The sokaiya payoff scandal and the end of Nakamura’s shadow rule (1997)

A rotten core is not fixed by changing presidents

At the heart of this decision was an attempt to settle the aftermath of scandal by swapping out the president. Promoting Kawazoe and shifting decisions back toward genuine deliberation made sense as a way to return hollowed-out governance to substance. But both the payoffs to sokaiya (corporate racketeers) and the U.S. sexual-harassment case, as Nikkei Business named it outright, had their roots in a single thing — the shadow rule of Chairman Nakamura, who held the power over personnel. Installing only a new president while leaving that shadow rule untouched would leave the rotten core in place. A missing sense of lawfulness was not the kind of thing that vanishes by changing the faces around the management table.

That Mitsubishi Motors was described as having a rotten core owed not to any single scandal but to a disposition that neither passed inconvenient information upward nor even heeded demands from outside. This disposition outlived the Kawazoe reforms and, each time the company sought rescue — from Daimler in 2000, from Nissan in 2016 — erupted as the same disease of concealment. The discipline of foreign capital or another firm can bring money and control, but it cannot transplant a sense of lawfulness. The 1997 crisis can be read as the point at which the structural problem running through all of later Mitsubishi Motors first broke the surface.