Chapter 95: Growing Chives Feels So Good

After wandering around the Shiodome area and thinking it over for two days, Tao Zhiming came to the bank.

Maehara Kyonna treated him with great respect. The moment she saw him, she bowed deeply. "Mr. Tao, have you come about the newly transferred funds?"

"Yes. I need to handle the paperwork."

After he reached an agreement with Suzuki Daiki, the five hundred million yen he had brought out for a gamble had not been available immediately. It had taken until now.

That only confirmed his judgment: although Irie Yuta held Suzuki Daiki in deep awe, Suzuki Daiki himself was not even truly number two within the Shindo Group.

It seemed that drawing those five hundred million yen out of the Shindo Group had also required some effort on his part, and he had likely needed the boss's approval.

The reason Suzuki Daiki had taken a special interest in Tao Zhiming was that he thought Tao still had the ambition to climb higher. And from Obata Yusuke, Tao had learned that Suzuki Daiki was a man of both brains and courage, not merely brute force.

So the man he had raised, Irie Yuta, had acquired a touch of style as well, handling matters with his head.

He had not seen Yuta much lately. Suzuki Daiki had said he was away studying. Tao Zhiming already felt he had a new topic to tease him with next time they met. He wondered where a yakuza was supposed to go to school.

Suzuki Daiki's plans would require money. Tao Zhiming could make money; not only was he bold, but his ability had already been proven through Inoue Ryu, Mogami Holdings, and the way he dealt with Hiroshi Omiya's threats.

Like Inoue Ryu, a horizon of six months would be enough to cover all of Japan's rate-cutting cycle in 1986.

By then, everything would be different.

Maehara Kyonna was no longer in her original frame of mind. She handled his paperwork devotedly, hoping only to leave an ever-better impression on his heart.

Tao Zhiming sat back down across from her and flipped through the magazines on the side table.

His absorbed expression made Maehara Kyonna feel more and more restless the longer she looked at him.

How could there be such a perfect man? Height, looks, education, conversation, wealth... every detail was beyond reproach.

The only pity was that he liked women older than himself, women who already had children.

"Mr. Tao, it's all been taken care of," Maehara Kyonna said softly.

"Oh." Tao Zhiming nodded, then suddenly asked, "Kyonna, if I wanted to buy a car, does the bank have any suitable channels?"

"Do you want to buy a car, Mr. Tao? Th-this... I can help arrange it!" Maehara Kyonna said at once.

"Yes. Then please contact them for me first. If you can handle the whole process, that would be best." Tao Zhiming smiled. "As for the car, I'll take this one."

He opened the magazine to the page and pointed. It was a Mercedes 190E.

"Can you find a reliable seller for this one?"

Seeing that it was a foreign brand, Maehara Kyonna answered without the slightest hesitation, "Please leave it to me!"

"Then I'll wait for your news."

With that, Tao Zhiming left the bank.

After seeing him off, Maehara Kyonna immediately got to work.

At present, the bank's service for premium clients still focused mainly on financial management and the convenience of internal procedures. Tao Zhiming had suddenly asked her to help him arrange a car purchase, and she had no experience with such a request before.

Not only she, but even the section chief was surprised when she asked. "Help arrange a car purchase? What kind of joke is that?"

"Yes," Maehara Kyonna said, pointing at the page in the magazine. "He wants to buy this one."

"...The styling is a bit flashy. It looks like a racing car," the section chief said, somewhat troubled. "And such a new imported car might be a real hassle. Why doesn't he buy it himself and instead ask you to handle it?"

Maehara Kyonna thought the look in the section chief's eyes was a little too knowing, and she hurriedly said, "In any case, this is the first time he has asked me for something. That proves he is beginning to trust me. Maybe this is a test? Chief, another five hundred million yen went into his account today! For such a high-quality client, we should make every effort to offer a wider range of services. That's what I think."

"...All right. I'll do my best to ask around first."

The section chief kept thinking that a young man who wanted to buy such a flashy car was probably deliberately trying to hint at something to Kyonna.

He gave her a long look and began asking around among the people who might know.

Tao Zhiming did not know that his casual remark had actually put the bank in a difficult spot.

He was already used to the later era of VIP banking and had forgotten that this was still 1986. It was only after Japan's financial liberalization and the entry of foreign major banks that Japanese banks began learning such practices. Besides, the increase in ordinary Japanese wealth was not something that had happened long ago. In the past, services for major clients had been aimed at corporations. The needs and service points of high-end individual customers were only just beginning to be explored.

The reason he wanted to use them to buy a car was that he did not really understand the situation in Japan or the procedures involved. The bank, after all, did attach some importance to him, and Tao Zhiming felt it was a good choice.

Once school started, he would have to move back and forth between school, home, and other places quite often. Having his own car would make things much more convenient.

As for a slightly flashy model... there were not many cars from this era that really caught his eye. Japanese cars had their own strengths, but he did not want to choose among them, so this one would do.

The AE86 had already come out, but Tao Zhiming had no particular sentiment toward it.

Besides, in the extravagant Tokyo of the bubble era, a good imported car could sometimes make certain minor troubles easier to deal with.

When he got to school, Tao Zhiming turned on the computer and first checked the latest market trends carefully.

After the rate-cut announcement on March 12, the yen had continued to appreciate a little, and now it had entered a brief sideways fluctuation, as if the exchange rate had stabilized.

The movement looked very real, but since Tao Zhiming knew there would be another rate cut in April, he caught a whiff of something unusual.

Over the past two days, the news had already been full of interpretations praising the rate cuts for working, and predictions had begun to appear that the yen would soon stabilize, perhaps even depreciating into the supposedly stable range of 180 to 1 that the government had once spoken of.

Tao Zhiming, who had been cut open by the market many times before, smelled the fertilizer of a fresh patch of leeks.

He knew perfectly well that the yen still had plenty of room to appreciate.

He calculated that after the last round of gains, his two billion yen in the foreign exchange market had, at the current exchange rate, only grown to a little over 2.7 billion yen.

Last time, with a principal of only 260 million yen, he had netted 600 million in one shot.

This time, with a principal of 2 billion and after such a long stretch, he still had not made that much.

Still, the next major move should be coming soon. Before the April rate cut, the big players ought to be following the same old script, shouldn't they?

First, they would ride the public reports and the stories their people spread to build some beautiful charts. Then they would create a wave of panic and swing the scythe at the irrational leeks.

Tao Zhiming thought it over carefully. If he was going to join the coming Tokyo land war centered on the privatization of the national railways, it would be better to have even more capital on hand.

He would try to take one more bite. Play it conservatively.

He began calling Kudo Choro.

With over two billion yen in principal, and now another five hundred million from Suzuki Daiki, if he added leverage and traded with it, there ought to be at least a little commotion, right?

"What? Slowly sell yen now?" Kudo Choro sounded surprised as always. "Mr. Tao, what exactly have you judged?"

"Quit the chatter. Just do as I say!" Tao Zhiming ordered. "Use the newly credited five hundred million yen to start buying dollars with a lower level of leverage."

Someone was preparing to fatten the leeks. The yen would most likely first be driven lower for a while, and then surge violently upward before the policy was announced.

So-called bottom fishing was always the bottom laid out by the big players.

Between these rises and falls, there was money to be made.

There was already over three billion yen now, enough to try to stir the market a little.

In a foreign exchange market where daily trading volume reached nearly one hundred billion dollars, this amount of money was not much of a disturbance.

Still, it could very well serve as a signal.

Tao Zhiming was certain that if he suddenly and orderly poured this capital into the market, anyone with an eye toward planting leeks would probably assume that another player had already begun laying out a position.

And then, of course, they would join in and help drive the wave higher.

Planting leeks felt wonderful.