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Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man. Steve Alpert
Читать онлайн.Название Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781611729412
Автор произведения Steve Alpert
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Whether first-time visitor or company employee, once you got the required dose of the art on the walls and the view out the windows, you were ushered to a suite of sofas and chairs arranged around a large glass-topped coffee table. This is where you were invited to sit and wait for the shacho to join you while observing him in action. He was usually on the phone when you came in. The single armchair looking outward was reserved for Tokuma-shacho, and on the table in front of it was his personal teacup, a very beautiful and very rare Edo-era blue and white Imari porcelain with a mountain and waterfall landscape baked into it. The two chairs facing the desk were usually reserved for in-house visitors. The sofa with its back to the desk was usually stacked high with books or more items that Tokuma-shacho had received as gifts but was cleared off to be used by outside visitors.
No meeting with the shacho ever began until Oshiro-san had brought in a tray with freshly brewed coffee and fancy French cookies or little cakes, followed by Japanese tea. Once the shacho settled into his chair, which was bigger than the others, he never seemed to be in a hurry. He asked how you were doing, what you were up to. There was personal conversation while you ate the cookies and sipped tea and/or coffee. And eventually he would get around to whatever it was that he wanted you to do for him. One such theme, for example, was his wanting to meet personally with Disney’s then chairman Michael Eisner. How could this be arranged and when? Several times he asked me up to his office for advice on how he could arrange to meet with Bill Clinton (Harvey Weinstein had suggested that he could arrange it).
Sometimes the meeting with Mr. Tokuma would be about an offer he had received from someone not Japanese, and he wanted a response drafted in English. Michael Ovitz once invited him to meet Christie Hefner to see if Tokuma Shoten would be interested in publishing Playboy in Japan (he wasn’t). Steven Segal wanted him to invest in one of his films (he didn’t). Every three or four months he received an invitation to executive produce a film somewhere in Europe that included a financial summary, and he asked me to look it over.
Sometimes Mr. Tokuma would ask me and Moriyoshi-san, who worked with me, to come up to his office, and there would be no point to the meeting or request at all. Oshiro-san would come in with individual cups of Häagen-Dazs (always vanilla) or little plastic containers of crème brulée. We would eat. There would be no talking at all sometimes; just eating. We would finish eating, he would thank us, and we would leave. That would be it. Moriyoshi-san and I would leave, look at each other but not voice the question “what was that about?” at least until we got back downstairs.
The actual business of Tokuma Shoten was entertainment and publishing. Mr. Tokuma had started his company by recognizing talent and promoting it. Writers and other artists loved to be represented by Tokuma because he firmly believed that the creative part was up to them, and he seldom interfered in any way with what they did. Once he selected someone he had decided to work with, he left the creative side of things entirely in their hands. It helped that he was always less interested in their actual work than he was in what use he could make of the relationship. He published books. He hired writers and other staff and let them create magazines. His companies funded the films of Akira Kurosawa when no one else would. He invested in Chinese filmmakers whose government threatened to ban their films. And he started Studio Ghibli by finding the money to finance the then relatively unknown Japanese directors Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki.
Studio Ghibli was founded in order to keep the team that had produced Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind) together so they could go on to make more films. A great deal of mythology surrounds the creation of Studio Ghibli. Toshio Suzuki has said that the name for the studio was chosen because Ghibli is a term WWI Italian fighter pilots used for the hot wind that blows out of the Sahara Desert. Suzuki maintained that Ghibli’s purpose was to blow a hot new wind into the world of Japanese film animation. Hayao Miyazaki, when asked why the name Ghibli, said the name was chosen when Suzuki told him they were getting their own studio and it needed a name. Miyazaki says he was looking at a book of WWI aircraft when Suzuki came in, and randomly pointed to a plane on the page he had open at the time. Both or neither may be true. Either way, it was Yasuyoshi Tokuma who came up with the money to make it happen.
Public Speaking
To manage his companies, or perhaps more accurately, to hear the reports on what was happening in his companies and create a narrative to describe it to the outside world, Tokuma-shacho held three monthly meetings on a regular schedule. There was a department heads meeting, a board of directors meeting, and an all–Tokuma Group employees meeting. The latter was a monthly address to the assembled employees of the companies that made up the Tokuma Group. There was also a semiannual stockholders meeting. Each meeting began with a speech by Tokuma-shacho. The speech took a slightly different form depending on Mr. Tokuma’s mood and what was going on at the time. It was somewhere between a comedian’s stand-up monologue and a politician’s formal address.
Each of the meetings had its own purpose and its own audience even though there was a good deal of overlap in the contents. At the department heads meeting attended by thirty or so department heads or subheads seated around the huge board room table on the top floor of the Tokuma Shoten Building, each department head was required to stand and relate the highlights of his/her department’s activities that month and say what kind of things were expected to happen in the coming months. All seats were assigned. You had to be on time. The meeting started at 10 am and if you were not in your seat by 9:55 am you were late.
The current status of each person in the company was revealed by his/her proximity to Tokuma-shacho seated at the head of the table. Toshio Suzuki was always seated to his right. No one managed to hold the seat to his left for more than a meeting or two. Because Mr. Tokuma loved intrigue, most of the other positions at the table often changed, and rivals of equal status sat equidistant from the boss, facing each other at the table. I always sat next to Suzuki, partly because the idea of having a gaijin at the table in the first place was meant as a kind of status for the company and partly because the gaijin needed frequent whispered commentary to understand what was going on.
Tokuma-shacho always opened the meeting and for the first half hour regaled the assembled group with a reading of selections from his current month’s diary. The diary, the parts of it he read anyway, contained secrets and glimpses behind the scenes of Japan’s centers of commercial and political power. He used the diary as a kind of jumping-off point for his monologues. He would tell stories about famous people. Sometimes he would interrupt himself with his thoughts on politics and society or just to tell a joke. He was one of the most riveting public speakers I have ever heard. And he expected no less of each person in the room when it was his/her turn to speak.
When you spoke at one of these meetings, you had to speak up in a loud, confident, and manly voice (even if you were a woman). Often not much happened in a particular department from month to month. Listening to a speaker trying to embellish his/her business activities and make it sound as though progress were being made could be either painful or sleep-inducing (sleeping in a Japanese business meeting is OK if done correctly; the proper position is arms folded across chest, chin resting on top of chest, and facial expression ambiguous enough to be interpreted as listening with eyes closed). Often the topic being reported was some business-related failure that everyone in the room understood Tokuma-shacho himself had caused but would not admit to. The publishing division’s numbers were down because a highly touted new book by Sidney Sheldon had failed to do any business. Tokuma-shacho had taken pride in negotiating the outrageously generous contract with the author by himself, against the advice of his head of publishing. Because no one could actually blame Mr. Tokuma aloud at a meeting, the head of publishing had to take responsibility for vastly overpaying Sidney Sheldon.
No remedies or actionable plans were ever offered at the meetings, and there were rarely comments or questions. The department head or subdepartment head said