Sayonara

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Mitsukoshi ousts the boss

For ten years Shigeru Okada reigned as the powerful president of Mitsukoshi, Japan's oldest and most prestigious department-store chain. The company, which grew from a modest kimono shop, founded in 1673, to a $2.4 billion concern, now has 15 branches in Japan and others in London, Paris, Rome, New York and elsewhere. But Okada seemed to have a most un-Japanese habit: he was unwilling to take responsibility for his actions, in both his professional and his private life. Last week Okada's personal flamboyance and his involvement in a series of embarrassing scandals caught up with him, in a manner that stunned his colleagues and shocked the upper echelon of the Japanese business community. He was fired.

Okada's troubles began in 1972 when, as Mitsukoshi's newly elected president, he developed a taste for high living. Despite his flair for public relations and his reputation as a supersalesman, Okada's autocratic ways angered his colleagues. In Japan, paramount value is placed on a business leader's ability to manage by "consensus," or group agreement on company policies and tactics. But, griped one Tokyo banker close to the company, "Okada became a dictator." Though married, with three children, Okada became a target for Tokyo tabloids, which began publishing breathless accounts of his private life, including a rumored involvement with the female owner of a small firm that supplied goods to Mitsukoshi.

Meanwhile, soaring oil prices in the early 1970s slowed the Japanese economy, and Mitsukoshi's profits began to slip. Top management at Mitsukoshi's associated companies in the Mitsui group eventually began to wonder if Okada could turn the store's fortunes around. The final blow came three weeks ago when experts charged that Persian treasures shown last month at the main Mitsukoshi store in Tokyo featured costly fakes. When Okada refused to accept responsibility for the hoax and resign, the store's 16 other directors convened at Mitsui's urging and voted to fire him, relegating him to the post of "non-regular adviser."

Okada sat in stunned silence during the vote. Then, when it was over, he turned to a colleague and asked in disbelief, "Naze?" (Why?). It was a question any Japanese businessman should have known the answer to, and never learning it had apparently been Okada's problem all along. Said the company's managing director, Tadayoshi Sugita, afterward: "Mitsukoshi will now make a fresh start."