A return to the office on Monday morning confronted me with an unwelcome surprise before I even had my first cup of coffee. While it was 8 a.m. in Maryland, it was already 7 p.m. Monday in Tokyo. The day had seen a major blow-up between our Japanese partner and the President of our joint venture. I was the guy who had championed both, so I was who our CEO wanted to see post haste.
It seemed that to gain some additional distribution of our products on the island of Hokkaido, the President of our joint venture, Moise Yakindo, had entered into an agreement with a firm that was a competitor of our partner. The issue was that our partner's distribution capabilities were close to non-existent on Japan's northernmost island, and despite Moise's pleas to expand them, no efforts to do so were forthcoming. Moise had had enough and had taken the bull by the horns. Now they wanted him fired.
This would not be resolved in one, two, or a million trans-Pacific phone calls. My quickly scheduled flight to Tokyo would be taking off from Dulles International at 5 p.m., just enough time to return home, pack and find my passport. I did call Moise, but he didn't tell me anything that I didn't already know or hadn't already guessed, so I told him what time I was arriving and asked him to pick me up. I wasn't in a good mood and it wasn't the most pleasant conversation. It was a lousy start to the week.
The flight from Washington to Tokyo comes within a hundred miles or so of flying directly over the North Pole and every time I'd done it, I couldn't look at that barren polar scene and not think about what it would be like for the early explorers who were vainly seeking the fabled, but non-existent, northwest passage from Europe to Asia.
I couldn't sleep, so I pulled out my folio and began to write. It was just these kinds of times that had prompted me a number of years previously to pass the hours by writing stories. In my youth, I had been exposed to some of the bawdy works of Victorian Erotica which not only served as inspiration for my earliest experiments in sexual self-abuse but also triggered what had become a lifelong curiosity about sex and the sexual roles of men and women. My stories began to emulate those that I'd read so many years ago but in a much more contemporary style.
Recently, I had been invited to join an exclusive and very secretive group called the Freyja Club, which not only met, but far surpassed anything that I'd ever encountered or even imagined existed in the realm of erotica. I hadn't yet gotten through my first year, but I'd already met some fascinating people in this club and I'd decided that I would base my new stories on what they'd shared with me about their own lives. I had just finished Michelle's and now I was on to Nancy.
As my thoughts pushed the real purpose of my trip into the background, my pen flew as I recounted how I had first encountered Nancy in the Canadian Embassy and then later, in one of those jokes that God sometimes plays on mere mortals, in the Freyja Club. I thought her narrative of how she had transformed herself from a shy and reclusive secretary to an unabashed 'oral slut' was more than worthy of being honored by my humble chronicle of her journey, and I had just finished describing her first blowjob as the plane began its descent into Tokyo, coincidentally, over the island of Hokkaido.
Passport Control and Customs were predictably efficient as only the Japanese seem to achieve, and Moise was waiting exactly where I expected. It was already midnight, so I was looking forward to about twelve hours of nonstop sleep. Moise had booked two rooms at the ANA Hotel near the Ginza, so we kept it light for the drive into the city. Fact-finding and damage control could wait until morning.
Well, I didn't sleep for twelve hours for the simple reason that at first light my body woke up and said "time for a run." I'd been doing five miles almost every morning since I was about sixteen, so I'd become somewhat compulsive about this morning ritual before breakfast.
The Ginza District isn't very conducive for long uninterrupted jogs, so as much as I disliked treadmills, I headed to the fitness center and was surprised to discover one of the new programmable models that alter the incline and speed. It was a welcome change from the usual monotony, so forty minutes later I was covered in sweat and ready for a shower and the hotel's breakfast buffet.
I called Moise and an hour later we were sitting in the Ginza Cafe, and he started telling me his side of the story that had yanked me from a nice Monday morning in Maryland halfway around the world to my present location at a hotel in the heart of Tokyo. Unfortunately, I was more than familiar with the situation.
Like most modern corporations, our Japanese partner-operated several businesses, many of which had nothing to do with our joint venture. The company that Moise had identified in Hokkaido was a good fit from his point of view since they had a compatible product line that augmented his own. Unfortunately, it appeared that a different division of this company was engaged in a bitter contract battle with one of our partner's businesses.
After breakfast, I decided that I needed to make some phone calls, so I told Moise that I'd come out and visit the venture's operation in the afternoon and have dinner with the key management. It would be something they'd expect and I didn't want to make things worse with an unintentional snub.
My first call was to Yoshimura Atigi. "Yoshi" was a Tokyo attorney that I'd developed a close relationship over the years. He had assisted in the original negotiation that had created the venture and was not only a good legal mind but had demonstrated an impressive understanding of how business is conducted in Japan. If I had any hope of defusing the situation, he would be a key asset. He was out, but his secretary booked me for an appointment for the following day.
