kvmb Chapter 199 Selling the Myth
Chapter 199 Selling the Myth
(A long chapter of 6400 words!)
October 25, 1989.
Nikkei Average: 30,120 points
Bunkyo District, Saionji Headquarters.
The cold autumn wind swept through the layers of withered branches in the courtyard, swirling up a few yellowed leaves that rustled softly against the wooden edges. Deep in the courtyard, the sturdy bamboo deer scarepost, filled with icy spring water, suddenly tilted and fell heavily against the moss-covered round stone as its center of gravity shifted.
"Thump—"
A crisp clanging sound pierced through the heavy washi paper sliding door and entered the enormous Japanese-style room called "Ōhiro-ma".
The main room is furnished with nearly a hundred tatami mats, hand-woven from premium Bingo rush and inlaid with Goryeo-style brocade. The fresh scent of rush mingles with the sandalwood aroma emanating from a bronze incense burner in the corner, slowly settling in the constant temperature air.
On both sides of the room, six tall, golden Kano-style screens are neatly arranged. Under the dim light of the wall lamps, the gold leaf on the screens reflects a dazzling, heavy luster, making the eagles with outstretched wings and the gnarled ancient pines in the paintings appear lifelike.
The room was packed, with more than forty people gathered there.
On the cushions to the left sat a uniform group of old aristocratic elders and heads of branch families, all dressed in traditional black patterned haori and hakama. Most of them had gray hair, fiddling with folding fans or leaning on carved canes, and exuded a scent that had been lingering for years.
The area on the right was occupied by the core executives of SA Group and the presidents of its various subsidiaries. These people were dressed in well-tailored dark wool suits, with reflective mechanical watches on their wrists, their leather shoes off outside the door, and sitting upright in snow-white tabi socks.
The breathing of dozens of people mingled in this spacious area. More than forty people who controlled massive amounts of money had gathered here, yet tacitly, not one of them spoke. In the corner, a piece of thoroughly burned sandalwood ash broke off in a bronze incense burner and fell silently into the ashes at the bottom with a "whoosh."
Shuichi Saionji, seated in the main seat, broke the heavy, lifeless silence.
He picked up the shochu teacup in front of him, skimmed off the foam, and took a sip of the warm shochu. As the porcelain cup was placed back on the lacquer tray with a soft sound, his gaze turned to the right side of the long table.
"Endo, let's begin. First, let's review the current market situation of each segment of the group."
"Yes."
Executive Director Endo bowed deeply at a ninety-degree angle towards the head of the table. He straightened up, reached out his hands, unfastened the brass clasp of his briefcase, and took out a thick, black leather ledger, placing it flat on the table.
"Everyone," Endo's voice rang out steadily in the lobby, "I will now give a comprehensive report on SA Group's (Saionji Group) various business and financial indicators for this year."
"First, the real estate and infrastructure sector. The 'Crystal Palace' in Ginza and the 'Pink Building' in Akasaka maintained a 100% occupancy rate throughout the fiscal year, with monthly net rental income consistently exceeding 2 billion yen. The first phase of the 'Saionji Tower' project in Odaiba has been completed and accepted, with the deep-sea pneumatic caisson 80 meters underground. 'The Club' in Azabu-Juban, Minato Ward, maintained its maximum core membership of 48 people, with 4.8 billion yen of interest-free membership fee deposits accruing on the books."
"Secondly, the retail and logistics sector. Saionji Apparel's Uniqlo and S-Collection have opened 120 directly operated stores in the Kanto region. Leveraging the production capacity of the Shanghai Gaoqiao factory, the inventory turnover rate for basic styles has reached an extreme of 400%, while the gross profit margin for high-end salons remains stable above the 80% benchmark. SA Logistics' four major transit warehouses in Chiba and Yokohama have a daily throughput exceeding 50,000 tons. Each S-Mart supermarket's checkout machine processes 120 transactions per hour, three times the efficiency of traditional supermarkets."
Endo turned the page, his gaze sweeping over the left-hand side of the chief retainers' camp.
"Thirdly, the food and agriculture sector. S-Food's central kitchen in Chiba has fully integrated the fresh food supply chain for the three major convenience store chains: 7-Eleven, Lawson, and FamilyMart, with an average daily meal delivery volume of three million servings and a waste rate consistently kept at the critical level of 0.6%. The premium agricultural products produced in the first phase of S-Farm's farm in Hokkaido have achieved 100% direct supply to high-end channels."
"Fourthly, the technology and overseas financial sectors. Saionji Information Systems (SIS)'s independent fiber optic network has been deployed to the Tokyo Stock Exchange's core data center, providing millisecond-level dedicated lines for foreign investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, with monthly rental income exceeding 1.2 billion yen. SA Investment's overseas umbrella trust assets, allocated through offshore channels, are in the final stages of their covert accumulation of positions in European and American technology stocks and core hardware sectors, with the net asset value maintaining a monthly compound growth curve of 15%."
These words were like a warm spring breeze, dispelling the solemnity that had filled the hall.
On the left, a highly respected elder of the family, Kensuke Saionji, stroked his white beard with satisfaction. He picked up the teacup beside him, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes smoothing out with a smile.
"Shuichi, you've really brought honor to the family these past two years." Kensuke's voice was full of elder's satisfaction.
He gently skimmed the floating leaves off the surface of the tea with the lid of his cup, and when he spoke again, his tone naturally carried a hint of disdain.
"A 0.6% abandonment rate and a 400% turnover rate. Those nouveau riche outside who made their fortunes by reselling land dare to dream of competing with the foundation of our Saionji family. They are truly overestimating themselves."
A murmur of agreement emanated from the executives on the right. The head of the real estate department, unable to contain his excitement, shifted his leather shoes restlessly on the tatami mat and leaned forward slightly.
"Kensuke-sama is right." The manager looked at Shuichi at the head of the table with burning eyes. "Rural land prices are skyrocketing all over Tokyo right now. The land we hold, even if we do nothing all day, its value is multiplying. The group's assets are expanding every day."
"Yes...the patriarch is truly young and promising..."
"I admire you!"
The previously oppressive space gradually stirred with a restless energy, and the atmosphere began to heat up.
As Xiu Yi watched the increasingly lively, even somewhat euphoric atmosphere below, he lightly tapped his fingers twice on the smooth rosewood table.
"Thump, thump".
The soft but steady tapping sound made the people in the front row quickly suppress their smiles and fall silent.
"You all know these routine accounts." Shuichi stopped tapping, his gaze sweeping across the room, his tone still calm. "Endo, present the final summary from Hokkaido to everyone."
Endo nodded and flipped the ledger directly to the page with the red bookmark.
His breathing paused almost imperceptibly, then rose slightly in volume.
"The final revenue summary for the first week of operation of the Niseko 'Gokurakukan' Resort in Hokkaido has been completed." Endo looked up from the ledger and surveyed the room. "The following are the precise figures for each section."
"The first item is the accommodation fees for the 500 customized villas and 30 'Hidden Villages' surrounding the resort, plus the basic ticket revenue for 3,000 ordinary visitors per day, totaling 2.74 billion yen."
"The second item is the settlement of box services at the central circular theater of Gokurakutenshu, the pure gold leaf SPA, and the food and beverage settlement in the global ingredients area, totaling 3.8 billion yen."
"Thirdly, the net inflow of actual chips exchanged at the bottom roulette casino of Gokurakutenmoku was 18.2 billion yen."
Endo turned the page, his fingers gripping the edge of the thick paper tightly.
"The fourth item is the joint auction hall on the top floor of Gokurakuten-no-kami (Gokurakuten-no-kami). A high-profile auction lasting seven days, including Impressionist paintings and European antiques, with a total hammer price of 26.5 billion yen."
He paused for a second before announcing the final summary figure.
"In the first seven days, Niseko Resort's total operating revenue was... 51.24 billion yen."
The moment that string of astronomical numbers, accurate to tens of millions of decimal places, fell, the atmosphere in the lobby that had just warmed up was completely doused with a bucket of boiling hot oil.
Kenjiro's old face turned into one of extreme ecstasy, and a sickly blush quickly crept up his cheeks, making one almost worry that he might faint from being too happy.
He excitedly raised the folding fan in his hand and slammed it heavily against his palm with the thick bamboo ribs.
"Slap, slap, slap!"
The sound of the fan ribs striking the palm was crisp and rapid.
"Hahahaha! Five hundred billion! In just seven days!" The old man's voice trembled with extreme excitement, even becoming somewhat shrill. "Ancestors above! The cash we have now is enough to buy half of Tokyo! The Saionji family is an unparalleled god in this world!"
The executives on the right were also invigorated.
Saionji Temple's head shogun, Eguchi Tokuhiro, suddenly leaned forward, gripping his knees tightly with both hands, the fabric of his suit taut against his well-developed muscles.
As a real estate upstart who had only been incorporated into the Saionji family two years prior, he craved massive infrastructure projects more than anyone else present. He desperately needed a constant supply of steel bars and concrete to feed his enormous black construction army, and he was even more eager to prove his worth as the family's "number one weapon" to Shuichi through frenzied physical expansion.
"Master!" Eguchi's voice boomed, bluntly revealing his ambition. "The profit model of Gokurakukan has been directly validated. We can take this financial statement and immediately apply for an additional loan of 100 billion yen from Mitsui Bank. As long as the funds are in place, the construction team for Saionji can set off at any time. We'll acquire land in Karuizawa, buy beaches in Okinawa, and build supporting facilities in Kyushu! We can build ten more Gokurakukans for you!"
The noise, the echoes, and the heavy breathing mingled together. The temperature in the room rose sharply, and a frenzied atmosphere quickly spread among the forty-odd people.
Xiu Yi sat upright behind the long table made of rosewood.
He looked down at the flushed faces below, slowly raised his right hand, and pressed it down in mid-air.
The downward press of his hand carried an undeniable air of authority. The noise in the main hall gradually subsided, and everyone fell silent, awaiting the patriarch's instructions.
"Five hundred and twenty billion, that is indeed a number worthy of being recorded in the family history."
Shuichi's voice was steady and deep, resonating clearly in the wide space.
"From the Crystal Palace in Ginza to Gokurakukan in Hokkaido, every stake the Saionji family has laid in the past two years has now become a wellspring of ever-flowing gold. Your hard work and decisiveness have made our family the dominant force in Tokyo's financial world today. Our current cash flow is indeed enough to make any bank feel awe."
Hearing the patriarch's straightforward affirmation, the branch patriarchs on the left straightened their backs proudly, while the executives on the right, including Eguchi, gleamed with extreme satisfaction. The air in the hall was filled with an inflated sense of "invincibility."
Xiuyi looked at everyone, pausing slightly as he spoke.
He placed his folded hands flat on the edge of the table and leaned forward slightly.
"but."
These two short words caused a subtle pause in the fervor that had just reached its peak in the air.
Xiu Yi opened the drawer beside him and took out a document with a red cover. He placed the document flat on the table, and with a flick of his fingertips, pushed it to the center of the table along the smooth grain of the rosewood.
The file rubbed against the desktop, making a low "rustling" sound.
"Before we discuss where to buy a beach to build a new store, everyone take a look at this." Shuichi's voice lost its previous warmth and became as cold as well water.
The red document reads "Report on Energy Consumption and Infrastructure Expenditure of Heavy Assets".
He leaned back in his chair, his gaze sweeping across the room.
"To maintain the tropical rainforest atmosphere inside the Gokurakukan's glass enclosure, the temperature control system requires burning hundreds of tons of special heavy oil every day. The de-icing system and wave generators also need to operate at full power 24 hours a day. Its daily electricity bill is equivalent to the total cost of all the neon lights in half of Shinjuku."
Xiu reached out and tapped the red cover twice.
"As for the Saionji Pagoda in Odaiba, the deep-sea pressurized caisson construction is being forcibly advanced. The impermeable concrete and special steel we dump into the sea every day don't even make an echo. But its daily billing expenses are enough to instantly drain the entire cash flow of a medium-sized construction company."
The previously high temperature in the hallway began to drop rapidly.
Xiu closed the red report. The heavy cover struck the rosewood tabletop with a dull thud.
The sound echoed in the deathly silent hall. Shuichi didn't speak immediately; he clasped his hands back together, letting the oppressive feeling of "heavy asset losses" spread through everyone's hearts.
A full ten seconds passed.
When everyone was breathing cautiously, Shuichi slowly spoke and gave the final instruction.
"The group's next strategic plan is to stop all new expansion projects."
His gaze swept across both sides of the long table.
"We need to send a signal to the outside world that the expansion is slowing down. We need to make the outside world think that we need to stop and consolidate our existing gains."
These words were like an invisible hammer blow, shattering everyone's newly inflated illusions.
Only heavy, suppressed breathing filled the room. Dozens of people looked at each other, their eyes filled with astonishment and confusion. The men who had just thought they were gods were instantly brought back to their mortal form.
In this heavy, deathly silence.
Satsuki Saionji, sitting in the shadows behind Shu, held a bone china teacup in her hand.
Today, she was wearing a soft, dark blue turtleneck sweater. Having stayed up all night analyzing the overseas funding channels and preparing for today's meeting, her young body felt a slight physical fatigue, and her eyelids were a little heavy. She took a deep breath, forcefully suppressing the sleepiness with willpower, and quietly observed the people in the hall through the rising steam.
This "fake fatigue" narrative was a script she personally devised.
The bubble is about to burst; the Saionji family can't carry those burdens.
The massive financial drain from the Gokurakukan and Odaiba projects was also part of her plan. She needed to use these expenditures to create a plausible excuse for a "tight cash flow and a need to recoup funds." With this seemingly foolproof reason, the group would sell off the marginal and obscure plots of land it had frantically acquired during the bubble economy.
This even includes heavy assets such as the "Crystal Palace" in Ginza and the "Pink Building" in Akasaka.
While market valuations are still at their peak of frenzy, they will cash out all these heavy assets and leave the market. When the economic bubble bursts and a long ice age arrives, these buildings that have been sold off can naturally be repurchased by the Saionji family at an extremely low discount.
The massive amounts of yen that were sold off and cashed out will definitely not remain in the country.
The funds will be rapidly transferred through Saionji Investment's offshore channels to secret trust accounts in the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein. To cope with increasingly stringent cross-border capital regulations and potential penetration reviews by the U.S. SEC, this massive sum of money will be physically fragmented according to a rigorous hedging model, transforming it into underlying assets with the highest global liquidity and strongest risk resistance.
The main source of funds will be used to directly purchase US short-term Treasury bills (T-Bills). These short-term bonds, backed by sovereign credit, are equivalent to highly liquid cash, and their absolute anonymity and security can be ensured through offshore trusts. The remaining funds will be diversified into Swiss francs, which have strong safe-haven characteristics, and used to purchase London standard delivery gold bars stored in the Zurich underground free port.
While creating the illusion that the Saionji family was burdened by heavy assets, they secretly stockpiled a massive amount of ammunition sufficient to wreak havoc in the global market.
Once the Seibu Group swallows the most glamorous poisoned apple—Gokurakukan—this money will be transformed into countless short-selling contracts, launching a fatal final strangulation on the entire Japanese financial market the moment the Nikkei index collapses.
"To alleviate the financial pressure," Shuichi's voice continued to echo in the lobby, breaking the brief silence, "the group will immediately launch an asset swap plan. The finance department and the real estate department will join forces to put all the non-core land, peripheral plots, and odd-numbered plots that cannot generate immediate cash flow that we have acquired in the past two years up for sale."
The moment those words were spoken, it was as if the air in the lobby had been instantly sucked out.
Selling off land.
In Japan in 1989, this touched a raw nerve with everyone. In this era of the "land myth" where land prices would only ever rise in one direction, owning land was equivalent to owning a ticket to eternal wealth.
The room erupted in chaos instantly.
"Master, please reconsider!"
A highly respected elder on the left suddenly stood up, his body trembling violently with anger. He gripped his sandalwood cane tightly with both hands and slammed the bottom of the cane heavily onto the tatami mat.
"Thump!"
"This is a wasteful act! Land in Tokyo is priceless! Land prices are changing daily; selling land is like cutting off a piece of your own flesh! Even if the Saionji family has to borrow money at exorbitant interest rates, they cannot sell off the legacy of their ancestors and descendants!"
The executives on the right also looked troubled.
A real estate manager standing next to Executive Director Endo wiped the cold sweat from his brow and forced a smile, saying, "President, land prices are indeed rising insanely. Even those two-meter-wide dead-end plots we own are seeing their valuations increase every day. If we sell now, we'll lose a huge amount of potential profits. We also can't explain it to the board."
"Yes, President. According to current model projections, Tokyo land prices will continue to rise for at least another year. Selling now..."
The voices of opposition, questioning, and pleading from dozens of people mingled together, rising in waves.
What was originally a solemn family summit gradually turned into a noisy marketplace. Several elders, relying on their seniority, even left their cushions and took two steps forward, attempting to use their numbers and seniority to force Xiu Yi to retract his decision.
"Shuichi! You're pushing the Saionji family into the abyss!"
"Absolutely not! That's a goose that lays golden eggs!"
A deafening clamor, filled with roars of greed and incomprehension, echoed between the wooden beams and pillars of the hall.
Amidst this boiling clamor.
Satsuki, who had been sitting quietly in the shadows behind Xiu, slightly turned her wrist.
The bone china teacup in her hand slowly descended. The bottom of the cup passed through the air and gently touched the rosewood tray below.
"bite."
It produced an extremely faint, yet incredibly crisp, collision sound.
With that soft sound, Satsuki slowly stood up from the tatami mat.
Her movements were slow. In fact, due to the physical exhaustion from being suppressed, her posture as she stood up carried a subtle languor. Her white cotton socks made no extra sound as they stepped onto the rush-woven tatami mat.
She stood up quietly.
Executive Director Endo, who was closest to the elder, opened his mouth, ready to refute the elder's words. But out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of the slowly rising hem of a dark blue garment. His slightly parted lips froze in mid-air. His Adam's apple bobbed laboriously, and the words that were about to come out were swallowed back. He quickly lowered his gaze, placed his hands flat on his thighs, straightened his back, and even deliberately slowed his breathing.
Endo's sudden silence startled the real estate department manager, who was currently in an agitated state. The manager turned his head in confusion, following Endo's tense profile upwards. His gaze passed over Shuichi in the main seat and landed on the girl standing quietly in the shadows. The manager's forward-leaning body froze. He didn't utter a sound, but slowly, bit by bit, shrank back into the cushion, his hands nervously gripping the fabric of his suit jacket at his knees.
This eerie silence quickly spread among the executives on the right. The arguing, the agreement, the rustling of papers—all subsided like receding ice water. The executives noticed the commotion in the front row, fell silent, followed the gaze of those at the very front, and then straightened their backs.
Without the argument from the right, the angry shouts of the elders on the left sounded particularly jarring in the main hall. Several elders holding folding fans shouted a couple of times, finally noticing the deathly silence from the opposing camp. They stopped shouting and followed the unified gaze of dozens of executives to the end of the long table.
The rosewood canes, raised in mid-air, came to a stop. The anger on the old people's faces froze the moment they saw the deep blue figure. The raised arms slowly fell, and the folding fans were silently closed and placed on the tatami mat.
The once bustling and noisy hall was now filled only with the faint white smoke from the burning incense in the corner burner. The breathing of the dozens of people was suppressed to the extreme.
Satsuki slowly walked to Shuichi's side.
Her gaze was calm as still water, slowly sweeping across both sides of the long table. The faces filled with greed, yet forced to submit at this moment, were reflected in her eyes without reservation.
"Everyone, have you had enough of arguing?"