CREEPING DOUBTS

With my bank's corporate business in Japan roaring ahead, and my own activities in various professional and cultural associations continuing to occupy most of the remaining time, the prospect of leaving all this behind for a quiet, bookish existence in a London suburb seemed increasingly unreal. If only I had been treated like a lame duck! But my impending departure was apparently not taken seriously. It was business as usual.

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Chicago bank's takeover of the Dutch bank's Japan branches, our Chairman flew in for a large reception at the Hotel Okura. In the opinion of kind friends, the guest list of over 800, with more than 600 attending, was testimony to the success of our efforts. At the very least it showed that our parties were popular! Though normally not given to advertising, on this occasion I ran a commemorative ad in several Japanese and English language newspapers and business monthlies, eschewing the usual pedantic claims of being The best’ for a subtle message of cultural assimilation. I had selected a haiku by Kyorai as the text for the ad. It ran: Taki tsubo mo / hishigeto kyi no / hororo kana (The pheasant's cry:/it crushes even the basin/of the waterfall). At the agency's insistence, but still brazenly, I did the calligraphy.

The ad's message was agreeably vague. Were we, the intruder bank, that pheasant whose piercing cry crushed the very basin of our competition's waterfall? Hardly that. Or was the lone bird's shout merely a metaphor for our (the outsider’s) attempt to disturb the natural order of things Japanese? If some American businessmen considered the ad an example of cultural snobbery, they were polite enough not to tell me. The Japanese apparently liked it, with several readers taking the trouble to write words of praise for our appreciation of Japanese sensibilities. One replied with a haiku of his own.

In May I helped organise a benefit concert at the Tokyo Festival Hall in Ueno by the Concertgebouw Orchestra from Amsterdam. Before the start of the concert — which was in aid of the World Wildlife Fund, since renamed the World-Wide Fund for Nature — the committee members and their spouses were to be presented to Crown Prince Akihito and Princess Michiko.