Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man - Steve Alpert

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people are used to happyo, a term that roughly translates as “presentation.” Long speeches mark many of Japan’s social occasions. Weddings and farewell parties require an endless series of long speeches. From an early age Japanese people are often pointed to at random, in school say, or at social gatherings, and asked to stand up and talk. And they almost always do, whether or not they actually have anything to say. At a Japanese business meeting, every single person in the room must talk, whether or not they have anything to say. There is never a sense of trying to come to a conclusion or challenging or discussing the opinions being talked about. Just a series of each person in the room articulating a position that may or may not have direct or even indirect relevance to whatever is being discussed.

      On the other hand, even a meeting where everything is decided or has been decided behind the scenes can serve other functions. Where people sit matters. Who sits closest to the president matters. Who is asked to speak in what order reveals things about the company’s power structure, which does shift from time to time. Who is invited to the meeting in the first place matters. The meetings may not bring forward the actual business of the company through critical discussion and evaluation of options. But they do let the people in it know a good deal about what is actually going on inside the company. The important information that you took away from a meeting often had very little to do with the topic that was being discussed.

      The chairman of the Tokuma Group was Yasuyoshi Tokuma, also variously known as Tokuma Kokai or Tokuma-shacho. Whatever stereotypical images there are of Japanese businessmen, Tokuma-shacho conformed to none of them. A consensus building, risk-averse team player, indistinguishable from his peers in a blue suit he was not. He was a quirky, self-confident, opinionated, strong-willed, blustering individual capable of swimming gleefully against the tide of public opinion and conventional wisdom. He consciously sought to appear bigger than life. He was exuberant and joyful but also capable of rage and thunder. He was a tall, good-looking man who projected an aura of authority. He was your grandfather on steroids (if your grandfather was Japanese). He spewed out transparent untruths so convincingly and entertainingly that no one believed them for a moment yet acted as if they did. He was capable of infinitely subtle Machiavellian intrigue that succeeded because it came wrapped in motives that seemed so comically obvious he was often underestimated. What you thought was really going on was often just diversion.

      It took me quite a while to realize that Tokuma-shacho’s self-aggrandizing, obviously exaggerated fabrications were meant to be dismissed as folly, because while you were congratulating yourself on seeing through the pretense, you were missing the real story. Tokuma-shacho could transform himself from a blustering, self-absorbed egoist into a wise elder statesman sharing his wisdom with you, secretly and off the record, in the space of a few sentences. His advice, when he gave it, could seem profound and usually made good practical sense. His mottos, which he repeated frequently, were “never let anyone else write the screenplay of your life” and “never let a lack of money stop you, because the banks have plenty of it just for the asking.” Knowing how to borrow large sums of money was his greatest talent.

      When I joined Tokuma Shoten, Tokuma-shacho was in his seventies. He was strongly built and handsome in the manner of an aging or retired movie star. He had a deep, gravelly voice that he broadcast stirringly to an audience of hundreds without a microphone. In private, the voice could drop to a sandpapery stage whisper, if he wasn’t yelling at you for something. He had the demeanor of an old-time politician or yakuza don. It was difficult to imagine him sitting down to give advice to famous Japanese politicians, or to heads of major modern corporations like SONY or Nintendo or to Japan’s first-tier major banks, as he often claimed. Yet there were newspaper articles, complete with photos, to prove that at least some of his stories were actually true. You were always sure that he was making up most or at least some of what he said, embellishing the details and adding here and there to make a good story, but there was always just enough verifiable truth in it to make you stop and wonder. No one ever believed his stories, and yet no one completely disbelieved them either.

      Mr. Tokuma was a fixer. He was a man who could get things done behind the scenes. If Politician A needed to speak to Politician B or Captain of Industry C, but couldn’t be seen in public doing so, he could speak to Mr. Tokuma and Mr. Tokuma would pass along the message. He was famously a friend of the Prime Minister Uno Sosuke. In 1989 when the Mainichi Shinbun broke with tradition and reported that then Prime Minister Uno had been keeping a geisha, Uno rode out the media firestorm hidden away in Mr. Tokuma’s twelfth-floor office suite for the better part of a week. Uno was later forced to resign after only three months in office. It was unclear whether the cause had been the public outrage over the moral issue of a prime minister having a kept woman, or the Uno regime’s being blamed for the prior administration’s imposition of an unpopular nationwide consumption tax, or that Uno had kept the geisha on such a pitiful allowance she had sought out a newspaper reporter to complain about it. In any event, it had been Mr. Tokuma who kept Uno out of sight while his political party tried to contain the damage.

      Once when returning from lunch and entering one of the two elevators in the lobby of the Tokuma Shoten Building, I noticed that people were avoiding the elevator I had just entered. People in public in Japan sometimes avoid sitting next to gaijin on trains or standing next to them in elevators (we are unpredictable, apparently), but this rarely happened in the Tokuma office building. Then I noticed that the other person in the elevator with me was clearly a yakuza. He was as wide as he was tall, muscular, wearing a dark suit with a narrow tie, had on sunglasses, and had facial scars, a crew cut, and an unambiguous attitude. He was carrying a large paper shopping bag in each hand. I casually glanced down to see what was in them. Though they were covered on top with loosely positioned Hello Kitty hand towels, I could clearly see that underneath the towels the bags were full of cash: bundles of ¥10,000 notes bound with rubber bands. No one else got on the elevator and the doors closed. I pushed the button for 10 and my companion asked me to push 12, the executive floor containing only Mr. Tokuma’s office and his private meeting rooms.

      The twelfth floor of the Tokuma Shoten Building was a kind of world unto itself. It contained the Tokuma boardroom, a very beautifully appointed president’s office with an adjoining smaller conference room, and a few secret rooms in the back, including a storeroom full of gifts that the shacho had received or that the shacho would eventually give to others. There was expensive-looking original art everywhere. The gatekeeper to the president’s office was Tokuma-shacho’s personal secretary, a very elegant woman named Oshiro-san.

      If you were summoned into the shacho’s presence you would get a call from Oshiro-san. If you needed to see Tokuma-shacho for some reason, you phoned Oshiro-san and she would either fit you in as appropriate or politely inform you that your request had been rejected. If you were a visitor from the outside or if you came up to the twelfth floor in the company of a visitor from the outside, at the end of the audience you would receive either a package of something called dokudamicha, a kind of supposedly healthful green tea, or a small present and a package of dokudamicha. Somewhere on the twelfth floor there was a storeroom containing a mountain of packages of dokudamicha.

      Any summons to the twelfth floor was guaranteed to be interesting. If there was something Tokuma-shacho wanted you to do for him, Oshiro-san would call you up. It was never come up at 3 pm or be here on Tuesday at noon. Advance notice was rare. When Oshiro-san called, the shacho wanted you right away. You dropped whatever it was you were doing and you went.

      Being ushered into Tokuma-shacho’s office always felt special. He had an enormous, beautiful mahogany desk that seemed to be overflowing with presents or framed documents he had just received and unwrapped. Two of the walls were all glass with sweeping views all the way out into Tokyo Harbor. It was a philosopher’s view of the city, similar to my own view from my office, but much grander. From up here the Bullet Trains rushing to and from Tokyo Station, the ferries docking or departing for Tokyo’s outer islands, and the planes banking low for their descent into Haneda Airport seemed somehow more significant. As if the person with this view of Tokyo had the kind of real power to change what you were seeing down below.

      If

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