The presentation is not all that great and it is too a group in the financial industry so it is a little hard to follow.
John
I followed it just fine. Which is why I said it reminded me of yakuza.
Maybe you didn’t follow my reference? (more at that thread)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1584360/posts?page=31#31
Yakuza Japan’s Criminal Underworld
On April 21, 1982, the manager of the powerful sokaiya group Rondan Doyukai, a gentleman named Shigeru Kobayashi, attended a stockholders’ meeting at the Chase Manhattan bank in New York. Kobayashi sat through Chairman David Rockefeller’s opening remarks, and forty minutes of questioning from the floor—undoubtedly fighting the urge to silence the dissenters—and then turned and addressed the crowd. Said Kobayashi: “We represent your stockholders from Japan. I am happy to be here at your general meeting. Now I have the honor of seeing Chairman Rockefeller. . . . He is a great man because he met with His Majesty the Emperor when he visited Japan a couple of years ago, and very few people in Japan can shake hands with the Emperor. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation for your high dividends.”
Kobayashi’s statement probably amused those stockholders present, but some were also puzzled. Why should Rondan Doyukai send one of its top people to New York merely to flatter the company? Kobayashi later told a Japanese newspaper: “We rode into New York to show them what Japanese sokaiya are. But, just before the meeting, the Wall Street Journal carried a sensational article with banner headline saying, ‘The Sokaiya are coming, the Sokaiya are coming,’ as if the Japanese gangsters were invading the U.S. This raised a stink. We know that the public peace is bad in New York, so we thought we might be eliminated by the Mafia.”
Kobayashi somehow avoided a trip to the bottom of the East River, but he needn’t have worried in the first place. Nearly six years earlier, in equally violent Los Angeles, another sokaiya group made its appearance. In 1976, according to police sources, fifty Japanese executives filed into one of the ballrooms of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. They were the top-ranking officers of the largest Japanese corporations operating on the West Coast, and they had come to pay their respects to a group of visiting sokaiya (who had neglected to announce their presence to the press). Police at the same time observed sokaiya Masato Yoshioka making a tour of Los Angeles to present himself at Japanese-owned banks, conglomerates, and securities investment firms, possibly to hit any companies missed at the Biltmore meeting. Although the businesses were reluctant to talk about the incident, informants revealed to law enforcement agents that, as in Japan, it was cheaper to pay up than to risk the consequences.
Rondan Doyukai also had made earlier trips to America. They had sent representatives to the 1981 annual meeting of the Bank of America in San Francisco. They were, in the words of corporate secretary John Fauvre, “polite but insistent.” The group approached the microphone, said Fauvre, with their own photographer and translator, and introduced themselves with lengthy formality. The sokaiya then did little more than wish the bank good luck, much as Kobayashi would do to Chase Manhattan a year later. Rondan Doyukai’s interests extended to other Western companies, as well. The group invested $232,000 to gain shareholder status in a strategic handful of American and European companies, according to the Wall Street Journal report that so terrified Kobayashi. Among those targeted besides Chase and Bank of America were General Motors, IBM, and Dow Chemical.
Other sokaiya operations got under way. Los Angeles and New York City police discovered that sokaiya-type scandal sheets were being used to extort money from Japanese corporations, and sokaiya continue to remain a threat to American branches of Japanese companies, particularly the smaller ones. In the early 1990s, at least one sokaiya group formed in the Los Angeles area, calling themselves the Japanese Defense Society. And a report from Japan warned that some gangs are believed to have sent some of their brighter members to pursue advanced business degrees in American universities, to prepare for sokaiya-style rackets in the United States.