OSAKA REALITIES

Several factors were beginning to complicate my life in the bank, adding to the dread I usually felt anyway at the prospect of facing the office after creative weekends with IJsbrand or my Kyoto friends.

Firstly, my manager Mr. V. appeared to be suffering from various ailments. His desk was a veritable medicine cabinet. He did not discuss his complaints, but his habit of popping pills at all hours of the day spoke volumes. He was also making himself less and less accessible and had a red ‘No Entry’ sign installed above his office door, which he kept lit most of the time. He was paranoid about the head office and his Tokyo colleague, and insisted on committing every decision however minor to paper, to have proof in case ‘they try to deny it’. Worse, he often stayed away for a day or two, calling in to say that he was feeling ill, leaving the management of the office in my inexpenenced hands.

As the frequency of his absences increased, so did my meetings with him on his return, to brief him on what was going on. At V.'s insistence these meetings took place behind closed doors, red lamp lit. Reind, my old mate from Tokyo, who had been transferred to Osaka and nominally had the same rank as I, took a dim view of these ‘cosy’ discussions, from which V. explicitly barred him. Understandably, though without any foundation, he took his exclusion as a personal affront. Much to my chagrin this began to sour our friendship.

Then there was V.'s gift for devising clever schemes to enlarge our scope of business, which was severely hampered by restrictive (and perhaps largely unnecessary) regulation. There was nothing intrinsically wrong about V.'s schemes, and they could only be descnbed as wholly supportive of Japan's policy to boost exports, but there was always a possibility that on close scrutiny they might be found technically illegal.

One scheme sought to circumvent the requirement of a letter of credit (L/C) for every export. Many overseas importers preferred to save themselves the costs involved in establishing L/Cs and instead asked the exporter in Japan to draw a draft on them, to be collected through a bank. Strange enough, with some exceptions this practice was not permitted under Japanese regulations.