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

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