Less than a year ago a damaging scandal over payments to Japanese gangsters by senior officials at Nomura Securities suddenly propelled a little-known and comparatively young executive, Junichi Ujiie, to the office of president and chief executive. There he took on the task of stamping out corruption and modernizing management at Japan's largest securities firm.
Today, Dr Ujiie, as he is widely known inside the firm, sees the crisis passing for Nomura and is developing plans finally to make it a powerful international investment bank on an unusual model.
The collapses of Sanyo and Yamaichi last year have been a boon to Nomura. It is winning back clients that had deserted it following the scandals, investigations and official sanctions that threatened the firm last spring. During the summer, new account openings by retail investors were a desultory 10,000 a month and Nomura's share of business on the Tokyo stock exchange declined from over 10% to around 5%. By last December, new account openings were back to 80,000. Ujiie has even had the luxury of telling his brokers that they don't need to chase those accounts too eagerly. "If you used to be the client of a company that failed [Ujiie seems almost superstitiously carefully to avoid mentioning Yamaichi by name], where are you going to go? There used to be the big four, now it's the big three or maybe the big one and then two."