Bain Japan Head Fends Off Rivals After $10.5 Billion Fund Launch

For nearly two decades, Bain Capital’s Yuji Sugimoto had Japan’s sleepy private equity market pretty much to himself. He nabbed the biggest deals, built one of the largest teams and nurtured a generation of executives.

Now that Japan has morphed into one of the hottest deal markets in the world, Sugimoto faces a different challenge: staying on top as bigger rivals like KKR & Co. and Blackstone Inc. up their game in the world’s fourth-largest economy.

“In the past, the most important thing was capital,” said Sugimoto, who also leads Bain Capital’s Asia-Pacific private equity business. “But today, capital alone ...