Ultimately, I got a lot of information out of Tominaga, much more than I’d expected. We talked for two or three hours, until he began to look as tired as I felt. We agreed to call it a night and then meet again in a few days. That gave me some time to absorb what I’d heard and get ready for round two.

Our second meeting was at a Western-style restaurant that Tominaga suggested, a place called Beacon in the upscale Aoyama district, just a short walk from Omotesando, the regular haunt of all serious Tokyo fashionistas (Ginza, as was patiently explained to me long ago by an ex-girlfriend, is for tourists and wealthy obaasan—grandmothers). Tominaga must have been trying to impress us, choosing this place over some fancy Japanese kaiseki restaurant. Or maybe he thought my gaijin stomach wasn’t ready for real Japanese cuisine. Whatever the case might be, I was happy to be here tonight.

Kato and I were just sitting down at a table in the rear, admiring the dark wood paneling and the delicious smells emanating from the open kitchen when a waitress appeared and asked if we’d like a drink before our meal.

A few minutes later, a bottle of Silver Oak Cabernet was making its way to our table only a few steps behind our guest of honor. I spotted Tominaga wending his way through the crowd, followed by an attractive woman in her late twenties.

“Russell-san, Kato-san,” he said brusquely in Japanese as he reached our table. “This is Oishi. She works in our PR department. She speaks English.”

I noticed that, aside from introducing her matter-of-factly, as he was required to do, Tominaga didn’t take her coat or get her chair for her, so I started quickly around the table to do it myself, but she had already seated herself, smiling as she noticed my failed attempt at chivalry. Oishi-san offered a hand in a very polite, ladylike way, and I took it.

“My name is Tomoko Oishi. I work in public relations for ORIX. I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said in very passable English. Obviously, a few years of study overseas, I thought.

I introduced myself, thinking perhaps I had been rash in refusing to have anything to do with the PR department. Then I suddenly realized that I didn’t know her title or phone number or mail address because we hadn’t exchanged meishi. People who haven’t exchanged business cards have never been properly introduced, they say. So, although we were sitting down, I pulled my meishi case out of my jacket pocket and presented my card to her with two hands. She dug in her purse and produced an ORIX meishi, which she likewise passed to me with two hands, bowing as much as possible while seated at a Western dining table.

I called for two more wine glasses, and poured some of our excellent California red for our two guests. What I really need, I explained to both of them, is some essential background on the company. I have a few disconnected dates and milestones, but I still don’t feel that I know how ORIX was born and grew up. And, now that we have a woman here, I’d also like to hear a little about what it’s like to be a woman working at ORIX. Perhaps we could tackle the historical background first . . .

Of course, I had some idea what ORIX had done in the United States, and I understood bits and pieces of the company’s history in Asia and elsewhere. As I noted earlier, I had skimmed the thumbnail historical sketches on the company’s website and in its Annual Report, but I still didn’t have any strong feeling for how ORIX got started or how it grew into the behemoth that it had become. My gut told me that the creation of the company and the first ten years were crucial to understanding everything else, and for Tominaga’s benefit, I said as much in my broken Japanese.

Without even pausing to ask Oishi if she wanted to start off, Tominaga launched into his own version of the company history. “First,” he said, “it is important to remember that in the years immediately following World War II, Japan was an economic wreck. I believe it was even officially categorized as a Third World country, barely able to feed itself. The idea of Japanese business being a force in the outside world was ludicrous. At the far opposite end of the spectrum was the United States, which had entered the war still suffering the effects of the Great Depression, but emerged much stronger and more economically robust than ever before. By 1946, the U.S. economy was huge and powerful, and kids growing up in Japan stared in awe if they happened to see one of those giant, well-fed American G.I.s they had heard so much about.

“What little remained of Japanese economic energy was concentrated in the old commercial capital, the Kansai region around Osaka and Kobe. Traditionally, Kansai was the center of commerce and Kanto (the greater Tokyo area) was the center of politics and government. That was still true in the first decade after the war. Today it’s hard to imagine, with so much business centered in the Tokyo-Yokohama area and Kansai a shadow of its former glory, but until the early 1960s, Osaka was the economic engine of the nation.

“Because of the weakness of the domestic economy and the relative strength of the U.S. and some European economies, almost all goods and technology were imported, and what little was created domestically had to be exported. That meant the general trading companies, or sogo shosha, that managed the import/export business were extremely important. What was their major commodity? Today this also seems hard to imagine, but there were no cars or electronics to export. Japan’s number one industry was the same as it had been since the nineteenth century—textiles. In fact, the textile business was the locomotive pulling the rest of the economy. Silk was a major export, and thus a leading source of foreign currency, which Japan desperately needed. Cotton was imported from abroad, woven and re-exported as finished clothing. By monopolizing the import and export of Japan’s main products, the shosha occupied a position of great power and influence in the economy.

“Needless to say, many of the key shosha were based in Kansai. One of them was Nihon Menka, known in the industry as Nichimen. It was not the biggest of the pre-war shosha, but when MacArthur’s Occupation forces broke up the pre-war zaibatsu (giant industrial conglomerates), they also split up the zaibatsu’s giant trading firms. Thus, the big Mitsubishi and Mitsui shosha were decimated after the war, leaving the field open for smaller firms to fill the gap. For a time in the 1950s, Nichimen became one of the stronger shosha. However, MacArthur’s reforms did not last a decade, and soon everything began to revert to the way it had been before. The scattered remnants of the Mitsubishi and Mitsui trading firms began to coalesce, aiming to rebuild their former glory. Nichimen knew it had to move quickly and diversify beyond the textile business if it was to survive and grow.

“Also, you must remember that Nichimen, like all the big shosha, had a network of overseas offices,” Oishi interrupted in English.

“I was getting to that,” her colleague said, a bit ruffled at having his long-winded narrative interrupted. “One big advantage that the shosha had over other companies was their overseas networks: Trading companies had branches in every important foreign capital. Among their other duties, these overseas offices were like an international intelligence network, keeping tabs on what was happening in various businesses around the globe and sending back reports to their head offices. Beginning in the 1950 s, Nichimen’s office in New York sent home regular reports on the growing strength of the U.S. economy. One of the American businesses that seemed to be growing strongly and contributing to the vitality of domestic industry was the leasing business. The New York office actively investigated this interesting business and wrote lengthy reports about it, largely because it was unknown in Japan. They even compiled a list of all the top firms in the sector, spotlighting the leading firm, a San Francisco–based company called U.S. Leasing, Inc.

“In Nichimen’s Osaka headquarters, the planning department was told to study these reports carefully. One of the youngest members of that department was a guy named Yoshihiko Miyauchi, who had just joined the company in 1960, shortly after returning from graduate school in the U.S. Miyauchi and his colleagues studied the reports coming back from America and strongly recommended that Nichimen get into the leasing business. After some discussion, Nichimen contacted USLI, suggesting that perhaps the two companies could effect some kind of cooperation. They received a very positive response from one of the firm’s founders, Henry B. Schoenfeld, who even suggested that USLI and Nichimen set up a joint-venture leasing operation in Japan.”

My ears perked up at the mention of the American’s name. This was the same guy and the same basic story that Nishitani had told me about back in Dallas. I had just heard the name a few weeks ago and had it written in my notes. How was it that Tominaga remembered Schoenfeld’s name so clearly? Had he prepped for this meeting?

He laughed. “Mr. Schoenfeld’s portrait is on the wall upstairs in a place of honor in our headquarters. I have seen it many times. In one sense, our history began with him.”

He then paused to drain his wine glass and Oishi took the opportunity to summarize the narrative. “So you get the picture. Nichimen, a textile trading company, is looking to diversify its income stream, and USLI, an American leasing company, is looking to expand globally. There is a proposal on the table to set up a cross-border JV, which was a pretty serious step in those days. The problem is that the Japanese economy at the time was still cash-poor; money flowed from the Bank of Japan to the nation’s big banks and they lent it to their favored customers, mostly former members of the old zaibatsu. This was the beginning of the government’s postwar industrial policy, and one part of that was the principle that only banks had access to serious capital.”

Tominaga’s expression told her he was ready to continue. He’d obviously heard the word “bank” and understood where she was going.

“The thing about leasing,” he began slowly, “is that it requires a lot of cash; without steady bank funding, you can’t do the business. So Nichimen knew it would need access to lots capital in order to do a JV with USLI. Nichimen execs talked to their main bank, Sanwa, about the JV idea. Sanwa was the strongest of the non-zaibatsu banks and, as it was based in Osaka, had good connections with local business. The Nichimen guys explained to a Sanwa executive how setting up a new leasing business could help to strengthen Nichimen’s other business segments, such as machinery, and also help it to compete with the newly reformed trading companies that were a legacy of the old zaibatsu. The Sanwa exec got the message, but he also understood that a new leasing company might require more capital than Sanwa Bank wanted to provide. So he took the lead in rounding up other prominent banks, including the prestigious Industrial Bank of Japan, Toyo Trust, Nippon Kangyo Bank, and the Bank of Kobe¹ as well as a couple of other Osaka-based shosha to back the venture. Ultimately, five banks and three shosha formed a consortium of founding shareholders that backed the new leasing company.

“In October of 1963, Henry Schoenfeld visited Japan to discuss specific plans for a joint venture, and he and Nichimen came to a general agreement for how USLI and Nichimen would set up a JV. One condition of that agreement was that Nichimen would send somebody to the U.S. to learn about the leasing business from the pros at USLI. So that same young guy in the planning department who had helped to recommend leasing as a viable business for the firm got called up to the CEO’s office. The president told this young fellow, Miyauchi, that Nichimen needed him to go to USLI and study the business inside out. Why Miyauchi? He had no seniority or special status with the firm, but he was young and smart; he’d not only graduated from a top Japanese university, but gone overseas to study in an American MBA program (something almost unheard of in those days), so it was safe to assume he was bright, hard-working, and spoke good English. Just what the company needed.

“In the late fall of 1963, Miyauchi was packed off to San Francisco, where he studied every day at USLI’s headquarters, working with a team of instructors who taught him everything they could about the fundamentals of the leasing business. He studied hard and sent reports back to Japan. Miyauchi knew that the success or failure of his company’s new business rested on his shoulders. If he learned what USLI had to teach him and transmitted that information back to Japan with no mistakes or misunderstandings, things would go well. If he screwed up anywhere along the line, there would be no one to correct his mistake until it was too late, and he could easily cripple the new venture before it even got off the ground.”

He paused again to taste a fresh glass of wine that I had just poured for him, and Oishi seized the opportunity.  “Originally, the basic idea was to create an extension of Nichimen, something like Nichimen Leasing. But as Sanwa Bank put together the consortium of investors and played a larger and larger role in the JV project, it began to look like the new firm would be called Sanwa Leasing. That would put the bank, rather than the shosha, in the driver’s seat. Finally, Schoenfeld helped to choose a new, more independent name, and it officially became Orient Leasing.”

American Seeds, Japanese Soil

Oishi could see her senior colleague finishing his wine and ready to resume his lecture, so she calmly went back to eating her dinner. Tominaga’s deep baritone once again blanketed our table and probably two or three adjacent tables as well. I hoped our immediate neighbors were eager to hear the history of the leasing business in Japan.

“In February of 1964, Miyauchi returned to Osaka from his three-month training program in the States. He was now, in effect, Japan’s foremost expert on leasing. His first job was to explain what he had learned to the people who would become the core of the new company. At first, it made no sense to them. Back then, Japanese business ran on a system of promissory notes called tegata, which are still in use today. To anyone who’s done business with tegata, lending valuable equipment to some company without receiving some kind of promissory note was insane. So Miyauchi’s explanations were met with puzzled looks and lots of head-shaking. I think it’s fair to say that the Japanese staff were not entirely enthusiastic about the prospects for this new business. On the other hand, Miyauchi was young, which meant he was new to the Japanese business world. He hadn’t spent years doing business with tegata, so he didn’t have all the prejudices that the older guys had. Most of what he knew about business was based on the U.S. case studies and Western business principles he’d learned while preparing for his MBA. In that sense, he couldn’t compare the old and the new; he simply told his colleagues what he had learned from USLI. This is how it’s done in America: You make a legal contract with your client, the client pays you leasing fees, and the contract is all the security you need. It’s just that simple.

“On April 17, 1964, Orient Leasing Co., Ltd. (OLC) was officially established in Osaka. It was tiny. Its staff was just three guys from each of the three shosha parents, plus three from Sanwa Bank, plus one former Sanwa executive, for a total of 13. Not exactly Toyota Motors or Nippon Steel. And it had a pitifully small capitalization for a company that intended to be a serious player in the financial services business. I never saw it, of course, but I’ve seen pictures of the OLC office. The whole thing—work space, meeting rooms, customer reception areas, everything—took up roughly 100 square meters on the top floor of an unimpressive office building in Osaka.

“The president of Nichimen was the nominal president of OLC, so Nichimen’s pride was honored. But the real boss of the operation was a guy named Inui who had been Sanwa Bank’s New York branch manager until he was recalled to serve as vice president of the new JV company. Let me tell you, Inui was an unusual man, a real visionary. Not many of them in Japanese business back then and even fewer today. So he was not like other managers at the bank and also very different from people at Nichimen. In some ways, he was ‘old school.’ Although he had been an executive with a prestigious bank, when he was given a management position at a new little start-up, he took the position very seriously. Instead of telling everybody about how he was really an important person at Sanwa Bank and counting the days till he could go back where he belonged, he threw himself into the new job completely. The little company became his company, and its success or failure became his responsibility. I think there’s something fundamentally Japanese in a person having that deep sense of loyalty to their company, even if it’s a brand-new company with no history.

“Yet in another sense, Inui was very progressive; he had worked in London, San Francisco, and New York during his years with Sanwa, so he had an international perspective shared by very few men of his generation. More than anyone else, I would say that he built Orient Leasing into the success that it became.”

Wait. You’re saying Inui was the key to building ORIX? Not Miyauchi?

“No one person built ORIX. Of course, Chairman Miyauchi played an enormous role in building this company. No one can ever doubt that. But people sometimes forget how important Inui’s contributions were. And part of Inui’s brilliance was in recognizing and cultivating talent. He basically trained Miyauchi, gave him a chance to see the view from the top—the problems, the headaches, and the responsibility, not just all the impressive stuff that goes with being the CEO. Then, when Inui felt the time was right, he stepped down and handed the presidency over to his designated successor. He knew that Miyauchi understood the leasing business as well or better than anyone in the company. And, because he was one of the three guys originally seconded to OLC from Nichimen, Miyauchi also understood the pros and cons of Nichimen’s ties to the new company, something Inui had worked to break; and Miyauchi was, like him, a visionary, someone who had lived overseas and would never be satisfied just to build a good business inside Japan.”

Time for me to interject another question or two, or Tominaga’s dinner would get cold. Oishi-san, perhaps you could help me to understand how Orient Leasing’s business got started?

She looked pleased to comply.

“The initial business plan, if you could call it that, was that OLC’s shosha parents would make sales calls on their clients as usual, then introduce OLC salespeople to set up the leasing arrangements. In that way, OLC would function as a kind of new financing arm to help the shosha’s machinery divisions close sales. But after the first hundred or so sales contacts, OLC still hadn’t signed a single leasing contract. Inui decided that the staff were too closely connected, both mentally and operationally, to their parent firms. You know that Japanese workers are tied to their corporate identities, even today, and it was 10 times more true back then. Inui thought, if these people could just stop thinking, ‘I’m a Nichimen guy’ and start thinking, ‘I’m an Orient Leasing sales rep,’ the business would finally get off the ground. He was instrumental in sending managers who had been seconded from the parent companies back to wherever they’d come from and then hiring new staff, men who’d never carried a Nichimen business card or known the status that came from wearing a Sanwa Bank lapel pin on their jacket. The new staff were genuine OLC employees and their mantra was ‘Sell!’”

Tominaga had used this brief respite to wolf down some excellent steak and wash it down with some even better wine, and now he was ready to jump back in. I took a deep breath.

“The mid-1960 s were part of a period called the Izanagi Boom, one of the longest and strongest growth spurts experienced by any modern economy. It was the final phase of an era in Japan’s growth still known worldwide as the ‘economic miracle.’ Annual real GDP grew in solid double digits from 1966 to 1969, and in 1970 dropped to only 8.2 percent.  And some large, well-established industries, like steel, were growing at an astounding 25 percent per year throughout this period. The government lowered both interest rates and taxes to spur consumer spending, then pumped money into huge infrastructure projects such as the Shinkansen bullet trains, a huge highway network, urban subways, and international airports. Manufacturing industries, which had been getting revved up since the late 1950s, went into overdrive. The auto and electronics companies, and more importantly, the tens of thousands of smaller firms that supplied them, grew rapidly. And that meant a desperate need for new machinery, fleets of trucks, and other equipment to support their growth. Around 1966, the office automation (OA) boom began: Companies of all sizes discovered they needed adding machines, copy machines, cash registers, and so on to keep their offices running efficiently.”

I noticed that Oishi-san was looking down at her dinner, but her head was nodding affirmatively as he spoke. I poured everyone some more wine. Tominaga went on with his discourse.

“Of course, the big banks also grew with the economic boom, but bank lending couldn’t possibly keep up with companies’ growing needs for capital. In that sense, the timing was perfect for a new firm to appear with a radically new approach to equipment financing. OLC, like most start-ups, had a tough time in year one, but under Inui’s guidance, it actually turned a profit in its second year and never looked back. The entire staff did sales calls. Business grew, and gradually the word about leasing began to spread. OLC set up new business development departments in both its Osaka and Tokyo offices to promote OA equipment, the new ‘business productivity tools’ that potential customers were eager to learn about, and at the same time explain the advantages of leasing rather than buying them outright.

“In 1967, three years after start-up, Inui officially took over as CEO. He made it clear that the company needed to become more independent. Within two years he managed to remove all managers seconded from the parent shareholders. His team was now completely independent, although they were still owned by the parent companies. That was his next target. In April 1970, exactly six years after its founding as the weak stepchild of eight much bigger firms, Orient Leasing publicly listed its shares on the Second Section of the Osaka Stock Exchange. At the time, that was the shortest incorporation-to-IPO on record for any company in Japan. And three years later the firm was listed on the more prestigious First Section not only in Osaka, but also on both the Tokyo and Nagoya stock exchanges. Less than a decade from its birth, an unknown company introducing an unknown product to the still-struggling financial industry had become a recognized member of Japan, Inc., a respected, publicly traded enterprise known throughout the country.”

Why Can’t We Do This Overseas?

All this was exactly the kind of background I’d been looking for. At last I understood how visionary management had turned a scrappy little start-up company into a serious player in the clubby, members-only Japanese financial market. Now I was ready to focus on my real interest—finding out how that little upstart Japanese company transformed itself almost overnight into a global giant.

When Tominaga paused for a moment, I asked him to explain how Orient Leasing had decided to go overseas.

He smiled, as if he’d been expecting the question all along.

“Although business leasing soon became popular in Japan, the service was no longer unique. Orient Leasing had pioneered this ‘blue ocean’ just a few years earlier, but by 1970 there were nearly two dozen leasing companies competing for a piece of the pie. While CEO Inui was fully prepared to compete in the domestic market, he was also thinking in much bigger terms. ‘If we succeeded in introducing the leasing business in Japan, why couldn’t we do the same thing overseas?’ he said. Having spent years abroad with Sanwa Bank, Inui understood the value of building a business outside of Japan. He also saw that many Japanese clients were already setting up offices overseas and, now that the phrase ‘Made in Japan’ was beginning to stand for technical innovation and quality manufacturing, foreign companies were starting to ask for Japanese equipment. Both groups would make good customers for an international network of OLC offices that needed to be built.

“So Inui established an overseas development department, and the department naturally included the young, bilingual guy with the foreign MBA. Miyauchi and another employee were dispatched to travel around Asia to get a sense of the potential benefits and challenges of each country. They visited Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, and their report recommended starting the overseas push in Hong Kong, which was still a British colony at that time, blessed with a strong legal system and efficient international banking network. In the fall of 1971, OLC set up its first overseas operation, a wholly owned subsidiary in Hong Kong. The following year, they tried a different approach, entering the Singapore market via a joint venture with two major banks [ I’d already heard this story from Mr. Soh in Singapore]. The JV model proved so successful that it became the template for Orient Leasing’s future expansion. One year later, the firm set up JVs in Malaysia and Brazil; the following year in South Korea and Indonesia, followed by Taiwan in ’76, the Philippines in ’77, and Thailand in ’78. In most of these cases, the company entered these markets through a tie-up with a trusted local partner and learned onsite how best to develop its business in that area. This strategy has served ORIX well for decades and remains our fundamental approach to international expansion even today.”

I see. So it was really President Inui who pushed the company to expand internationally before it was even 10 years old. I’m impressed. I assume the domestic leasing business grew more competitive but still provided a solid base for the firm to keep growing overseas? And from what I’ve heard elsewhere, Miyauchi was also a prime driver of ORIX’s globalization. Where does he fit in here?

Tominaga was now busy polishing off his steak, so I gestured toward Oishi and nodded for her to take over the narrative. She smiled back at me as she began, “Well, OLC continued to grow strongly in Japan despite two big oil shocks that shook the economy, slower GDP growth, and less robust capital spending. With each year, competition grew tougher in the leasing business. The company’s strategic response was to diversify its business, expand into big-ticket leases such as ship leasing, which became a major business, as well as into consumer credit, and other, specialized leasing operations. It created a subsidiary company that leased office furnishings, another one that leased cars, and yet another that specialized in leasing electronic measuring equipment. The move into consumer credit was particularly interesting because it was the first time the company had addressed the retail market, providing financial services directly to individual customers. That put OLC squarely in competition with Japan’s major banks. However, this expansion from B2B to B2C within the financial services industry proved to be a smart move and paved the way for today’s diverse mix of credit card, insurance, and other services. As you guessed, that steady growth gave the company a solid foundation to continue its international expansion.

“As for Miyauchi, he took over as president in 1980 when Inui, who had been CEO since 1967, decided to step down. Miyauchi was every bit as big a proponent of business diversification and international expansion as his predecessor, maybe more so. Within a few years, he oversaw the opening of offices in Sri Lanka, China, Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, and the United States. He insisted on building stronger connections among the Group companies, using their broad knowledge of different clients and products to improve aggregate sales. Within Japan, he also strongly promoted cross-selling, getting different OLC companies to sell each other’s products and services to their own clients, thus further leveraging the power of the Group. The company began its mortgage business the same year that Miyauchi took office. In quick succession, OLC started a venture capital firm and an auto rental company, expanded from ship leasing into aircraft leasing, and took the first steps toward creating what would soon become a very large real estate business. To add to its services menu, it bought both a securities company and a firm that specialized in leisure facility management. By the late 1980s, Orient Leasing was not merely Japan’s biggest leasing firm, but had transformed itself into a much more diversified financial services company. Yet despite all these achievements, the company was not well known among the general public.

“That all changed in 1988 when OLC purchased a popular baseball team called the Hankyu Braves. The Braves were one of the oldest teams in Japanese baseball, founded back in the 1930s, I think.”

“Nineteen thirty-six,” came a sharp correction from Tominaga. I could tell Tominaga considered himself an expert where matters pertaining to Japanese baseball were concerned, and he was ready to prove it. I suddenly remembered that Tominaga-san was from Osaka. Oishi fell respectfully silent and the torch was passed once again.

“Originally they were the Osaka Hankyu Baseball Club, known locally as the Hankyu Braves as they were owned by the Hankyu Railway that links Osaka with Kobe and Kyoto. They played in the Pacific League, and they were great. From 1967 to 1972, they won the League pennant five times in six seasons. Then, in 1975, they won the pennant and went on to win the Japan Series, which they then swept for the next two years, twice beating the Giants.” He spat out the name of the most famous team in Japanese baseball with all of the natural disgust that any good Kansai-bred fan should exhibit. This reminded me that the centuries-old rivalry between Tokyo and Kansai (Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto), the two regions constantly vying for primacy in the political, commercial, and cultural arenas, has been mirrored for longer than any living soul can remember on the baseball diamond. The legendary Yomiuri Giants of Tokyo and their various Kansai rivals have maintained a heated rivalry that has fueled ticket sales, been the source of countless family arguments, and given rise to “safe house” bars in both cities where fans of the opposite team can take refuge when traveling in enemy territory. Just to confirm that I was reading the situation correctly, I asked Tominaga if we could assume that any Osaka team that won the Series and beat the hated Giants, not once but twice, would be treated as living gods by Kansai fans.

“Absolutely,” he replied in a deep, solemn voice. “So you can imagine the reaction when the team’s owner decided to sell the franchise. Back then, ball clubs were not thought of as assets to be bought and sold as their value fluctuated, and sales were rare. Still, the fans were relieved to see that at least Hankyu had not committed the unforgivable sin of selling the team to a Tokyo company. If they’d done that, there might have been riots in the streets. Instead, the new owner was a stalwart Osaka firm—” he began to smile, “—a young leasing company whose new CEO had even gone to college close to the home of the Braves franchise.”