Arab News Japan

Japanese twin sisters Anna and Mizuki Nakajima made headlines on becoming multi-millionaires after their female-focused mobile games company hit the jackpot on the stock market.

The sisters barely launched Coly, an anime-based game, and within a week their stake in the firm was worth around 15.2bn yen (£101m, $141.5m).

With the size of the Japanese market for games specifically made for females growing from 70bn to 80bn yen from 2019 to 2020, the sisters were quick to jump on the bandwagon.

The company’s genre is called “otome”, Japanese for maiden, with almost three-quarters of its 200 employees, all women.

Otome followers tend to be fanatically devoted and willing to stick with titles for a long time, Serkan Toto, an analyst at Japanese gaming consultancy Kantan Games told the BBC.

With fewer than 5% of software companies in Japan led by women, the industry is a “boy’s club” and the Nakajimas’ story is “very unusual,” added Toto.

“The Nakajima twins did an exceptional job scaling their company so fast in such a hyper-competitive industry.”

Coly’s games, which include Stand My Heroes and Promise of Wizard, are free to download but players can pay to reveal extra story lines.

Business experts say it is still not easy to find your own way as a woman in the Japanese business world, having to overcome challenges that men would not have faced in the same situation.

“The company never took venture capital (VC) money, which is surely a much easier route to take in Japan for men,” Toto added.