On a certain Friday every month, in the heart of Japan’s business district and in sight of the Imperial Palace, an elite group gathers for Japan’s most famous corporate meeting.
Around the table, as they have done for decades, sit some of the nation’s most powerful chief executives: leaders of the biggest bank, the biggest commodities trader and one of the largest arms makers, along with manufacturers of everything from cars and air conditioners to nuclear reactors and space rockets. Its members are diverse, but are unified by a single name: Mitsubishi — once the most formidable of Japan’s conglomerates, until it was dismantled after the second world war to curtail that power.
Its Friday Club meetings, an open secret but a strictly behind-closed-doors affair, have felt like one of the great enduring certainties of corporate Japan. But even they, admits Takehiko Kakiuchi, the 65-year-old chief executive of Mitsubishi Corporation and the central member of the club, have been suspended in recent months by a continuing rise in Covid-19 infections.