Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📕

impossible to put a price on safety. Now that the man who himself had insisted on such measures had been kidnapped, the air that greeted Kotani in the conference room was, to say the least, chilly from the start.

Kotani had been head of the Japan branch of a large property and casualty insurance company that was contracted by Hinode’s subsidiary in the US. The insurance company had referred Kotani to Hinode’s main office, and he had signed with them as a consultant. The impression he gave as a typical Harvard yuppie aside, certain aspects of his behavior and manner revealed that his sensibility was slightly different from that of an average Japanese person. Even now, in the hushed meeting room, he blew his nose—loudly and deliberately—causing the executives around him to furrow their brows in disapproval.

The only person with the wherewithal to address Kotani was Shirai. “I hear the cedar pollen is particularly bad this year.”

As Kotani began his report, it became clear that he did not interpret the current situation as a lapse in the system. He emphasized craftily that now was the time when risk management’s effectiveness would be proven.

It was then and there Shiroyama learned that, as per the manual created the previous fall, over the last three days a special top-secret control center had been installed and was up and running in an underground storage room beneath the opera hall. Kotani said that, starting tomorrow, the point of contact between their public relations and the press would also be directly linked to this control center, as a means to streamline their information management even further.

“The crucial point is, no matter whether it’s internal or external to the company, no employees other than those assigned exclusively to the control center has anything whatsoever to do with information related to the incident,” Kotani said. The preventative measures were detailed indeed; he spoke about ensuring that those involved in the police investigation enter and leave from the underground parking lot and go straight to the control center, and that all communications and instructions between the control center and the board be conducted verbally and not on paper.

Kotani had not been informed about the particulars of the situation, so he was merely generalizing, but even so, the specific measures were based on the assumptions that the company faced certain circumstances that could not be made public and that the criminals would later make a monetary demand.

In closing, Kotani said, “How you maintain your relationship with the police will become an important issue as the situation progresses. It’s vital to ensure that all questioning of your employees by the investigators be channeled through the control center so that your company is always aware of the flow of information. As a basic rule, I advise you to respond prudently, with the assumption that anything you share with investigators will leak out, one way or another.” Thus he ended his report, which took less than ten minutes and did not elicit a peep from the board.

After Kotani left the room and the door had been locked again, someone quipped, “We’re going to let that guy negotiate with the criminals?” but no one responded and the meeting proceeded to the report by Ide, the manager of general affairs.

Ide first explained what, going forward from this morning, the response had been within and outside of the company, and emphasized that there had been no notable inquiries from their clients or industry peers that required their collective attention. Internally, during the morning division heads’ meeting, Ide had arranged for all employees to be given a script on how to respond whenever a customer might bring up the incident, and the procedure was already in place by that afternoon. He also reported that one of their employees had been stopped on the street in front of their Osaka branch office that morning by a television crew from a commercial broadcasting company and he had ended up talking to them. The head of the branch immediately called the main office about this occurrence, reporting that said employee had been given a stern warning.

Next, Hiroshi Sakakibara, the corporate secretary and executive director of general affairs, read aloud the list of documents he had submitted in compliance with the police’s request: first was the set of materials distributed at the current term’s board meeting; organizational charts and allocation of duties for every department and division in the main office as well as every factory, branch office, store, and sales office; issues of their quarterly in-house newsletter, Hinode, from last year going back to 1955; the two-volume History of Hinode Beer, compiled to commemorate their centennial; a register of retired employees from last year going back to 1965, and the employee directory for the current year; and finally a list of all their distributors and suppliers.

There was another list of documents, those they had refused to submit to the authorities: minutes from board meetings; daily logs of executives and the president; employee performance evaluations; a list of callers to the general affairs department and records of faxes sent and received, going back to January of this year; the contents of company insurance policies and a list of insurance companies; a set of their current and past ledgers.

Next Kayama, the manager of public relations, announced that their deputy manager had been assigned to the control center. But since the various media companies were so aggressive in their pursuit, and an ambiguous response might harm the company’s image, he suggested that instead it would be better to refuse all interviews. To this, Tazawa—the managing director in charge of public affairs—immediately reprimanded him, “What do you think you’re saying? Consider first whether you assigned the right person to deal with the media. Then we’ll discuss this. That’s enough from you.”

Following Tazawa’s rebuke, a chorus of impatient voices rose from the group, urging that they move on from the reports and proceed to the main subject. Shirai signaled with his eyes and the two managers,