Umamusume Can Reap The Rewards Of Susumu Fujita’s Savvy Timing
Forever Young’s self-made owner is riding the pop-culture wave of his Umamusume project all the way to Del Mar and the Breeders’ Cup.
SUSUMU FUJITA couldn’t have orchestrated it any better: Wednesday morning, Tokyo time, Breeders’ Cup and Cygames revealed to the world that the upcoming G1 Breeders’ Cup Sprint will have Cygames as its title partner; Wednesday evening, also Tokyo time, Fujita’s colt Forever Young emphasised his G1 Breeders’ Cup Classic credentials with victory in the JP1 Japan Dirt Classic at Oi racecourse.
While that was happening, Europe’s racing fans and participants were anticipating the weekend’s major attraction, the G1 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, for which Fujita’s contender Shin Emperor was attracting a heap of interest.
Fujita, whose net worth Forbes listed in 2023 as being US$970 million, has moved quickly in the four years since he was granted his JRA (Japan Racing Association) owner registration, emerging as a prominent race horse owner in Japan and on the world stage. His spending power at the sales was breathtaking from the outset: at Japan’s 2021 Select Sale, he made an immediate statement, buying the joint top lot, a Lord Kanaloa colt, for ¥300 million (US$2,702,703).
He ended that sale having bought 12 yearlings and six foals for a total outlay of ¥2,362 million (US$21.2 million). He has continued in like fashion and his four forays at the Select Sale alone have brought him 62 horses at a total, eye-watering, cost of ¥8,741 million (US$64 million), and let’s not forget Shin Emperor’s €2.1 million purchase out of Arqana in France.

Fujita is not only one of Japan’s most prominent race horse owners, but also the founder, president, CEO and driving force behind CyberAgent, of which Cygames is one of several subsidiary and affiliated companies. Cygames is the developer of all things Umamusume:, the ‘Pretty Derby’ horse racing-based game, Manga books, anime, music, movies, live show experience, merchandise, and even candy bars. Umamusume is already a huge hit in Japan, offering a fresh take on horse racing and attracting a new kind of young follower to the sport.
“Mr Fujita has invested a lot in horse racing, so it’s a good connection between Manga culture and horse racing; Manga has become very popular here in the last 50 or 60 years,” said Japan’s champion jockey Christophe Lemaire, who has appeared alongside Japan’s legendary jockey Yutaka Take in TV commercials for Umamusume, and, he noted, gets recognised in public more often since.
“If Shin Emperor wins the ‘Arc’, for example, it will be the first Japanese horse to win that race so it will have a real impact on all horse racing business … and for sure Mr. Fujita will capitalise on such a big victory, he will use it to promote horse racing more and more through Umamusume.”
And vice versa, as the Breeders’ Cup announcement showed. Fujita is, after all, a natural salesman as well as an innovator.

The Umamusume suite of offerings is pitched as ‘The Umamusume Project’ and within the Breeders’ Cup press release was a tantalising line: “The partnership with Cygames will mark the upcoming launch of the English version of Umamusume: Pretty Derby, a simulation game that debuted in Japan in 2021.”
Was it really saying Fujita would be unveiling the game’s English language release in California in November, at the Breeders’ Cup, at Del Mar? It wasn’t exactly crystal clear, but, if so, that would be huge for non-Japanese Umamusume fans who have been waiting, watching, wishing, and speculating about that day for more than three years.
“Does this mean what I think it means?!?!?!” one fan posted in the comments beneath Umamusume: Pretty Derby’s official English language X.com (formerly Twitter) account’s post about the partnership, while others expressed frustration at the lack of a firm date. “This is the first bit of news we get in a month? More info on English release would’ve been great,” posted another Umamusume fan.
Interestingly, Thursday saw the same X.com feed post its first character introduction in English, Special Week. And this all followed the English version of the game being demoed at the 2024 Anime Expo in early July, also in southern California, and the English release in August of the spin-off Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Party Dash game.
Fans have known the English release of the main game was coming, too, but the idea that it is perhaps being timed to hook into the Breeders’ Cup is fascinating: the granddaddy of ‘international’ racing events providing the stage for a youthful cultural phenomenon out of Japan.
“The Breeders’ what?” was how some Umamusume acolytes reacted to the news.
Regardless, it is certainly an exciting time for Fujita and ‘The Umamusume Project,’ and that means an exciting time for horse racing if the sport can understand and figure out how it might embrace the Umamusume phenomenon.

“Umamusume means, literally, the daughter of a horse, or horse daughter,” Lemaire told Idol Horse. “The concept is the girls are characters dressed in famous horse racing colours and you train them, like you would the horses they represent, and you prepare them to run on the race track.”
Cygames has used the names of real-life big-name horses from the Japanese racing scene, past and present, for the Umamusume game, which is aligned with the Umamusume anime series that first aired in April 2018. Among those ‘horse daughters’ are such stars as Special Week, Tokai Teio, Silence Suzuka and Kitasan Black: you don’t have to be a female horse to be turned into a horse girl.
“It’s kind of a parallel horse racing culture which is very positive for horse racing business. It has a huge impact, especially for the younger generation,” Lemaire continued.
“It’s kind of been a different way of introducing horse racing to the people and especially to the youngsters, because it’s not horses, it’s young lady characters with the horse’s personality and story. It was something very new and quite fun for the young people, so it became very big: the game really took off during Covid because there weren’t many distractions for the people then and the game was downloaded many thousands, if not millions of times.”
“It’s a parallel horse racing culture… It has a huge impact, especially for the younger generation.”
More than 21 million times, in fact. That number was reached and passed in June 2024, three years and four months after its release. At that point, it had made more than US$2.4 billion and accounted for more than 70 per cent of Cygames’ mobile game revenue since its release.
To be clear, Fujita is self-made and had no tangible connection to the racing industry growing up. Umamusume is produced and funded independently of the racing industry, yet it is horse racing’s greatest pop culture cross-over since Bing Crosby and his Hollywood ‘Golden Age’ friends were bringing superstar glamour to their Hollywood Park hangout.
The CyberAgent boss has not only enabled its development, but is also advancing awareness of it through the real horses he owns. Forever Young came so close to elevating the whole project globally when he was beaten a whisker in the G1 Kentucky Derby in May: imagine if he had won; imagine if he could win a Breeders’ Cup Classic, with the keenly anticipated Cygames announcement timed to coincide.


Fujita was born in 1973, in Fukui Prefecture, and lived in a rural town in a company housing unit, his father being a regular ‘company man’.’ He would listen to late-night radio, he recorded and watched movies on VHS, played Mahjong on his Nintendo Famicom game system, read books, played in a band, and used his pocket money to buy and absorb Manga comics from which Umamusume can trace its roots.
He worked in a mahjong bar (he is a skilled player) and also worked part-time selling free paper advertisements before graduating from university. In April 1997 Fujita joined Intelligence Ltd, working in sales, but less than a year later, at age 24, he founded CyberAgent and was made president. He became CEO in 2020, and, on his own blogging and social-platforming site, Ameba, he says his management style is “one that seeks growth through self-sufficiency, and distinguishes itself from flashy (mergers and acquisitions).” He has also championed youthful innovation.
Lemaire has met Fujita only a couple of times, despite his own role in the Umamusume commercials.
“But what I can say is that he’s very passionate about horse racing,” Lemaire said. “He’s got some visions for the future and he’s a very good businessman.
“He’s not a show off man, even on the racecourses he’s very quiet and discreet. He’s new in this game and maybe he doesn’t know many people in horse racing, so I think he’s observing and looking around at how all this game rolls on and how it works.”
Fujita’s trainers include three of the best, Yoshito Yahagi, Mitsu Nakauchida and the pioneering Hideyuki Mori, while his first winner, Dobune, was ridden by the great Take for his debut score in September 2021.

“He listens a lot to the jockeys, the trainers, and he lets them work without interfering. He’s still learning about horse racing, so that’s maybe why he’s in the background,” Lemaire added.
Fujita is nonetheless a racing ‘outsider’ smashing his way into a tight, often rigid, business. That ‘outsider’ background, riding in on a pop-culture hit, may have counted against him at times.
It is said that some of the sport’s participants play Umamusume: Pretty Derby, but it has not been embraced by all within the racing industry, and even the JRA seemed to view the phenomenon with caution: it should be noted that the game’s critics accuse sexualisation of the characters, ‘blurred lines’ about how old the ‘horse daughters’ are, and that it could also be a gateway to gambling.
There are owners who do not want their horses involved in the Umamusume world. Around the turn of the century, some owners went to court to establish their rights over the use of their horses’ names in two other games, Gallop Racer and Derby Stallion. The upshot, after an appellant High Court ruling, was that the game makers were able to use those horse names without having to pay royalties to the horse owners.
But even with that historical ruling sitting in Cygames’ favour, it would be folly within Japanese society, especially within such a tight business as horse racing, to upset major players. There has been much speculation among fans about what might have been kept under wraps regarding which owners will not allow their horses to be included in the Umamusume world and what deals may or may not have been done.
Deep Impact and King Kamehameha raced for Makoto Kaneko and both are obvious omissions from the game. He also owns Sodashi, the ‘White Wonder,’ one of Japan’s most popular horses, being the first pure white racehorse to win a Group 1 race.
A white horse would be a great addition to Umamusume’s alternate universe: perhaps that’s why Fujita went to ¥190 million (US$1,180,125) to buy a white yearling colt by Maurice out of Marble Cake at the 2024 Select Sale.
“It looks like everything he touches becomes gold,” Lemaire observed, and if that is so, given the huge investment Fujita has made in buying quality bloodstock, a world-waking major win could be on the cards sooner than later.
None come bigger than the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe or the Breeders’ Cup Classic, and if a Fujita horse could win one or both of those, it would be a marketing and sales dream for ‘The Umamusume Project’ on the brink of an English language game launch.
Not only that, you can bet there’d be a new character or two joining the Umamusume universe, decked in Fujita’s own maroon and white colours ∎