Leo guests on Horie

[For the first time, Asia Exile is entrusted to the hands of a guest blogger - my worthy colleague, Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent, who returns to The Times this week, amid scenes of near hysterical rejoicing, after a few weeks getting something out of his system (working for the Financial Times). He writes on Takafumi Horie, the former CEO of Livedoor, who faces a verdict this Friday is his trial on charges of market manipulation and false accounting.

Take it away, Leo.]

Abraham Zapruder, Deep Throat, that Area 51 alien dissection footage and now…me.

Nestled in a top secret location somewhere in Tokyo (and under 24-hour guard by vicious attack pot-plants) is my Olympus Voice Trek 50 digital recorder – an excellent model that will record around 40 hours of interviews at pin-drop high quality.

And the Japanese want it from me.

Oh how they want it from me.

They want it so badly they will pay anything to get it. They are talking offer prices that are corpulent with zeroes. One chap called eight times yesterday and on the eighth refusal got his friend to call me a further five. The final husky-voiced “give me the tape” call came in at 2:30am (because they thought I was in the UK).

And what lies behind this joke-and-dagger farce?

On the recorder is (my tormentors believe) one hour six minutes and 35 seconds of pure media gold: an exclusive interview I did back in December with Takafumi Horie, and which represented his first proper discussion he did with the media since his spectacular arrest and downfall in January 2006.

It certainly was a good interview, and there wasn't room to print every word. But does it really deserve all this attention?

The people who want the recording the most are the cream (ahem) of the Japanese media – mainly the likes of Nippon Television, Fuji Television, Asahi TV, a couple of magazines and a handful of others. All of them prepared to pay hard cash to own this little blip of digital dynamite in advance of this Friday – the showdown-day on which Horie receives his judgement from the Tokyo District Court.

I’m sure if they had their way, they would feast on the indiscreet, sometimes juicy little gems Horie cast towards me during the interview. The critical question here is not why these people are so desperate for the contents of the tape, but why they haven’t got equivalent tapes of their own. They are, after all, the biggest media organisations in Japan.

The answer, which we probably knew all along, is that Horie is nobody’s fool. Present him as greedy, present him as poorly-advised, present him as a cutter of corners. But do not present him as an idiot.

What the dimwits at NTV, Fuji TV etc have only just realised is that they burned their bridges with Horie the moment they decided that the best way to cover his arrest and prosecution was to parrot, wholesale, everything the Tokyo District Prosecutors office was leaking. Japanese TV, in its various forms, arrested, tried and hanged Horie long before the legitimate wheels of justice had turned a single cog. If he is now only giving interviews to media organisations that believed him innocent until proven guilty, then his premature hangmen can hardly be surprised he doesn’t want to talk to them.

I’m not going to give up the tape, which is a shame, because I could use the loot…..

Comments

[Jeremy]

I'll buy it for a tenner.....or a Doutor coffee, which ever you prefer....
jsh

[Ｍａｒｋ]

Nice to see Leo back. Does this mean the return of his blog as well? Not that we don’t enjoy reading your blog Richard but I do miss the stories and various pseudonymous characters whose adventure’s kept me smiling over many a shoddy bento.　

[Richard Lloyd Parry]

Leo's blog is indeed expected to resume soon. Funnily enough, I believe that it will be entitled 'Shoddy Bento'.

[Tim Footman]

Didn't Shoddy Bento play bass for T Rex?

[zhi]

i hope leo will let us know what the ft is like from the inside...

[-Paul]

Miss Nippon is 2008, January 28th. Bring it on.