His father died in 1942, when the ship that he had taken to the then-Japanese-occupied Philippines, as part of a business delegation, was attacked by an American submarine.
[1] During his time at Harvard, his roommate was Robert Monks, a shareholder activist who was noted to have forced Sears Holdings to sell most of its diversified business interests and focus on retailing.
[2] Some of the other notable students in his graduating class included future senator Edward Kennedy, and author John Updike.
[1] He returned to Japan in the late 1970s, to lead the marine products group that his father had once headed, focusing on exports of salmon and crab.
[4] He spoke against the closed nature of the Keiretsu, a Japanese corporate structure representing companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings, and emphasizing the need for more transparency.
[4] His reforms at the group included financial management to recognize portfolio losses and writing off bad investments, engineering cultural and organizational changes at the company to change the corporate mindset from a Japanese trading company to a global conglomerate, and reorienting the business with western corporate principles toward a focus on returns on equity and creation of stakeholder value.
[5] He was an advocate for strong US–Japan business relations, through a period in which many Americans viewed Japanese resurgence as a threat to their own economic and global trade domination.