To those in the know, Nomura chairman Masashi Suzuki's choice of Junichi Ujiie as the new president of the company was not a complete surprise.
In a sense, Ujiie was Suzuki's protégé. They had first met in the early 1970s, when Ujiie was a post-graduate student at the University of Chicago, and Suzuki was head of Nomura's personnel department. It was a meeting with Suzuki that had helped persuade Ujiie, at the age of 30 and with a doctorate in monetary economics, to join Nomura in November 1975. Suzuki and Ujiie were further drawn together because both were graduates of the prestigious Tokyo University - a rarity in those days when many Nomura brokers had not been to university at all and when stockbrokers were still considered low-life kabuya, stock-peddlers.
When it came to picking a new president, Nomura's rank-and-file did not trust Suzuki's instincts. He had connections with the two Tabuchis - Setsuya Tabuchi and Yoshihisa Tabuchi - who had resigned as, respectively, chairman and president after Nomura's last scandal in 1991. The Tabuchis (who are not related) continued to wield considerable power at Nomura after their resignations.