JAPAN: How did the (former) richest man in the world end up in a Japanese jail? David McNeill, in Tokyo, charts the rise and abrupt fall of Yoshiaki Tsutsumi
It has been a long, humiliating fall for Yoshiaki Tsutsumi. Once listed as the world's richest man, with a fortune of $20 billion, connections to the heart of government and a property empire which hoovered up thousands of square miles of Japanese real estate, the 70-year-old resort and railway tycoon is today languishing in a Tokyo detention centre, forced to ask permission to use the toilet.
If convicted, he will be lucky to leave prison before he dies.
Tsutsumi was arrested on Thursday on charges of insider trading and falsifying financial statements in an attempt to prop up his tottering business empire.
At its height, his Seibu Railway Group had holdings which included a transport network, a baseball team, more than 80 hotels, 52 golf courses and dozens of ski resorts in Japan and elsewhere. In many Japanese cities it was possible to ride a Seibu train to a Seibu shopping centre, hotel or resort without ever setting foot on another company's property.
The press dubbed it the Seibu Kingdom. "He was more powerful than god," one television commentator said after his arrest.
Tsutsumi earned far less flattering sobriquets during 40 years of ruthless wheeling and dealing. Variously described as a "tyrant", an "autocrat" and a "dictator", one biography recalled some of his staff vomiting in fear before his arrival on a typically hands-on inspection tour of company property. His fearsome reputation helps to explain why few Seibu managers could be found to come to the defence of their former boss in his hour of need.
The Seibu Group was so powerful that local authorities were scared of it. In one town, Seibu employed a quarter of all employees and drove them to polling booths to support the firm's preferred candidates during elections. Tsutsumi is credited with single-handedly bringing the Winter Olympics back to Asia and to the mountain resort of Nagano in 1998, using a mixture of money, charm and cajolery and leaving behind a whiff of scandal and corruption.
His rise and fall is an all-too-familiar tale of greed and hubris in a secretive family-run empire: a domineering patriarch who sowed the seeds of the empire's demise in his warring offspring.
But it is also a story which mirrors the fate of Japan's asset-inflated, corruption-riddled business model. Many in Japan believe that Tsutsumi's imprisonment may indeed help to kill off this model for good.
Tsutsumi took the helm of the Seibu Group in 1964 from his iron-willed father, Yasujiro, a farmer's son who founded the corporation and demanded "undying loyalty" from his sons to keep the family fortunes intact. It was a message his favoured successor, Yoshiaki, took to heart.
After a bitter leadership struggle with his brothers, Yoshiaki drove Seibu into one of Japan's postwar success stories, fuelled by the relentless rise in land prices and an apparently insatiable demand for resorts and hotels.
His father's political background hardly hurt: the elder Tsutsumi was a member of the Japanese Diet (parliament), with connections deep inside the Liberal Democrats, the pro-business party which has ruled Japan almost continuously for half a century.
It is no secret that the present prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has been close to Tsutsumi for years. His party faction still has a permanent office in a Seibu-owned hotel in central Tokyo.
The peak of Tsutsumi's power, as is the case with many fallen Japanese tycoons, came in the late 1980s, when land and stock prices rose to gravity-defying heights through a combination of cheap credit and lax financial regulation.
During the heady years between 1987 and 1990, when the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo was valued at more than the entire state of California, Tsutsumi's enormous real-estate holdings propelled him to the top of the Forbes "Rich List" and kept him there for four consecutive years. During this time his 70 companies employed more than 35,000 people.
However, even while his star was shining at its brightest, Tsutsumi was a sullen and secretive figure, a workaholic little known outside Japan and respected rather than liked at home.
Driven by his promise to his father to protect the family's fortunes, he concentrated power around himself and a few close aides from his university days, buying up shares in group companies under false names to avoid takeovers and putting these under the control of Kokudo, a private unlisted company which he chaired.
When the economy went into reverse in the early 1990s and land prices began the long slide to between 20 and 40 per cent of their peak values, the Seibu Group became saddled with huge debts and turnover at its resorts began to dry up.
Tsutsumi's paranoia and secrecy increased as he tried to plug the holes in his leaky empire by further concentrating share ownership and ordering his officials to cover his tracks.
By the time a police van came to pick him up at one of his luxury hotels on Thursday, Tsutsumi's Forbes ranking had slipped to 159 and Tokyo newspapers were alleging that he directly or indirectly controlled 80 per cent of Seibu stock, violating the ownership rules of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
The family head had surrounded himself with so many yes-men that prosecutors simply did not believe him when he claimed to be unaware of the violations taking place in his name.
The police path to Tsutsumi's door was lit by his two younger brothers, who revealed last year that the company had been registering Seibu Railway shares under false names.
Quite why the brothers, who helped to run parts of the group, decided to break ranks is unclear, but rumours of family feuds reaching all the way back to the battle for leadership following the death of the elder Tsutsumi have beset the Seibu Group for years. The final straw is thought to have been a row over inheritance.
Family bonds are not the only casualty of the Tsutsumi saga: the former president of Seibu Railway, Terumasa Koyanagi, killed himself earlier this year after admitting that he had been told him to lie about financial statements.
Few were surprised when Fuji Television reported recently that the order came directly from Tsutsumi, but reports that the former Seibu boss cried when he heard the news added to the picture of a man at the end of his tether.
One measure of Tsutsumi's unpopularity was that he appeared to be friendless as he spent his second night alone in a police cell. The press, mostly silent about his wrongdoings when he was powerful, has ganged up on him and dropped the all-important Japanese honorific "san" (meaning Mr) for the newer tag of "suspect" Tsutsumi.
Mr Koizumi has admitted to reporters that he is a "close acquaintance", but declined to comment specifically on the case or to defend his "friend". Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said that the prime minister's faction had not received particularly warm treatment from Tsutsumi.
One former Seibu Railway executive, interviewed by the Asahi newspaper yesterday, said: "Tsutsumi never listened to his subordinates and was surrounded by people who only followed what he said. He had this coming."
Unfortunately for Tsutsumi, many others agree.