Sending Hidaka Teru to Yamaichi, and taking on the rebuild with the two other main banks (1965)

Lending money, and taking custody

What Nakayama Sohei moved was not a credit line but a man: Hidaka Teru, then president of Nissan Chemical. From a word spoken in a private room in Akasaka, through nearly a year of work that drew in the presidents of Fuji and Mitsubishi and Kobayashi Ataru, IBJ shifted itself from the position of creditor to the position of a party responsible for management. It was IBJ's president who attended the Hikawa lodge meeting, and Yamaichi's president who waited for him back at IBJ. Which side of the rescue each man stood on is written in the seating of that one night.

To take custody of a company is also to remove the people who ran it. Adviser Koike Atsunosuke and Chairman Ogami Hajime stepped down, and Hidaka himself wrote that he might have jumped the gun at the start of the rebuild. In an atmosphere where crying out first meant losing, Yamaichi's decision to change its management was not irrational for its time; it is nearer the truth to say the gamble went against it. That the special loans were repaid in a little over four years owed much to the recovery in the market and to refunds from the shareholding cooperative. What IBJ took on, even so, was not the success or failure of the rebuild but the position of being answerable for it.