Two presidents’ expense misuse, and governance rebuilt under Sakuraba Shogo (2023)

The merit and the sin of always choosing from within

That the same kind of misuse continued after the presidency changed hands cannot be explained by the morals of two individuals. Ono was president for some fourteen years and stayed on at the company as an adviser after stepping down. Ajisaka too was raised from vice-president, a career insider: management passed along inside the house for a long time. Always choosing the top from within served the transmission of technical skill — and the same mechanism, it can be argued, created a closed room in which no one was in a position to stop the president’s spending.

Even so, that tradition of internal promotion cannot be condemned outright. Sakuraba, pulled up to the presidency in an emergency, was an engineer who had spent years in optical development, and the core business did not falter through the handover: the year ended December 2024 delivered results at record levels. The soil that allowed the wrongdoing and the person who could be trusted to contain the crisis were grown by the same depth of home-grown talent. Closing the gaps in the system with outside eyes while not letting go of the strength of insiders — whether the company can do both at once is what the rebuild turns on.