Hatano then looked at the first page of the letter.
Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory. To Whom It May Concern.
Should he say something before the opening line? He hesitated a moment but, thinking that he owed them no explanation whatsoever, he made up his mind. Hatano hit the record button on the Walkman and, pausing for two seconds, began to read the letter aloud: “Hinode Beer Company, Kanagawa Factory. To whom it may concern.” No, he didn’t just read it; he narrated it on behalf of Seiji Okamura.
“I, Seiji Okamura, am one of the forty employees who have resigned from the Kanagawa factory of Hinode at the end of this past February. Today, as I am currently confined to my sickbed and can hardly sit up or stand . . .”
He figured Okamura had been a man of few words who faltered in his speech. In trying to resurrect such a man forty-three years later, Hatano took on a slightly hesitant tone and spoke quite slowly.
“. . . My ‘former colleague,’ that is to say Katsuichi Noguchi, himself resigned from the Kanagawa factory in 1942, but in the case of Noguchi, I know that his resignation took place with an unspeakable amount of disappointment and indignation, and that various circumstances transpired before and after . . .”
Hatano read straight through to the end without any inflection, as if he were chanting a sutra, and once he had practically filled both sides of the sixty-minute tape, he signed off with the date and name. He inserted the tape into one manila envelope, sealed it, then inserted the package into another manila envelope before sealing that one and affixing enough stamps. He typed up and printed out a label with the address of the human resources department at Hinode’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa, leaving his name and return address blank.
After finishing these tasks, he threw the thirty-one pages into the trash. He then returned to the sofa, put on the CD of the singer Yuming that his son had left behind, and drank until three in the morning.
Early the next morning—the sixth—Hatano woke after sleeping for about three hours, took the envelope and drove his Mercedes-Benz to the Shinagawa post office in Higashi-Oi, where he deposited it into the same mailbox as before. Afterward, he opened his clinic at half past eight and started seeing patients by nine, as usual. By the time noon rolled around he already felt like the tape recording was the work of someone else—not him—and before he knew it, all that remained in the back of his mind was—the same as yesterday—the image of his son’s head, covered with blood.
3
Kyosuke Shiroyama
It took less than twenty minutes to drive directly from his house in Sanno to Hinode’s main office in Kita-Shinagawa, but since his days as managing director, Kyosuke Shiroyama would instruct his driver to take twice as long by meandering along a different route every morning. One reason for this was to secure the time to scan through the sections of the newspaper he had not finished reading at home; another was to observe the backstreets he did not normally pass by, the secluded stores, the signage and billboards, the flow of commuters.
It had been thirty-one years since he joined Hinode Beer. Even now that he had assumed the position of president and CEO in June, he retained basically the same perseverance he had attained by spending two thirds of that time in the front line of the sales division. No, in terms of both ability and character, Shiroyama knew there was simply no way for him to change.
Unlike other alcoholic beverages, beer acutely reflected the sensibility of the times and the quotidian emotions of the people. Thus, copious research was always conducted before the release of each new product, but Shiroyama occasionally felt caught between his salesman’s desire to maintain his intuition about the accuracy of such research even now that he had reached the top and the awareness that he was no longer in a position to share his personal hunches about a single product. Now that keeping an eye on current figures as well as the status of the entire company was his job, this incapacity to shed the perspective of front-end sales had, in effect, ultimately turned Shiroyama into a prudent manager who carefully considered the opinions of others and actually in some ways made him more agreeable.
He had never told anyone about his morning prowls—not the other executives, much less the general employees—out of concern that it might put unnecessary pressure on them. As usual on that Monday morning, November 12th, Shiroyama spent about ten minutes scanning the Nikkei’s personnel column, then as the company car drifted around the Yashio Park Town residential complex, he gazed out at the morning scene and, opening the window a little, breathed in the salty air. With fifteen minutes still to spare, his driver offered to take him through the neighborhood of James’s Slope, to which Shiroyama agreed, and as the car turned toward the waterfront and carried him along, his eyes continued to scan the scenery outside. In a rapidly changing city like Tokyo, less than a couple of weeks went by before a new store or new billboards popped up here or there.
Still, this whole time Shiroyama’s mind was never at rest. He lined up the affairs of the day in his mind, confirming what was urgent, worrying about the year-end account figures that would arrive in the middle of the winter sales campaign, deliberating over the next term index that had already arrived, reminding himself about the mid-to-long-term agenda items he would need to act on soon, and mulling over the angles and the sequence of the groundwork he would have to lay to reach a consensus at the next board meeting. On that day, his mind was predominantly occupied—for the time being—by the November forecast for next month’s figures as well as the numbers from October’s monthly interim financial statement, followed by other sundry concerns that asserted themselves one after another.
Hinode Supreme, a new product that had gone on sale in the spring, had already proved to be a big hit, clearing its first-year goal of thirty million cases by October, so Shiroyama felt somewhat at ease, but his concerns still seemed myriad. The gross domestic demand for beer had been on the rise these past few years, but the gradual decline of Hinode Lager, which had dominated the market for a quarter of a century, had now become the trend of the times. Last year, Hinode experienced a historical nadir when its share dipped below fifty percent, and management had been overhauled. And so, compelled by an onslaught of new products developed by their competitors, for the past two years Hinode had been reconsidering its product range, which relied too heavily on the lager, and had shifted toward a more diversified strategy. But the result of Hinode’s relinquishing its fortitude as the stalwart of the industry was that ultimately every company was dragged into a grueling, never-ending competition that forced all of them to increase their advertising budgets and to overproduce new products to maintain their market share. The situation was unlikely to change anytime soon.
The massive process industry that was the beer business operated on razor-thin profit margins to begin with, and they faced heavy competition abroad due to high liquor taxes. All of them had attempted to diversify but even for Hinode, whose pharmaceutical business was doing well, beer still exceeded 96 percent of their overall sales, thus things were not so simple. Moreover, at a time when external pressure to censure conglomerations of keiretsu-affiliated groups was sure to grow stronger on the heels of the Japan-US Structural Impediments Initiative, it was obvious that the company could no longer continue to skirt the issue by importing foreign brands and making licensing deals. Therefore, showing progress on their strategy to form a new business alliance with an overseas manufacturer—the company’s one and only offensive—was Shiroyama’s biggest responsibility during his term in office.
As a matter of fact, the world’s largest beer manufacturer, Limelight, with whom Hinode had held an exclusive distribution agreement for the last ten years, was privately consulting with them about their interest in establishing a joint venture. This was a complicated issue, and if they did not meticulously deliberate the terms, the company ran the risk of coming under fire from the Fair Trade Commission—which despised Hinode’s oligopolization of the market�
�and would force them to swallow unfavorable conditions. Even if they formed the joint venture, there was still the fear that domestic products would be upstaged in the future, pinned down as they were by the high liquor tax. And, considering the long-term effects, it might very well hasten their self-destruction to release their nationwide network of six hundred distributors from their contracts. Yet if they were to backpedal even the slightest and this opportunity went elsewhere, everything would be lost. Limelight’s move was top-secret, so he would have to keep a close watch on Japan Fair Trade Commission’s activities and figure out the right time to start laying the groundwork with the National Tax Agency.
Meanwhile, among their domestic concerns was the issue of a new Nagoya factory. They were accelerating construction because of a desperate need to raise their beer-canning rate, but due to sudden increases in land value, the site acquisition wasn’t progressing very smoothly. Then there were the liquor discount stores, who would undoubtedly gain strength from the easement associated with last year’s partial revision of how applications for liquor licenses would be handled. This issue would lead to the destruction of every company’s network of distributors that had been established during beer’s hundred-year history, so realigning their sales channels was an urgent matter.
On the logistics side, he had to figure out what to do about the relationship between Hinode Distribution and the Ogura Group. Personally, he wanted to reassure himself of the bank’s intentions regarding their purchase of additional Ogura stock, but what would be the consensus of the board?
“Are we about ready, sir?” asked his driver, always punctual.
“Yes, go ahead,” Shiroyama replied.
The driver promptly brought the car over to the front of their main office on the south side of Yatsuyama-dori Avenue in Kita-Shinagawa. The company’s new building, completed three years ago, consisted of forty floors paneled entirely in solid granite, which an architecture magazine wrote off as a nouveau-riche knock-off of 1920s New York. The first and second floors housed the Hinode Opera Hall with its world-class acoustics, and on the top floor was the Hinode Sky Beer Restaurant, managed directly by the company’s dining division. The remaining thirty-seven floors were occupied by all of the various corporate divisions and twelve of their affiliated companies.
At a quarter past eight, Shiroyama walked through its entrance alone. When he became president he had scrapped the practice of the executive secretary greeting him at the door, so he also carried his own briefcase. He believed that the elimination of wasteful time and expenses must begin at the top, and the matter was considered by and agreed upon by the board. He had also decided that all eight thousand employees of their fifteen regional divisions, forty branch offices, and twelve factories in the nation should be referred to at the company with just the polite suffix “san” after their names, rather than using job titles to refer to superiors. This wasn’t to put on airs. Rather, it was implemented to motivate and streamline their organization, but Shiroyama knew that some of the board members viewed it as an aggressive step toward the implementation of a Shiroyama system. It was necessary for him to pretend not to hear talk such as this—otherwise nothing would get done.
From the time he entered the lobby and headed to the elevator banks until he reached the president’s executive suite on the thirtieth floor, Shiroyama repeated a mechanical “good morning” about a dozen times whenever he encountered an employee. Since way back, no matter his position at the company, people had always said that his appearance seemed to represent the average Hinode employee, and even now that his hair had grayed, that had not changed and he still did not stand out at all. More than a few times during his stint as managing director, he would walk around the office and hear an employee who passed by murmuring to someone else, “Who’s that?” And when he’d worked in sales as a young man, he had had trouble getting clients to remember his face.
But now that he had become the “face” of Hinode, he had stopped hearing whispers, although at the Japan Business Federation or the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, this was basically the status quo. What it came down to was that they had entered an era in which, by working hard, an anonymous sales machine could rise to the top of management before anyone noticed. As a CEO, Kyosuke Shiroyama was in the vanguard of his generation—men born in the second decade of the Showa era, who were not baptized by the romanticism of the preceding Taisho era. He wasn’t cut from the same cloth as those corporate men who adorned the covers of business magazines, nor was he a model of management philosophy. He simply bore the responsibility to protect the profits of all of Hinode’s shareholders and employees. Shiroyama acknowledged that he was a management machine that, though lacking a recognizable face, ran the company with sound business acumen and reasonable leadership ability. In truth, he knew would never be anything beyond that.
As he entered the executive suite, Shiroyama said another “good morning” to his secretary, who had risen from her desk in the anteroom. Then, he finally opened the door to his own office in the back.
The secretary, following immediately after him, asked, “May I confirm today’s schedule?” She waited until Shiroyama had placed his briefcase on the desk and sat down before presenting an enumerated list to him. Her name was Takako Nozaki; she had been working in this same office for over twenty years. She was a woman who seemed to know instinctively the most efficient way to do things, so Shiroyama rarely made any demands of her. One would not call her beautiful, but there was something comforting about her low, calm voice.
“Will you attend the breakfast meeting at 9? The car will pick you up for the Japan-US Businessmen’s Conference at 9:45. Please don’t be late. Will you look at the report now?”
“In the car.”
“Then I’ll gather the documents and wait for you by the entrance. Also, the interview with Asahi Shimbun at 2:30 will be twenty minutes, including a photo session. The questionnaire is . . .”
Ms. Nozaki showed him another sheet of paper with an itemized list of questions, but she knew they would never stick in Shiroyama’s mind at such a short notice. “I’ll look over them myself beforehand,” she added diligently.
“There won’t be your usual rounds within the company at 3 today. The task force for the construction of the new Nagoya factory will give a briefing at the business development division, so please attend that instead. The board members who will also be in attendance are listed. Then at 4:15, the honorable Sakata-san from the Liberal Democratic Party will be calling, so please don’t forget.”
On the schedule, prepared with a word processor, were the words, “Thank-you call from S.” The call was in regard to a fundraising ticket.
“Yes. I understand,” Shiroyama responded.
“Then, at five there’s the ceremony for the Hinode Cultural Awards.”
With that, she placed a slim pamphlet in front of him. The award was a project of the Hinode Cultural Foundation, established ten years ago, with both art and music categories. Feeling embarrassed that he had forgotten all about it, Shiroyama replied simply, “Yes.”
“The list of recipients and their work is in the pamphlet.”
“I’ll take a look at it in the car.”
“I’ll have the car ready for you at the entrance by 4:30. Then, you will be returning at 7 . . .”
And that was that—the confirmation of his schedule first thing in the morning took three minutes. Another three minutes to go over publicity events and advertising, as well as crucial matters regarding business at the different branches and factories.
Last came the reports from the beer, pharmaceutical, and business development divisions, which arrived every Monday; the stack of October’s monthly interim financial statements; and clippings from trade publications such as food industry newspapers, all compiled into a folder. After placing them on his desk, Ms. Nozaki then delivered a carafe of water and a glass and promptly disappeared by e
ight-thirty.
Shiroyama looked at his watch. He had less than half an hour until nine, the official start of business. The accumulation of these half hours every morning was a small point of pride for Shiroyama. He laid out all four sets of documents on his desk, including the reports and the interim financial statements, and began scanning through all of them at once. When it came to numbers, his instincts were useless unless he looked at them everyday. He had no intention of criticizing the details of the accounting; he never said anything about numbers during management meetings, but taking a broad view of the numbers aided him with various decisions, including whether the company was proceeding properly day-to-day, and whether there were any unusual changes in its progress.
But first, last week’s results for Hinode Supreme: 520,000 cases. The report noted that, looking ahead to increased demand forecast over Christmas, there was the potential to restore the weekly sales pace of 700,000 cases. Based on the rate of orders to the end of the term, the cumulative forecast was set at upwards of thirty-five million cases. This would ensure them their next-term goal of seventy million cases. However, if the lager—which dominated with 80 percent of their product range—were to fall short of the previous term’s cumulative total, this term’s year-over-year sales could be on the brink of a deficit.
Next, he quickly skimmed the results of each branch, as well as the production rates and inventory numbers for each factory.
Lady Joker, Volume 1 Page 8
