The attempted coup, and Kuriwada’s seizure of control (2000)

The price of clearing out the factions

What Kuriwada chose was a form of governance in which opponents are removed from inside the institution itself and representative authority is gathered into his own hands. It can be read as an extension of the choices he had made until then — a man from the founding family who deliberately kept his distance from his own father, and put the survival of the company first.

Concentrating representative authority in one person, however, meant both the concentration of executive control and a structure that tied the succession problem to Kuriwada personally for years to come. That he returned to the presidency in 2021 shows how the clearing-out of the factions two decades earlier left behind an arrangement from which it was not easy to move away from founding-family rule.