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

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 .