Disgraced apostles
A few people fell under the spell of the Founder the Great and cited his maxims as if they were the revelation from the above. The men of the management level were like apostles who gained the confidence of the founder. Their great purpose was to earn the founder’s favor by doing his bidding. The rest of us endured daily reminders of our meager existence by doing whatever the apostles told us to do. When we disagreed with the apostles’ instructions, they brought up absolutism.
Among the apostles were the founder’s relatives. They were his sons, the husbands of his family members, or the sons of his close friends. Some were very decent though dogmatic. The others were buffoonish. One of them was the son of the founder’s friend who saved his business at the beginning of his entrepreneurship: this man, Mr. Akinaga, was a small, gaunt-looking man with premature tonsure. His round spectacles over narrow eyes gave an uncanny resemblance to a mantis. Miss Asai, the gossip queen, told me he married his favorite sex worker. His words of the proposal were, “I have shitload of money.” He did, indeed, as he was the head of a business division that sold millions of copies of paper-made cards at a high margin to prepubescent children of the world. Among the plebs of the company, he was known to bring his wife on business trips overseas. Later, my boss in the European office told me that the Japanese female staff locally hired at the London office complained that she had to accompany his wife shopping all day as a translater/guide. Not my job, she claimed. I am not certain if his wife’s travel cost was charged as a business expense.
Related apostles were protected at all times and reigned in their business division forever. But the non-related apostles’ positions were highly precarious. They started to disappear from the office. One day they stood right behind the founder, and the next day they were gone. Some left the company, but many were sent to the fitness gym management company that they themselves helped the founder to acquire. Ironically, they dug their own graves. The bad boss, Mr. Iwata, went as far as traveling the world with the founder on an IR tour, but he eventually fell from grace. I watched him leave with satisfaction. I despised him and was glad he was disgraced.