Three days later, at Sega Headquarters, in the large conference room on the top floor.
The routine board meeting was underway.
President Nakayama Hayao had suffered a hypertension episode from days of overwork and was recuperating in the hospital, so today's board meeting was being chaired by Nakayama Takuya in his stead.
Nakayama Takuya wore a well-tailored, custom-made dark blue suit today, carrying the composure and ease unique to a young man in power.
He sat in the seat that had originally belonged to the president, casually twirling a Montblanc fountain pen in his hand.
Standing before the projection screen, Hoshino laid out the breathtaking maneuvers of the past few days, along with the latest situation in Southeast Asia, in the calmest possible tone.
"Based on the above assessment, we moved all our risk exposure to the offshore market before the Bank of Thailand locked down liquidity. At present, all of Sega's funds in Thailand have been safely withdrawn. Not only did we preserve the principal, we also brought out roughly thirty percent in early gains."
The meeting room fell deathly silent.
Several older directors, who normally paid little attention to financial operations and cared only about console sales, had all put on their reading glasses and lowered their heads to frantically flip through the briefings in their hands.
The rustle of turning pages was especially distinct in the pin-drop silence of the meeting room.
Each of them had their own connections and sources of information.
Over the past few days, the Southeast Asia divisions of Japan's major banks had looked as though they had been hit by a bomb, thrown into a pot of boiling chaos.
After all, Japanese banks had issued astronomical amounts of corporate loans in Southeast Asia over the past few years.
Now that the situation