—What an odd staircase.
Mitsuhiro Matsunaga stopped after going down a fair distance, overcome with regret.
The stairway went deep underground. Each flight was ten or eleven steps high, and it just went on and on. Every time he thought he was almost at the end, there’d be another landing, and then the next flight of stairs would appear.
It was perfectly normal for construction sites like these to have lots of exposed concrete around, but there were no lights at all, which was strange. Mitsuhiro adjusted the headlamp on his helmet with a gloved hand, hoping to make it shine downward as much as possible. That was the only source of light he had. Having to constantly stare at his feet as he descended was starting to make his neck stiff.
—How much longer do these stairs go on?
As he rubbed the back of his neck to loosen it up, Mitsuhiro realized that he had an intense urge to turn back. The more he went down, the more irritated he was about having to climb all the way back up later. The claustrophobia of being this deep underground began to slowly spread out across his mind. He was anxious that he might be trapped in this total darkness forever. But most of all:
—Why is it so dry in here?
The basement should have been damp, but this stale air was almost painful for his eyes and throat. It was getting on his nerves, and he wanted to return to the surface as soon as possible to get some fresh air. At the very least…
—This stench, like burning bones…
There was no logic to it, but the air made him feel uncomfortable. He wanted to be out of it, even if for just one minute.
But that wasn’t possible, so Mitsuhiro instead took his phone from his jacket pocket and checked the time. It was a bit past seven thirty in the morning. He had one more hour to complete his investigation and report back to the office.
“I want speed to be your priority here,” his boss, Yasushi Takenaka, had told him on the phone just before six. With Takenaka and the rest of Mitsuhiro’s team working on this emergency, there was no time to entertain fantasies about heading back up and coming down again later.
—Let’s just get this over with.
Mitsuhiro forced himself to continue down the stairs, feeling like he was jumping into the bottom of a dark hole.
“We have to wrap this up before it gets any more difficult for us.”
When Takenaka called him, Mitsuhiro was already wide awake and out of the shower. He was already aware of the problem, even without an early-morning call from his boss. He quickly got ready in his dim bedroom, grabbed his bag, and opened the door.
“See you later,” murmured his wife, Miyoko, without moving her head from the pillow. “Tough day ahead, huh?” She waved at him, her other hand resting on her large belly. She was in her seventh month now, so she could hardly even stand up quickly, much less bend over. Even putting on her socks was a struggle.
Mitsuhiro returned and lightly grasped Miyoko’s hand, placing it by the pillow. She sighed peacefully through her nostrils.
He left her there and went out into the hallway, then checked into the room nearby. Their daughter, Sae, had kicked the blanket off the bed, so he put it back on her, stroking her head. She sighed as well, just like her mother had, which made him smile a bit.
Now that she had started first grade, there was no need for him to drop her off and pick her up at kindergarten any longer, and that was a big relief for a working couple. They still had to prepare for the new baby, but Mitsuhiro was sure he and Miyoko would make it work. After everything they’d learned from their first, he had much more confidence about that.
Leaving Sae’s room, he went up to the entryway, picking up a pair of nonslip shoes from the shelf and putting them on. These were meant for navigating construction sites; if he wore regular shoes, it’d be all but asking for an accident.
In another moment, he was out of the door and in the elevator. Mitsuhiro had purchased a corner condo on the fourth floor; he’d take the stairs for exercise when he had the time, but he didn’t feel like it right now.
Once he got out and walked through the auto-locking front door, he was taken aback by the sound of heavy rain and the surprisingly chilly air.
It had been hot and sweaty since June began, so it caught him wholly by surprise. Out of consideration for Miyoko, he hadn’t opened the curtains in the bedroom this morning…but still, the fact he didn’t notice the rain at all showed just how much modern construction shielded him from the outside. No wonder there were laws about providing ventilation; otherwise, oxygen might not be able to get in.
Letting out a sigh, Mitsuhiro ran off, holding his bag above his head. The station was just across the street, so he only had to go about five hundred feet from his building to reach his subway entrance.
—Good thing we decided to live near the station.
It was on the pricier side, but it couldn’t be much more convenient for commuting. Miyoko was into stuff like feng shui, things that went completely over Mitsuhiro’s head, but she was the first to agree to this location.
—She called it a “power spot,” didn’t she?
Mitsuhiro brushed the raindrops off his suit as he rode the escalator down. That was some kind of trend lately, he heard, but he didn’t know what kind of “spot” it was supposed to be. Probably it was Miyoko’s way of showing gratitude for all the convenient urban benefits their condo provided.
The sound of the rain was no longer audible as he reached the underground floor, and the dampness of the wind blowing in had also disappeared. He bought a sandwich and some tea from the kiosk, put them in his bag, and hurriedly passed through the gate for the Den-en-toshi commuter line into Tokyo.
The train he boarded was sparsely occupied, and the air conditioner was blowing hard enough to give him a chill on his skin. Mitsuhiro found a seat as far away from the vents as possible, took out his company phone, and got himself caught up on the incident.
Twenty-two hours had passed since it broke out. The crisis-management team at IR tried to document any incident that took place within twelve hours, so this was a performance nobody was proud of.
IR, or Investor Relations, was essentially a PR department aimed at investors, which made its job fundamentally different from dealing with mass media. The IR group had to communicate the current status and future outlook of a company’s board, finances, and performance in order to present a transparent view of the firm, improve its brand value, and attract investor interest. They could hold press conferences as well, of course, but their main objective was to minimize the risk of unexpected changes in the stock price.
Mitsuhiro was a member of the IR team for the financial planning bureau at Shimaoka Corporation, the main hub of Shimaoka Group, which was currently betting its corporate future on the redevelopment project taking place at Shibuya Station. The group consisted of over forty companies encompassing five main businesses: railroads, real estate, resorts, lifestyle services (chiefly department stores), and construction.
This redevelopment project was launched in the early twenty-first century, bringing all of these core businesses to the table together. It was being closely watched by every type of investor, so IR’s role was to function as a kind of central crisis-management center for them all.
Not long after Mitsuhiro had joined the firm, his boss, Takenaka, had told him about the phrase “earthquake-proofing fraud” and how it had haunted him between 2005 and 2006. The MLIT—the Japanese government’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism—had publicly disclosed twenty-one hotels, condominiums, and other properties that had fabricated the seismic resistance of their buildings, triggering a massive public outcry. The companies took a major hit to their reputation, and the police set up a task force to arrest all those responsible.
“A lot of the arrests were actually for other crimes, but there was so much rage across the country, they had to do something.”
Takenaka had spoken in hushed tones, like he was still fearing all that anger…but fortunately, the Shimaoka Group wasn’t badly hurt by that scandal. The directors at the time, though, were almost morbidly fearful of any potential blowback, so they decided to boost the on-site verification and crisis-management teams over in IR around that time.
Now, in 2015, after several reorganizations, IR’s crisis-management group was being headed by Takenaka, who had a great deal of PR experience. He had a gift for calmly reading two or three moves ahead and giving just the right instructions, and Mitsuhiro and his coworkers never found themselves scrambling to make a decision or releasing incorrect information that harmed more than helped.
The most dangerous situation in crisis management is when you’re obligated to make an announcement while something is keeping you from all the pertinent information. If you don’t know what happened, why it happened, and how you’ll prevent a recurrence, all you can do is say a bunch of hollow, made-up nonsense. Sometimes, the C-suite would order you to report total falsehoods, and you’d be at your wits’ end trying to figure out how to toe the line and say something comforting that still managed to be true.
“There’s nothing you’ll regret more than doing IR work for a company that normalizes coverups,” Mitsuhiro’s colleagues from other firms would tell him. “You make one misstep with the media, they blow you away with a big exposé, and now your own family’s calling you a liar.”
So far, at least, Mitsuhiro had never dealt with that sort of situation, a testament to both Takenaka’s talents and the relative sanity of the managers above him.
After arriving at Shibuya Station, Mitsuhiro went out not at the Sakuragaoka side, where Shimaoka’s corporate headquarters was located, but through the east exit, where the construction site was.