Good Risks: Discovering the Secrets to ORIX's 50 Years of Success

Chapter 12 Baseball Friends

A few days after my meeting with Miyauchi, I received an official-looking envelope in the mail. It had the ORIX logo prominently printed on the front and my name handwritten beautifully with a brush. I was impressed. When I opened it, I found a brief letter in English. It said, “Dear Mr. Russell, I remember you saying that you are a baseball fan. I hope you will be able to put these to good use.” It was signed by Yoshihiko Miyauchi. Inside were two tickets to see the ORIX Buffaloes play the Rakuten Eagles in Osaka’s Kyocera Stadium and two Tokyo-Osaka round-trip tickets on the Shinkansen bullet train. Thirty seconds later, I was on the phone with Kato.

Just a few days later, he and I were reclining in our seats on the Shinkansen, still one of the fastest and most reliable trains on the planet. The charming dining cars that I remembered from the old days were gone, but the Japan Railways girls selling food and drinks in the trains were still the same. The door at one end of the car would whoosh open, a girl in a JR uniform would enter, dragging a metal cart slightly bigger than those used for meals on airplanes, then bow deeply to the passengers and begin pushing her cart up the narrow aisle, selling bento boxes of food, plus beer, sake, soft drinks, and all sorts of other consumables. At the far end of the car she would turn, bow again, though she was now behind all the passengers and no one could see her, and exit, then repeat the performance in ...