[2] His father Ryōichi Mikitani served as Chairman of Japan Society Of Monetary Economics and was a professor at Kobe University.

[3] His mother Setsuko was a graduate of Kobe University and worked for a trading company; she had attended elementary school in New York.

His grandmother was born to a noble family which had fallen on hard times, and raised Mikitani's father as a single mother while running a tobacco store.

[5] Ryōichi was Japan's first Fulbright Scholar to the US[5] and taught for two years at Yale University; during that time, from 1972 to 1974, the family lived in New Haven, Connecticut.

[2] Mikitani has stated that the destruction caused by the devastating 1995 Kobe earthquake made him realize he wanted to help revitalize Japan’s economy, leading to his resignation from banking and decision to start his own business.

[5] On February 7, 1997, Mikitani founded the e-commerce company MDM, Inc. with three co-founders and US$250,000 of their own money, launching the online marketplace Rakuten Ichiba in Japan on May 1, 1997.

[5] In founding the company, Mikitani envisioned an online marketplace focusing on the exchange between buyers and sellers, as a hybrid between eBay and Amazon.com.

[9] Beginning in March 2010, Mikitani implemented a plan that he calls "Englishnization", making English the primary language of Rakuten within two years.

[11] While the plan was dismissed as "stupid" by Honda president Takanobu Ito in 2010, Mikitani believes that "English is not an advantage anymore – it is a requirement."

Mikitani was approached by league officials about putting together an expansion team in Sendai, which would be named the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles.

[29] On 10 April 2024, Mikitani was among the guests invited to the state dinner hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden in honor of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House.