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addition to his duties at Ghibli, Suzuki was also the number-two man at Tokuma Shoten, a company that had businesses in publishing, movies, music, and computer games. His boss and mentor, Yasuyoshi Tokuma, chairman and sole owner of the parent company, was in his early seventies and had a penchant for causing trouble and creating situations. It was often Suzuki’s job to unravel the problems his boss had caused. This generally involved many time-consuming meetings and private, in-person visits.

      Suzuki lived in central Tokyo and would start his day with a one-hour-plus drive out to Ghibli in suburban Koganei. He would work there for several hours, then drive back into central Tokyo to attend a meeting or meetings in Shinbashi, where Tokuma Shoten was located. Most meetings in Tokyo were followed by a side meeting, or meetings, in a coffee shop or restaurant. Then Suzuki would drive back again to Ghibli to see how Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) was coming along. On some days he would drive back again to Shinbashi for another meeting and then back again to Ghibli. Suzuki often held meetings out at Koganei or back in Tokyo that began at 10 pm and lasted for hours. He usually left the studio at 1 am or 2 am for his drive back home to Tokyo. He rarely slept more than four hours a night.

      Suzuki is not a particularly large man, but he radiates a palpable energy, intelligence, and wit. Like Hayao Miyazaki, who is older than Suzuki by about a decade, Suzuki is instantly recognizable by anyone almost anywhere in Japan. His narrow face with John Lennon–style round glasses and a perpetual five-day beard and his extremely casual style of dress make him look like a person no one would ever mistake for a Japanese salaryman or believe was a director of a major company.

      Despite living a good deal of his life in a car or in meeting rooms, Suzuki always had time to see every major Japanese and Hollywood film then playing. He had an unusually thorough and detailed knowledge of the roads, paths, and hidden alleyways of the Koganei-Mitaka area. None of these roads were ones Suzuki would have crossed in his back-and-forth travels between Ghibli and Shinbashi, and they often led to the most interesting hidden parks and special restaurants in the area. For someone so eternally busy, Suzuki managed to spend long periods of time alone and just thinking. He also spent long hours locked in windowless rooms attending to the excruciatingly time-consuming process of filmmaking. And somehow he still found time to mentor the people who worked for him.

      The Tokuma Group of companies then consisted of Studio Ghibli (animation), Daiei Pictures (live-action films), Tokuma Publishing (the main company and a large publisher of a range of books from graphic novels to literature, nonfiction, magazines, and even poetry), Tokuma Japan Communications (music), Tokuma Intermedia (computer games and computer game magazines), Toko Tokuma (joint venture movie projects in China and independent films using Chinese directors), and Tokuma International (my company, engaged in sales of Tokuma’s entertainment products outside of Japan).

      When I joined Tokuma International, all media companies in Japan were just beginning to experience the serious challenges to their traditional business models posed by computer-based entertainment products and a decline in the demand for things printed on paper, formerly known as books, magazines, and newspapers. Over at Ghibli, the studio’s primary creator, Hayao Miyazaki, was simultaneously working himself nearly to death on his new film, Princess Mononoke, and facing a monumental writer’s block in his struggle to come up with an ending for the film. Miyazaki would always work by writing the endings to his screenplays while the beginning and middle parts of it were already in production. When the production of the film would catch up to the unwritten parts of the screenplay, a general panic would set in. Ghibli produced approximately one film every two years, and to miss a release date could conceivably mean financial ruin for the studio.

      With the business problems at Tokuma, the production problems at Ghibli, and the teething problems with the brand new Tokuma/Disney relationship in which Disney had contracted to distribute Ghibli’s films worldwide, Suzuki was driving back and forth between Shinbashi and Koganei quite a lot. He therefore spent a good part of his day in his car.

      Toshio Suzuki was then and continues to be what is known as an early adopter. If a certain new technology is available, he will be one of the very first to start using it. Owing to his position in the entertainment business, major Japanese electronics manufacturers would often seek him out to try their prototypes of new devices. Spending so much time in his car, Suzuki was always looking for ways to turn his car into a mobile office, so that he would never lose working time driving from place to place.

      Years before hands-free mobile phones became readily available in cars, Suzuki had one in his. Years before GPS systems became readily available in cars, Suzuki had one in his. He had an audio CD system in the trunk of his car that automatically rotated and played either a preselected menu of music or randomly selected music for him to listen to. The system was attached to four very fine speakers that replaced the ones that had come with the car. All of this gadgetry allowed Suzuki to conduct business during his hours on the road and to listen to his favorite music when he wasn’t on the phone.

      Thanks to his hands-free phone system, Suzuki was among the very first humans capable of gesturing wildly and yelling at someone while driving (legally) as he commuted to work. Thanks to his mobile GPS and sophisticated music players, he could plot his escape from Tokyo’s famous traffic jams while steeped in the sounds of 1950s and 1960s pop music (“Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “She Loves You,” and “House of the Rising Sun”). Many of his gadgets were specially made for him and were designed to be installed in various places in his car, including on the dashboard on the passenger side.

      I would often ride with Suzuki between Tokuma Shoten and Studio Ghibli. Once as we were cruising through relatively light Tokyo traffic, it occurred to me that his car was equipped with air bags.

      “Suzuki-san, does this car have a passenger side air bag?” I asked.

      “Yes, of course,” he said.

      “So if we get into an accident, the air bag will deploy and the GPS thing and the phone thing and the CD player controller thing will all be driven into my body at warp speed and with lethal force, killing me instantly?”

      “Well . . . yes, now that you mention it, I suppose it would.”

      The systems in his car were down for a few weeks after that. No one would agree to ride shotgun until his technology friends had figured out how to place everything so as not to kill the front-seat passenger in the event of an accident.

      No matter how busy Suzuki was, he always had time to do what was needed to make sure that my transition from a large American entertainment company (Disney) to Tokuma Shoten went as smoothly as possible. Most of his efforts in this respect involved keeping me isolated from contact with the company’s other divisions.

      The mission statement for the new company and my job description was to sell the rights outside of Japan to anything owned or produced by any of the Tokuma companies and to handle any business of the Tokuma companies that involved dealings outside of Japan. This included managing the Disney relationship for the Ghibli films they would distribute, but it also included the Daiei films (Shall We Dance?) in markets where they had not been sold and the music, video games, and the Chinese-produced or -directed films.

      One reason for setting up a separate company for the international business was to avoid the work rules of the rest of the Tokuma Group. Japanese companies then still worked a six-day week. Overtime, if required, was not compensated, even for hourly workers. Vacations and holidays, though earned, were rarely taken. And duties such as cleaning the office and serving tea or coffee were mandatory for all female employees (only). Suzuki understood that gaijin lacked the proper work ethic to submit to the normal working conditions in a Japanese company and would also resist applying the work rules to the new company’s Japanese staff as well. In order to function harmoniously in a Japanese company, the new company had to be separate and to have its own work rules.

      Many years ago when I was still a student in Japan, I was out drinking with a Japanese friend in a backstreet section of Osaka’s Dotonbori entertainment district. It was late, maybe 2 am, and we were stumbling around looking for a taxi, having had a lot to drink in the bars and clubs called “snacks” that my friend often frequented. We came to a very narrow street, so

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