Shifting wind
My family was glad that I secured the job at a company publicly listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The videogame industry was relatively new but growing. My grandfather checked my employer’s stock price every day. Their manga-licensed card game was a mega-hit among pre-teen boys, and the company’s stock price and capital value that year hit the highest since its foundation. It almost seemed they were unaffected by the depression and the ensuing high unemployment rate. My heart swelled with hopes and anticipations.
A few months before graduation, I found my future employer on the front page of Nikkei newspaper. They announced an acquisition and merger of a company that ran fitness gyms. The stock market didn’t respond favorably to their drastic business diversification and the immense acquisition cost. The stock price plummeted, and the company lost a significant chunk of its value overnight. My father told me about my grandfather’s distress over the prospect of my future employer. I told them the acquisition was strategic, but the market didn’t understand the return value the company would gain from the investment. I said they knew what they were doing, and the stock price would pick up again.
The stock price didn’t recover for the next two months, and then I received a phone call from the HR of my soon-to-be employer. I feared the job offer was retracted. Instead, they told me there was an organizational change, and there was no longer the International Business Department, but each business division held staff engaged in an overseas operation. As a result of the change, I was assigned to a position in the Corporate Management Department. They also told me that the head of the department who interviewed me and said I’d miss marriageable years relocated to the US office.