Takashi Yuasa - Profile

Profile

He attended Shirogane Elementary School, Azabu High School, in Tokyo, and graduated from the Department of Law at the University of Tokyo in 1979. He claims to have graduated with "the top results ever achieved" in his department. He received an LL.M. from UCLA Law School in 1984.

During the sale of the Rockefeller Center in New York City, he acted as a lawyer for the Rockefeller family (however, he was not the head of the legal team). As a result of his efforts, he says, Mitsubishi Estate paid approximately 1.5 times the amount it planned for the land, and he received a large sum in return (the precise amount was not revealed).

However, many raise doubts about these claimed achievements. A large team of lawyers and accountants was formed to handle this contract, which was concluded in 1985. (The actual sale occurred in 1990.) However, Yuasa attained his credentials as a New York lawyer in 1984 (as can be seen from the records listing New York lawyers), just one year before this massive contact was concluded. As he was not qualified as a lawyer in Japan, he was a novice lawyer fresh out of law school. This raises the question of how much authority one rookie 29-year-old lawyer was given.

He has stated that Mitsubishi's purchase of the Rockfeller Center for such a large amount of money, convinced of the myth that land prices would rise ever higher, contributed to the turning point that was the bursting of Japan's economic bubble, and that the eventual stock price crash proved that there was excessive asset inflation in the economy.

In Wall Street, he has a large amount of work with companies related to the Texas oil market, such as the Rockefeller Group and ExxonMobil, which lean very much to the conservative side, and is therefore at a distance from the Morgan Group, which leans towards the Democratic Party.

In recent years he has taken an interest in the acquisition of oil fields, but due to the above, he has few contacts related to the Dubai crude oil market and the North Sea blend market, where supply volumes are stabilizing, and so has met with difficulties.

From the late 1990s onwards, he has grown to be a more important figure due to the prevalence of hedge funds which have taken root in the oil market. Dealing with hedge funds, an area where he has a great deal of influence, is also an important part of his work with oil markets, but the facts above again present an obstacle to him here.

Until recent years, his work was to provide defences against commentators who saw the futures instruments of hedge funds as the cause of increases in oil prices. However, there is information indicating that, in the face of the confusion starting to occur in the Dubai crude oil market, which affects Japan most, he has received requests to turn his attention away from his main area, the Texas oil market, towards trends in Asia and the Middle East, areas in which he has been weaker, and deal in financial products and investment consulting. He is currently looking into a strategy for dealing with this field, has held private discussions with the financial commentator and Meiji University professor Masaru Takagi, and has sometimes written his own commentary on the outlook in the field in financial magazines.

In the debate on the Livedoor takeovers, he took a stance criticizing the techniques of Lehman Brothers, a company who he had dealings with before, starting when he moved his Asian branch office to Hong Kong and then back to Tokyo, and he spoke on the illegality of the practice of after-hours trading by Livedoor. While the general American view was that this was exploiting a loophole in the law, he took the stance that it was illegal.

He also severely criticized the poison pill approach to hostile buyouts, as used by Fuji Television Network and Nippon Broadcasting System when they exchanged rights to buy new stock. He stated the opinion that in the end, both of them had obtained little, either in quantity or quality, and that their actions were the epitome of an American-style money game.

In other fields, he has had an influence on the competitions to renovate the Guggenheim Museum and Art Institute of Chicago.

His hobbies include dance and opera, and is often asked to sing. He participates in opera together with the pianist Ayako Uehara, the Art critic Yuki Yamashita (Tokyo Research Institute for Cultural Properties) and the actress Misa Uehara.