Slow burn
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 25: After the Crisis
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Colin Mills
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Colin Mills' biography and other articles by this writer
I was initiated into the Japanese investment-banking scene in a murky Tokyo izakaya in early 1988. Selling Japanese stocks to international investors was a new game – foreign securities firms had been permitted by the authorities to buy seats on the Tokyo Stock Exchange only two years earlier – and everybody was learning the rules as they went along. Or making them up.
‘No, no, you still don't quite get it,' my boss insisted, shunting aside his glass to create more space in which to gesticulate. Beer slopped up and over the edge of the glass, forming a little pool on the table. Around us, waitresses in bright blue and white happi coats weaved between the tables and emerged from clouds of cigarette smoke with trays of sashimi and tofu. Eda-mame shells lay scattered between the plates and on the floor.
‘Look, in this business, there's this big trough of money, right? You've got to stick your snout into the money trough and keep it there! You plant your elbows like trotters in the mud, get your head down and snuffle, snuffle, snuffle! Every now and then, other little pigs will grab your hindquarters and try to drag you squealing from the trough, but you can't let them.'
Imposing, blunt and prone to espousing politically incorrect views with unashamed glee, James was an Englishman ten years my senior who had been transferred from his firm's London office, having found himself in stockbroking after studying particle physics at Cambridge and in Moscow. Ebullient but cynical, he didn't suffer fools and held himself and those around him to a high standard.
I spoke Japanese, but otherwise knew precious little. This saved me, as it turned out that some American with an MBA had also interviewed for the job. ‘Give me the Aussie guy,' James growled at the human-resources team. ‘I might be able to do something with him.' He took me under his wing, trained me and kept me sane.
From the window of our office in Akasaka, Mt Fuji could be glimpsed to the south-west when the occasional typhoon sluiced away the haze pumped out by the paper factories in Shizuoka. On the thirty-ninth floor was a bar next to a glitzy home-fixtures showroom featuring the latest shapely multicoloured toilet bowls with heated seats and electronic control panels, and automated bidets with hot-air dryers. After work we would sip our beers and admire the porcelain. Perched on one colleague's desk was one of those over-the-head rubber Halloween masks. This one was a Mongol, perhaps Genghis Khan: wispy facial hair, topknot. Sitting there it looked uncannily like a severed head. Take no prisoners.
I WAS TWENTY-ONE and had already been living in Tokyo for two years. The asset-price bubble of the late 1980s was inflating quickly, fed by low interest rates, aggressive bank lending and euphoria, but I wasn't conscious of it at the time. I was high on Japan and a youthful fervour for the exotic. Not until later did I perceive the extent to which Japan was high on itself. For me it was a can-do kind of place, where anything was possible. Disbelief is never too difficult to suspend. If stock markets teach us anything, it is that.
Across Minato-ku in central Tokyo, crude hand-painted signs hung on tiny dilapidated cottages, around which all surrounding land had been acquired and cleared for redevelopment: Tochi wa uran! I won't sell my land! The ji-age merchants – standover men who tried to bully landowners into selling – persevered anyway. In Yoyogi Park, hundreds of Iranian men, many of them in the country illegally to labour on construction sites, would congregate on Sundays. On weekends, I joined a group of other Australian expats in games of Australian Rules football against teams fielded by a couple of local universities. The young, fit Japanese guys ran rings around the older, fatter Aussies, who had been out drinking in Roppongi the night before. But we, the recent arrivals, were taller and by marking above their heads we held our own.
After university I had briefly been a reporter with a Japanese wire service but quickly became disillusioned with the work. It was all speed, not much creativity. At the press clubs at the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Bank of Japan, where I was assigned, I was surrounded by rumpled, perpetually exhausted Japanese reporters who hung out at their desks reading tabloids or manga until 8 pm, having filed their final stories for the day four hours earlier. When they then went out drinking I asked them why they didn't go home to their wives and families. They laughed, amused at my ignorance of the evening habits of sararimen.
Each weekday, a huge electronic stock-price board glowed like an idol gazing down over the press room. Share prices that were up that day flashed green; those that were down flashed red. The board was a sea of green nearly all the time and I was enthralled. Japanese corporations were on the brink of taking over the world, so I decided I had better find out how they were doing it. I had struggled in economics classes at university, but this was different. The stock market was the real economy in action: living, breathing, throbbing. I wanted in. That I knew absolutely nothing about stocks meant I got my wish.