It seems like quite a jump from English Literature and Law to Japanese equities and detective fiction.
Well, I was going to be a lawyer in the mid-to-late-seventies. We have a tradition in Britain of people wanting to get out of Britain. That was how the Empire and all that stuff was actually created, you see. It’s not unusual for people to want to get out. 

At that time, there was quite a feeling that the whole place was falling apart, and it was probably not a bad idea to get out. People were looking around for opportunities, myself included. Being a lawyer was pretty much a stopgap. I was working in a law office and studying for my legal exams at the same time.

Solicitor or barrister?
Solicitor. I was looking around for various opportunities and a program came up to send people to the Sudan; I was looking at that very seriously. I thought it sounded quite interesting. A friend of mine signed up to go there — he’s my contemporary. He got there, came down with a horrendous case of hepatitis and has been suffering from it ever since…for the past quarter century, in fact. I keep saying to myself, “That could have been me!”

So I decided to go with Japan, which was bubbling away in the background at that stage. Any one looking around at the world could see that there was something happening there, something major. But yet, the level of awareness and knowledge about the country was really low. I don’t know what it was like with rest of the world, but in Britain the awareness level was exceptionally low. To give you an idea, the known Japanese at the time were Tanaka Kakue, Mishima Yukio, and Ono Yoko. That was about it. 

We British were starting to get some Japanese investment into our country, but still very small. We were starting to get Japanese products in Europe of obviously very high quality, starting with the autos, and it suddenly became clear that something very dramatic was happening. 

So, there was a program to send young Brits to Japan for a year at that stage. That subsequently became known as the JETRO program. At the time it was called the Wolfers Program in honor of its founder Nicholas Wolfers, a merchant banker. A very interesting guy. So there was an attempt to get a whole load of young Brits to go out to Japan, and deposit them in various institutions for a year. The idea was that these guys were to become sleepers who, when they came back to the UK, would go to all sorts of places in the economy and society, rise up the ranks, be favorably disposed to Japan, be knowledgeable about it, and finally influence opinion in a positive way.

Which is actually quite a smart, farsighted idea. In reality, almost nobody went back to work in “normal” UK type businesses. They almost all ended up arbitraging their knowledge of Japan versus the rest of the world, instead of going back to being lawyers handling torts and contracts. 

Anyway, the list of people they managed to get to apply was huge. The paper you had to write was on Japan and Europe. The one thing they do teach you in Oxford is how to write an essay, a nice persuasive eloquent essay on something you know nothing about. So I wrote this highly impressive, well-embellished essay of flowing cadences and sentences about this subject of which I knew absolutely nothing. 

What did you do? Did you go to the library to do research? 
No, no, no, no. God, no! We would never do that. Research? What’s that? No. We had no information whatsoever. It’s like an editorial in the Times. You don’t actually really need information. You have to know a few names of people, a bit of history and slot it all together. From a lawyer’s perspective, you are presenting a case. You stick in all the bits that support your case and forget all the rest. 

Sounds like a financial analyst’s report…
[Laughs] Right. The rest of the guys, we are talking about 1977. Um the rest of the people, we are not just talking of males here—who took part in this exercise, were a fairly unusual, eccentric bunch of people. Obviously oddballs, I think you have to say. A lot of them were martial arts goons, to put it bluntly, though they had good education as well – which, of course, does not prevent you from being a martial arts goon. But they were martial arts guys who wanted to come to Japan—what they really wanted to do was to spend day after day at the dojo beating a wooden board with their fists, if not their foreheads. And t so this as a good ticket for that. And there were a couple of sort of aesthete type guys who were quite fascinated by Kabuki and the idea of wandering around Kyoto after dark in a kimono, slapping their thighs with a fan. That sort of thing. 

So in other words, there was nobody who you might call mainstream-interested in business, economics. . .the stuff that subsequent to that became part of the whole Japan story. But that didn’t really exist back then. People who had any curiosity about it were quite marginal. They were there because they wanted to be. 

The “exotic” Japan?
Exactly. Nobody every thought they were going to make any money out of it. 

Did you?
Well, I did actually. I thought [laughs] there was something happening there which was going to be quite a big story. Sort of having followed to some extent the leading Asian economies (e.g., Singapore and Hong Kong), Japan is obviously a much bigger story than this and it’s just exploding. So, to cut a long story short, I think ten years earlier I’d probably have gone to the U.S., but by that time everybody had already gone there. You know: we had Kojack, we had Columbo—we knew the U.S. inside out. “So let’s go to somewhere where there’s no information”, we thought. A sort of Lawrence of Arabia fixation, let’s get out there to somewhere completely alien to our own cloudy and rainy little island. 

What year was this?
1977. So anyway, suddenly I’m living in this four and half tatami mat room in a company dormitory in the badlands between Osaka and Sakai. I was working for Suntory Corporation, which, as you know, is one of the leading alcoholic drinks companies in Japan. At that time, it was one of the leading companies in Japan overall because Suntory had cornered the alcohol market. There really wasn’t anyone importing booze into Japan; they had the whole market tied up. And they were number one on the list of companies that university graduates wanted to join because they were so slick; their advertising was so international. So, Suntory pretty much summed up a particular image of where Japan could be; a version of America with Japanese characteristics. It was a very slick, hedonistic image that the company was trying to project. We didn’t know at the time that the profitability of the drinks industry in Japan was going to fall apart. But that didn’t really happen for another ten years. It was a great time to be there — the peak. Osaka itself was an incredibly vibrant, dynamic city. When I arrived, I had never seen anything like it in my life.

It was something out of “Bladerunner”…
It wasn’t as skuzzy as Bladerunner. It’s a bit like Bladerunner now, but in those days, you would go through Kita-shinchi, Osaka’s entertainment district in the nighttime, which we did every night. It was our job to go out and drink our own product all night, all the time. The streets were packed with people. There were all these beautiful women. There were all these quite cool guys. Everybody had money; it was just pouring out of their ears. I thought, “Wow, this is what life should be like.”

These guys, they did good business, you know. It wasn’t like they were playboys, wasting away their lives. These guys worked like hell in the daytime, and yet played like hell until two o’clock in the morning. And this was great. “What a tremendous place!,” I thought. 

So, how did you make the leap from Suntory to Grieveson and Grant?
I went back to the UK in 1979; my little stay in paradise was over. I figured, “What am I going to do?” I knew there was no way I was going back to being a lawyer and sit in an office shuffling paper. I wanted to get back to Japan. I wanted to be involved in this. So I was looking around, and thinking about what was the appropriate way of doing this, what were the opportunities, and there were two. 

One was chocolate. The only British corporate with any connection with Japan were a couple chocolate companies, which were trying, and not really succeeding in selling their KitKats, basically, in Japanese sweet shops and the little shops in stations, and such like. KitKat was a major global brand, and a few others. Roundtrees, as it was called, was trying to push into Japan.

Wine gums in Japan?
Exactly. Wine gums and KitKats in Japan.

And, that was one potential area, the confectionary business. And the other was finance. Going back to the 1980s, this was a far cry from the world we live in now with the huge bull market, and massive financial industry. The City was hugely depressed in 1980. It had just been through eight years of bear market, most of the firms were partnerships in those days. They were obviously owned by the staff, and they were all losing money. The guys would come into work, and lose money. The pay was very very low, therefore. It would have to be. Nevertheless, some fare sighted firms—they were very small scale as a partnership, not many people—had set up offices in NY, Hong Kong, and were starting to move into Tokyo. Grieveson and Grant did not have an office in Tokyo but they were developing a Japanese business, which had two sides to it: selling UK gilt edged securities bonds to Japanese clients, and selling Japanese stocks to UK and European clients. And that business was starting to take off on both sides. There was tremendous appetite for British bonds by the Japanese, and performance of Japanese stocks was beginning to look quite stellar compare to the rest of the world which was extremely depressed. And there were a number of brokerage houses and merchant houses which was starting to develop that.

This was 1979?
1979, 1980.

When Ezra Vogel was coming out with Japan as Number One? 
That’s right. People were starting to say, “Japanese management, this is pretty unique stuff.” And really, way before the trade friction stuff of the 1980s: it had not even started. Inroads with electronics and autos, they started to get very visible on the street level. From an investment level, the performance of the Japanese securities were started to look really good. Not a lot, but a few far sighted stock broking houses, even though they were losing money, even though they were quite small and modest in their scale, decided to set up Japanese teams. I joined one at Grieveson and Grant. 

Did Nomura Securities exist at the time? 
Sure, they were all there.

I worked in the City for three years in London, and finally, they decided that it would be good to put some people on the ground in Japan. It was pretty modest in scale. We had a little office in Japan, which was over a noodle shop, in Kudanshita [Tokyo], right across from Yasukuni shrine. So forever, there were these right wing vans and rallies taking place at incredible decibels. Our little building looked to be made out of cardboard, and every time there was an earth quake, the thing shook like hell. It was pretty modest stuff, cheap rent, low over head.

What did you do, write reports on typewriters?
Yeah yeah. That’s right. I was quite unusual because I could type. No word processors or computers. They just did not exist in those days. You typed up your piece, and you could then fax it.

There were faxes in those days?
Yeah, there were faxes. Or alternatively, some people would post them. 

Or telex?
Yeah, telex. Telex was better in those days, as we didn’t have the white paper you have now. It was this messy purplish thing, and it was very hard to read an ordinary fax.

How long were the reports? Were they very short?
Yeah. You went and visited the company and found out what it did. You asked how business was going, you looked at the stock price and if it was cheap it was a Buy, and if it wasn’t, well, it was probably a Buy also.