Furuta Akira
If your boss won’t ever let you go home
Business owner | 13 January 1906 – 30 October 1973
We all have our reasons for drinking.
There are some who are faint of heart, so they drink like whales just to hide their embarrassment or shyness. You’ll often hear people describing these individuals using words like, “He’s a great guy so as long as he doesn’t drink.” But for the person in question, it could be that it feels like they’re incapable of doing anything unless they drink. Or they might find it troublesome that anyone should ever think of them as a “great guy” to begin with. They just can’t take it without a drink.
But although one might feel that they “can’t take it” without liquor, it’s quite the challenge to drink during the daytime if you happen to be an office worker. Or even if you’re not an office worker, but a popular actor perhaps. If you don’t even have enough time to sleep, you might not have time to drink either.
That is what I used to think until just a while ago. But now when even a Johnny’s Entertainment pop idol—someone who was constantly busy with everything from doing renowned TV music shows to planting rice—could be forced to retire due to getting drunk off his face, it proves that no matter how busy you are, anyone who wants to drink will always find a way to do so.
This is exactly why this book has significance. Only fools would try to learn from their own experiences—the wise choose instead to learn from all the great drunks of history.
But while I have just been singing my own praises for the past couple of sentences, the truth of it must be that it is exactly the people whose work doesn’t bind them to anyone or anyplace who are most likely to routinely go on the piss. Ultimately, the reason we writers can turn into alcoholics so effortlessly is because we are in an environment where if we want to drink, it’s easy for us to do just that.
Sure, if an office worker wants to drink, they can do so. But in their case, when they cross a line they will be punished for it accordingly. If you engage in drunken violence—say you drunkenly assault the masseuse at the parlor, for instance—it is a given that you’ll be out of a job. But it’s also a surprisingly non-trivial number of people who are fired simply for the reason that they’ve become alcoholics and thus can no longer make it to work.
However, if you are in a role where you will not be punished for your misdeeds, you can continue drinking yourself legless even while part of a company organization. The role, that is to say, of the owner-manager. If one wishes to do so, a company manager is allowed to drink like a whale.
You might think, “Yeah, okay. But there’s never been a company like that.”
Oh, but there has.
Furuta Akira, the founder and first president of publisher Chikuma Shobo, left behind a great many stories relating to alcohol. It pains me to say this as a fan of his company’s publications, but after having read several books for reference, it is now clear to me that in his case what we’re talking about was something very close to drunken frenzy.
Actually, no. I’m being too careful with my words. It wasn’t just “close”—it was drunken frenzy. This was drunken frenzy on the level that now every time I see Chikuma books on the shelves when I’m at the bookstore, it’s like I can smell the alcohol.
But how bad was it exactly? What, did he get drunk and end up vomiting or something? Did he get injured? Did he hit people? If it was something along those lines, we might be able to pass it off considering the historical background—after all, Furuta became active right during the postwar period. “It’s no wonder. That’s just how people were back in those days.”
But Furuta? Furuta went about three levels beyond that.
According to Hashimoto Chiyokichi’s book Hi no Kuruma Itamaechou, one night when Furuta was at one of his regular haunts, already seeing double, a ramen cart happened to be passing by in front of the establishment, so he stepped outside. Drunk as he was, he must’ve gotten hungry. As he was eating, however, he suddenly asked for some paper from the pub’s cook who had come outside with him.
“Maybe he needed to wipe his mouth?” That is what any ordinary person would think. That is what the cook thought. But Furuta then took the paper down below his waist. Hmm? What was this, then? What was happening? As the cook leaned over to take a peek, he quickly learned that what was happening was, in fact, a bowel movement.
The guy was standing there eating his ramen while taking a shit.
In the present day, something like this would spread on social media like wildfire and the culprit would be ostracized. But even back in those “good old days,” this really was something rather shocking. (By the way, even the pub owner, poet Kusano Shinpei, left behind a written record of Furuta’s eccentric behavior as described above.)
But do not be shocked, because this was nothing yet.
When Furuta was tanked, his specialty was attacking people when they were asleep. You can already imagine how big of a nuisance something like that must have been. For the people involved, these incidents were feared, often being referred to by names such as “Typhoon Furuta” and “Storm Furuta.” Apparently, no other hurricanes were even comparable to the intensity of these ones. We’re talking… Isewan Typhoon vs. Storm Furuta.
(As a side note: although they always like to bring up the Isewan Typhoon in the news when it’s typhoon season, it actually wasn’t the strongest-ever typhoon (in terms of low central pressure) measured in Japan. On 16 September 1961, the Second Muroto Typhoon which made landfall west of Cape Muroto at 925 hPa was, in fact, the strongest typhoon ever. Isewan Typhoon comes in second place at 929 hPa. But in terms of the number of victims, the difference was staggering. While the Second Muroto Typhoon left 194 people dead, 8 missing, and 4,972 injured, the Isewan Typhoon left much deeper scars with 4,697 people dead, 401 missing, and 38,921 injured.)
In contrast to other typhoons, however, Storm Furuta was an equally colossal menace for the people who got caught in it. Unlike other storms, this one didn’t occur just once every couple of decades or so—it was a storm that would rage on intolerably almost every single night.
Furuta was friendly with some scholars from Kyoto University, and whenever they would come to Tokyo, that was naturally a cause which called for drinks.
When English literature scholar Fukase Motohiro came to visit, Furuta took him all sorts of places. Fukase couldn’t stay up drinking very late, however, as he had to prepare for a lecture he was giving the next day. Thus, he soon escaped to his lodging.
But Furuta would not allow it. The next day, he showed up at Fukase’s accommodation at five in the morning and began drinking immediately. It’s a funny episode when you read it in story form like this, but if you actually had a friend like that yourself, it could be quite irritating.
Furuta then waited at a pub for Fukase to finish his lecture. But after he arrived, Furuta found out that his friend had delivered his lecture while sober. He became furious, shouting, “It’s only good etiquette to bring a bottle! That way you can crouch down to fill your cup from it every now and then when no one’s looking! University is university, sure. But you’re you!”
Please take the “quite irritating” part from my previous statement and replace it with “exceptionally irritating.”
But it’s not because this buddy of his only seldom came to Tokyo that Furuta decided to raid him at 5 AM when he was still fast asleep. It’s just that this man simply did not care as to what time it was, or who it was that he was assaulting.
Even just according to what is written in Sakurai Shoichiro’s book Kyoto School: Drunken Legends, he raided at least three houses belonging to Chikuma employees, the house of publisher Sogensha’s president, and one totally random house where he forcefully woke up someone he didn’t even know and got in trouble for it.
Someone attacking you while you’re asleep is already a nuisance enough. But understand that this wasn’t just someone coming over in the middle of the night and yelling, “Hey, anybody home?” When Furuta woke up the president of Sogensha, he abducted the man while he was still practically half asleep. The poor man was then put in a taxi, driven around multiple pubs, and was released only after he’d reached a state of unconsciousness. I feel like even Middle Eastern terrorists treat people with a bit more hospitality.
When Furuta broke into the aforementioned stranger’s house, he drank straight from a bottle of milk which had just been delivered there early in the morning. It’s one thing to kidnap your friend (although that is already a case of first-class annoyance), but rousing a complete stranger out of bed and even drinking their milk without their permission? That is a criminal offense, no two ways about it.
But while Furuta did as he pleased in ways just described, he also had high ambitions as a publisher.
It was around the time when his company began experiencing financial difficulties that he became a hard drinker. Despite said difficulties, however, whenever Furuta came across a book that he thought was of high quality, he would continue publishing them even if he knew they wouldn’t sell or make a profit.
Furuta was never calculative in his interactions with writers he found promising. But he was burdened by an innate timidness—when he was sober, he could not look people in the eye during conversation. It was only with the help of some liquid courage that he could manage to win over these authors, and now with his business facing financial difficulties, it meant that he was constantly drinking more and more.
How did his underlings deal with such a boss? That is to say, a boss who would show up uninvited at their houses in the middle of the night? You’d think they probably found him insufferable. But in fact, the employees were actually neck and neck with their president.
Back then, the way things worked at Chikuma Shobo was as follows. Whenever they went out on a company retreat, they would all drink themselves silly on the train on the way there. They would all get soused, resume drinking at the inn, and finally things would escalate into physical brawls. Naturally, no one could sleep easy even after everyone had gone back to their rooms.
But okay, considering how this was the time of non-existent compliance guidelines and matter-of-course power harassment, perhaps this was just a company outing like any other. So far.
But when we learn how the next morning someone would already be pouring sake over their rice at breakfast, we must become a little wary. We also learn that the previous night one of them had broken into the room of one of the inn’s female employees. Meanwhile, another had gotten on the elevator stark naked.
This really was a rather unhinged group of people.
It is not known whether Furuta’s habit of getting into states of drunken frenzy was something that spread throughout the company like an infectious disease, or whether it had simply been a group of ruffians to begin with.
However, it is plausible that when the employees saw how big of a piss artist their president was, they figured they might as well follow suit and drink away. Or, maybe it’s that when Furuta saw his employees drinking so much, he then saw it fit for him to play the part of that vicious drunk.
30 October 2023
People paying their respects at Furuta Akira’s grave on his 50th death anniversary
However, if one was to claim, “My boss is a drunk—I only lapsed because of him,” it is not an excuse that would fly in Japan in the current year.
For starters, if a well-known business owner was to go ringing the doorbell at some stranger’s house at dawn and then forcibly make his way in, it’s an incident that would make it to the top of Yahoo! News. The comment section would be on fire. And since the president would apparently have been the source of all problems, the employees would then make excuses along the lines of, “It’s not alcohol that is at fault—it’s him.” It would only make people question the company’s true nature.
For better or worse, it is no longer an era in which anyone could run a company while also asking one’s employees, “Are you too good to drink the booze I’m offering you?!” At this point in time, booze-loving company presidents like Furuta must surely be an endangered species.
To begin with, the entire premise of this chapter—”if your boss won’t ever let you go home“—might really be more of a twentieth century theme altogether.
