When the World Wide Web first became a big deal in the mid-1990s, Hiroshi Mikitani was a 31-year-old executive with a Harvard Business School degree striding down the traditional Japanese path to success at one of the country's biggest banks.

Then he quit.

As much as American entrepreneurs like to portray themselves as mavericks, the stricter bonds of loyalty that define Japanese corporate culture made Mikitani's departure all the more radical. As was what he did next.

Mikitani launched e-commerce startup Rakuten in mid-1997, just before Amazon went public. But his vision of online shopping had little in common with the standard being set by Jeff Bezos.

From the start, Mikitani has shunned what he calls the "vending machine" model of e-commerce, the utilitarian, product-centered approach favored by Amazon. From the beginning, he has built Rakuten as a collection of individual digital shops branded and run by the merchants doing the selling. Mikitani believes shops foster a sense of human connectedness that makes shopping more fun.

It's an instinct that's paid off handsomely. Rakuten now handles more than one-quarter of all e-commerce business in Japan — more than twice as much as Amazon's share in the country. Now in more than a dozen countries, the multi-billion–dollar company has expanded from shopping into a range of services, from travel to banking to e-readers (Rakuten owns Kobo). It could be the largest internet company you've never heard of.

But Mikitani's planning to change that. In 2010, Rakuten acquired Buy.com. Earlier this year, the site was rebranded Rakuten.com and will serve as the company's launching pad into American e-commerce (though for now it's still in transition from its former self into its fully Rakuten-ized version). Mikitani recently stopped by Wired during the North America leg of his tour to promote his new book to talk about his approach to business, why he's betting big on Pinterest, and why Rakuten requires even the workers at its Japanese headquarters to speak English.

Mikitani told me that the key to claiming a bigger share of the U.S. market lies in recreating the shop-centric approach that led to such success in Japan.

"We are a bazaar. We are not a supermarket," Mikitani says. "We are creating a first-class shopping district instead of being a retailer ourselves."

Of course, eBay and to a growing extent Amazon rely on third-party sellers. But Mikitani contends that Rakuten gives those sellers more control over how they brand themselves and how they connect with customers. Today Rakuten has more than 40,000 merchants, who Mikitani describes as curators who are often most successful when they dominate a very specific niche, whether it's wine, fashion, furniture or eggs.

"My point is you don't need to kill the human factor," he says. "You can amplify the human factor by using information technology."

Mikitani's embrace of the "human factor" informed his decision to lead a $100 million venture capital round in user-powered Pinterest last year. While Pinterest hasn't hit upon a solid way to make money for itself, the value to a business like Rakuten is clear to Mikitani. The site's communities based around shared love of product niches parallels Rakuten's shops.

"Pinterest of course is a social network. But at the same time I would characterize it as a socially enabled publishing platform," he says. "You can create a social network around interests. That's totally different. When you think about its influence on consumption, it's like magazines. It's a fashion magazine or a travel magazine. It's so influential."

Mikitani sees Pinterest's next step as finding ways to help users act on their interests. In his book Marketplace 3.0, Mikitani cites Pinterest as evidence of the rise of "curated commerce." Since niche selling is Rakuten's specialty, Mikitani's interest in self-defining niche markets is easy to grasp.

Not so intuitive is Mikitani's decision to embark on a company-wide initiative he calls "Englishnization." While the name itself might not roll smoothly off the tongue, Mikitani insists the process is going well, even at the main office in Tokyo.

In 2010, Mikitani set a requirement that within two years all Rakuten employees would have to score at least a 600 on the Test of English for International Communication, a standardized test for non-native speakers brought to you by the same people responsible for the GRE. Up the management chain, the minimum test score increased.

Employees are allowed to study English on company time, Mikitani says. But getting people to use what they learned was especially challenging at first. In his book, he writes that fear of losing "face" led many employees to avoid using English at all out of fear that they'd make mistakes. He says he tried to coax them along with a dose of realism: "I joked that the corporate standard at Rakuten was not English but poor English." He says more than 90 percent of employees now meet the minimum standard.

One obvious benefit of the plan is that at a global company of nearly 10,000 workers, an employee in Japan can call the Rakuten office in Paris and the people on both ends of the line can talk in English without tracking down translators.

But Mikitani told me company-wide proficiency in English affords other, more urgent competitive advantages. Mikitani says half the new engineers Rakuten hires to work in Japan aren't Japanese and don't speak the language. An English-first policy helps Rakuten attract global talent in an intensely competitive recruiting environment.

Knowledge of English also helps employees keep better tabs on global competition, Mikitani says.

"There are so many interesting startups in the U.S.," he says. "It's very, very important for us to benchmark global competitors." By competitors, he says he means not just fellow internet giants but also small companies that might be doing "the coolest thing in the world."

Having an entire workforce that speaks English also doesn't hurt when moving into the U.S. Mikitani has always seen his mission as striving to marry digital technology with what he calls the Japanese "service mind." The idea of shopping as a friendly entertainment rather than brute commerce may not be enough to unseat Amazon on this side of the Pacific. But more thoughtful exports from Japan have shaken up American industries before. Over the next few years, it will be interesting to see Mikitani try.