Naoki Shimizu, Creativeman Productions CEO, Honored at Impact International: Asia 2026

Naoki Shimizu Chief Executive Officer Creativeman Productions Co., LTD.

AAA ATTITUDE: “Artists And The Audience.”

The continuing success of Creativeman Productions, one of the biggest concert promoters in Japan, is attributable to its founder-CEO’s enduring love of music and his determination to satisfy the Japanese public’s equally strong feelings about live performance.

The acronym Naoki Shimizu uses to describe this professional attitude is “AAA.”

“It reflects the idea that our work cannot exist without Artists And the Audience,” he says. Staying ahead of the competition requires vision and constant innovation. “The Tokyo area alone boasts 13 venues with capacities ranging from 8,000 to 25,000,” says Shimizu, “and they operate at nearly 80 percent capacity.”

Creativeman has always specialized in presenting Western artists, which Shimizu admits “is not an easy task” given the wide range of preferences at large in a large isolated market that has always gotten by very well with domestic acts. He has led the field by being bold in his choices.

Creativeman was the first promoter to bring Radiohead, The Beastie Boys and Green Day to Japan. In fact, it was the excitement he felt in the risk of presenting Public Enemy in a gritty club in the industrial city of Kawasaki in 1989 that prompted him to form Creativeman the following year.

Ten years later, he conceived Summer Sonic, one of the two big summer rock festivals in Japan centered on international artists, and which celebrated its 25th anniversary this summer. His business philosophy marries ambition to the pursuit of what he loves the most, in that while he can plan large-scale arena tours by the likes of Iron Maiden and this summer announced a partnership with international promotional powerhouse AEG, he also runs a live house in central Tokyo with a capacity of 350 called Space Odd, a name taken from his boyhood musical idol, David Bowie. “I am 61 years old and I have a 2-year-old child,” he says. “Living a life that feels like that of someone in their 30s might be the reason why I seem to be aging more slowly.”

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/10/02/impact-intl-asia-2026-honoree-naoki-shimizu/)._