, fitting-only stores where customers can try on clothing and place orders online for later delivery, according to the Japan Times.

"This means that corporate governance will function even when I'm absent," Yanai said when he announced their promotions in October 2018. "It does not mean that they will take charge of the company."

Yanai's sons, Kazumi Yanai and Koji Yanai, were both senior vice presidents at Fast Retailing before being promoted to the board, according to Nikkei Asian Review.

Yanai turned 70 in February 2019 and so far has made no official announcement about leaving his role as president or about who will take his place.