[3] In 1992, twenty Ivy League football players visit Japan, to play an exhibition match against Japanese college kids.

[4] Carney was an executive in Kidder Peabody's Tokyo office, and he suggested Malcolm contact him about a job if his pro football career did not pan out.

He was again to work out of Osaka, but this time his orders were coming from Singapore, where Barings' star trader, Nick Leeson, held court.

In January 1995 he made an enormous bet on a rise in the key Japanese stock exchange index, known as the Nikkei (large enough so that if he won, he would recover all his losses).

In the event, the tracking fund did not make the expected purchases, and the price dropped dramatically—Malcolm covered the short position, winning his firm more than twenty million dollars.

Other elements which Mezrich intertwines into the narrative with the main characters[5] include the sex industry in Japan[6] and the role of the Yakuza in Japanese society and finance.