📊 Across four stories this spring and summer, we followed the fight between KADOKAWA and Oasis Management. On June 24, shareholders answered. Takeshi Natsuno kept his job. But once the votes were counted, the result looked less like a win than a suspended sentence, and three months later the numbers have drifted toward the argument Oasis was making.

The story so far: Part 1: Activist fund Oasis takes an 8.86% stake in KADOKAWA Part 2: Oasis pushes its holding to 10% Part 3: At 13.76%, Oasis passes Sony as largest shareholder Part 4: The proxy fight begins: Oasis demands Natsuno's removal

The winner did not look like one

Natsuno was reappointed to the board with 59.68% support, down 30.58 percentage points from the previous year. Every other director on the same ballot landed in the 90 percent range. Director Nobuo Kawakami came in at 77.86%.

In Japan, a director clearing 90% is not a triumph. It is the baseline. Which is why 59.68% files under "approved" without reading as an endorsement.

Oasis Management's shareholder proposal to remove Natsuno, meanwhile, was voted down with 26.79% in favor.

Four in ten shareholders declined to back Natsuno's reappointment, yet only 26.79% would vote to throw him out. That is roughly 13 points of daylight, and it opened even though proxy advisers ISS and Glass Lewis had both recommended voting against him.

A large share of Japan's institutional investors are unhappy with KADOKAWA's performance. They are not, however, willing to let a Hong Kong fund pick the chief executive. Register the complaint, keep the keys. The 59.68% and the 26.79% are two faces of the same shareholder base.

The meeting ran about three hours, with 226 shareholders in the room. Reports describe roughly two hours of questions, including an exchange between Natsuno and Tsuguhiko Kadokawa, the former chairman from the founding family.

What happened in the final weeks before the vote

Thirteen days before the ballot, the fight picked up new ammunition. On June 11, Japan's Fair Trade Commission issued a formal recommendation against KADOKAWA.

The law in question was the Freelance and Business-to-Business Transaction Fairness Act, which requires companies to spell out the terms of freelance work in writing and to pay by a fixed deadline. KADOKAWA had done neither. The recommendation covered 113 freelancers.

For a publisher this is not routine compliance: writers, illustrators and translators are mostly freelance, and the books come from them. Being named by a regulator over how they were contracted and paid pulled the word "governance" down from the shareholder meeting to the production floor. The company apologized the same day.

Oasis moved immediately. On June 8, as reports of the pending recommendation circulated, the fund published a fresh call for a change of management and urged shareholders to vote. It also lifted its stake from 13.76% to 15.25% and walked into the meeting as the largest holder on the register.

The material was all there. The votes still were not.

Three months on, which way did the numbers move

In August, KADOKAWA reported results for the first quarter of the fiscal year ending March 2027, its first quarterly report after the vote.

Revenue came in at 68.252 billion yen (about $444 million), up 5.3%. That part was fine. Operating profit fell 45.5% to 1.264 billion yen (about $8.2 million), pulled down by the absence of the big game title that carried the same quarter a year earlier and by higher anime production costs. The quarter closed with a net loss of 4.54 billion yen (about $29.5 million), driven by a special charge of roughly 5.4 billion yen (about $35 million) after 154 employees took an early retirement offer aimed at staff aged 45 and over with at least five years of service. Full-year net income guidance was cut 82.8%, from 5.8 billion yen (about $38 million) to 1 billion yen (about $6.5 million). Revenue and operating profit guidance were left untouched.

Publishing and IP creation, the segment Oasis attacked hardest, returned to the black with quarterly operating profit of 1.187 billion yen (about $7.7 million). After the meeting, Natsuno said the new medium-term plan would rebuild publishing and anime into the group's profit engine.

Still, the quarter did nothing to refute the claim that the business is deteriorating. It reinforced it. The runway to show results before the next vote is shorter than it was on June 24.

This is bigger than KADOKAWA

Daiwa Institute of Research counted 101 companies facing shareholder proposals at Japan's June 2026 meetings, the second-highest total on record behind last year's 111. Of those, 52 faced proposals from activist investors and similar filers, beating last year's 51 for an all-time high.

Something else moved too. This June, environmental NGOs filed no climate-related shareholder proposals at all. They switched to campaigning against the reappointment of directors instead. Filing a resolution and watching it fail is less useful than stacking votes against the people who sit on the board.

Underneath it is a change in who owns Japanese companies. Cross-shareholdings, the old web of friendly stakes that reliably voted with management, are being unwound, and institutional investors have taken those seats. The Tokyo Stock Exchange's long push for disclosure on "management conscious of cost of capital and share price" has reached 94% of the Prime Market, or 1,464 companies, as of the end of July 2026.

The article that prompted this series, published by Diamond Online, summarized the shift as activists moving from cash to the election and removal of directors, and named Kyocera and Wacom alongside KADOKAWA.

How 59.68% reads from outside Japan

Diligent Market Intelligence counted 1,040 companies targeted by activists worldwide in 2025: 579 in the United States and 246 across Asia, with Japan accounting for 56% of the regional total. By volume, Japan is no longer anyone's frontier market.

The texture is different, though. By the same count, 89% of the board seats activists won in 2025 came through settlements rather than shareholder votes. Seats change hands before anyone counts a ballot. That is not what happened at KADOKAWA. The three-hour meeting and the 59.68% exist because the talking did not settle it.

For a foreign investor there is a pessimistic reading. A 15.25% top shareholder, backed by both major proxy advisers, still could not remove a CEO. Given how Japanese share registers are built, 40% of withheld support buys a warning, not a change.

There is another reading. Ten years ago, would a director's approval rate have been the next morning's headline in Japan? The fact that 59.68% was published, reported and demanded an explanation is evidence that governance reform did land somewhere. The resolution passed. It did not pass intact.

Immediately after the meeting, Oasis said it would study the detailed voting results before deciding what to do next.

Japan is still split on the whole affair. Some argue that a long run of poor results has to cost someone their job. Others distrust the idea of measuring a publishing house, whose business is nurturing work that takes years, by a quarterly number.

What would happen where you live if 40% of shareholders declined to back a CEO's reappointment? Would the board move, or would the seats have changed hands in a negotiation long before the vote got that close?

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