🎮 Three times this spring we told you Oasis Management was tightening its grip on KADOKAWA — the Japanese empire behind FromSoftware and Elden Ring. The quiet stake-building is over. The Hong Kong fund now wants the CEO gone, and on June 24 KADOKAWA's shareholders will decide. Here is what is happening — and how the predictions in our earlier coverage held up.

Earlier in this series: 📰 Part 1: Activist Investor Oasis Acquires 8.86% of KADOKAWA — March 19, the fund crosses the major-shareholder line. 📰 Part 2: Oasis Raises Its Stake to 10% — the wider wave of activist investing reshaping corporate Japan. 📰 Part 3: Oasis Becomes Largest Shareholder at 13.76% — overtaking Sony, with the June meeting flagged as the moment to watch.

From quiet stake-building to open warfare

When we last checked in at the end of March, Oasis Management had just become KADOKAWA's largest shareholder at 13.76%, edging past Sony. The unanswered question was simple: what would the activist fund actually demand?

Now we know. On April 17, Oasis — acting through its investment vehicle Oasis Japan Strategic Fund — filed a formal shareholder proposal calling for the removal of Takeshi Natsuno, KADOKAWA's president and CEO, from the board of directors. On May 14, KADOKAWA's board resolved to oppose that proposal. And on May 20, Oasis took the fight public, urging every KADOKAWA shareholder to vote against Natsuno's reappointment at the company's June 24 annual general meeting. It launched a dedicated campaign site, "A Better KADOKAWA," with a detailed presentation laying out its case.

This is a full proxy fight — an open, public contest for shareholder votes. These are still relatively uncommon in Japan, where activist demands have more often been settled quietly behind closed doors. Both sides are now campaigning directly for the support of institutional investors and ordinary shareholders, and the June 24 meeting has turned into a genuine showdown.

What Oasis is actually arguing

Oasis's central charge is that KADOKAWA's performance has badly deteriorated on Natsuno's watch. Natsuno became CEO in 2021, and according to the fund's presentation, the numbers since then tell an uncomfortable story. Operating profit shrank from roughly ¥13.6 billion in the year ended March 2021 to about ¥8.1 billion in the year ended March 2026. The operating margin fell from 6.5% to 2.9%. Return on equity slid from 8.2% to 0.5%. Earnings per share, Oasis says, dropped by about 89%.

The fund also points to a credibility problem. In November 2025, KADOKAWA cut its full-year operating profit forecast by 38.3% and its net profit forecast by 57.0%. When actual results landed in May, operating profit came in another 21.3% below even that lowered figure. Days before the shareholder meeting, KADOKAWA scrapped its previous mid-term plan and replaced it with a new one stretching its financial targets out to March 2032. Oasis frames this bluntly as asking shareholders to wait six more years before judging current management.

Two arguments stand out for international readers. The first is about publishing. Oasis says a "quantity over quality" strategy has weakened KADOKAWA's core publishing and IP-creation business, citing an over-reliance on "narou-kei" — the wave of isekai (other-world) stories that began as amateur web novels and now dominate light-novel shelves and anime schedules alike. The second is about gaming, and it is the part that will surprise FromSoftware fans most. Oasis argues that KADOKAWA is not fully extracting the value of FromSoftware, leaving too much of the studio's commercial upside to outside partners rather than pursuing global self-publishing. In other words, the fund's complaint about Elden Ring's maker is not that KADOKAWA invests too little — it is that KADOKAWA earns too little from a studio this successful.

Oasis rounds out its case with governance concerns: a goodwill write-down at anime studio Doga Kobo, an impairment on the Tokorozawa Sakura Town complex, and the special losses from the 2024 cyberattack that crippled the Niconico video platform. It even quotes Natsuno against himself — a February 2023 press-conference remark in which he said that if business expansion did not go well, stepping down would "naturally come into view."

KADOKAWA fires back

KADOKAWA's board is not backing down. It has formally recommended that shareholders reject the removal proposal and re-elect Natsuno. Its defense rests on the argument that the "Global Media Mix with Technology" strategy pursued under Natsuno has strengthened the company's growth foundations across publishing, video, games, web services, and education — expanding overseas operations and building up anime production capacity while overall revenue has continued to rise. Group revenue did grow 1.8% in the year ended March 2026, to ¥282.9 billion (about $1.78 billion).

The company has called Oasis's "quantity over quality" framing a factually incorrect misunderstanding, saying it has not increased the number of titles each editor handles and that revenue per editor has grown over the past five years. On FromSoftware, KADOKAWA argues that whether to self-publish a given title is a strategic, IP-by-IP decision aimed at maximizing returns — and that disclosing the confidential contract terms Oasis wants to see would damage relationships with partners.

There is one nuance worth noting. KADOKAWA's own May 14 earnings materials openly acknowledged that its publishing line-up had become over-concentrated in narou and isekai works, and its new six-year plan designates the first two years (through March 2028) as a "structural reform" phase focused on rebalancing the title portfolio and cutting costs, alongside an early-retirement program. So on the specific question of genre over-reliance, the two sides are not as far apart as the rhetoric suggests. The real fight is over who is to blame, and whether Natsuno is the right person to fix it. On May 22, KADOKAWA issued a statement saying Oasis's presentation contained claims that differed from the company's own understanding and did not fully reflect its reforms, promising a fuller rebuttal soon.

How our earlier predictions held up

This is the part our readers specifically asked about. Across three articles in March, we made several calls on where the KADOKAWA situation was heading. Here is an honest scorecard.

What we got right. Part 3 pointed to the June annual meeting as the moment Oasis could "formally submit proposals regarding board composition" — and that is exactly what happened. Part 1's list of likely Oasis moves put "governance changes or board representation" near the top, and the fund went straight for the most aggressive version of that: removing the CEO outright. We also predicted that KADOKAWA's spring earnings would be the trigger for management to respond with a restructuring plan, and the new six-year mid-term plan, the structural-reform phase, and the early-retirement program are precisely that kind of response. (One small miss: we flagged May 7 for the earnings; the actual date was May 14.)

What we got partly wrong. In our March 31 article we wrote that the most likely outcome was financial restructuring "rather than direct interference with game development," and suggested Oasis would focus pressure on print publishing "while leaving the profitable gaming and anime divisions largely intact." That call needs a correction. FromSoftware is not on the sidelines of this fight — it is one of Oasis's headline arguments. What we did get right was the underlying instinct: the feared scenario, the "99-cent jump" nightmare of microtransactions forced into Elden Ring, has not materialized. Oasis is not asking KADOKAWA to monetize FromSoftware's games more aggressively toward players; it is asking KADOKAWA to capture more of the existing success for itself through global self-publishing. That is close to the opposite of what panicked fans expected — but it does mean gaming is squarely in the crossfire, and we underplayed that.

What the readers got right. Some of the sharpest forecasting came from the Japanese voices we quoted. One reader, reacting to the rapid stake increases, wrote that the rush was "clearly to make the June AGM deadline" and that Oasis "no doubt" had a major proposal ready. Another, back in Part 2, simply said CEO Natsuno "might want to brace himself." Both read the situation more precisely than a lot of professional commentary.

June 24, and why it matters beyond KADOKAWA

The outcome is genuinely uncertain. Oasis holds 13.76%, far short of a majority, so the result hinges on how Japan's large institutional investors, index funds, and Sony — still a roughly 10% shareholder and a strategic partner with its own interest in KADOKAWA's IP — choose to vote. Proxy advisory firms' recommendations, due before the meeting, will matter a great deal.

Whatever happens, the vote is a marker for corporate Japan. A successful CEO removal by an activist fund at a company as culturally prominent as KADOKAWA would send a loud signal; a clear defeat for Oasis would suggest there are still limits to how far shareholder pressure can reach into Japan's content industry. Either way, the era when activist demands in Japan were settled discreetly is looking increasingly over.

In Japan, opinion on this fight is split — between those who think a long stretch of weak results should have consequences for whoever is in charge, and those who worry that handing more power to short-horizon investors is a poor way to run a company built on slow, creative work. Where you live, should shareholders be able to remove a CEO over financial performance — and would you trust an activist fund to know what a company like KADOKAWA is really worth? Tell us how this looks from your corner of the world.

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