Photo/Illutration The head office of Airport Facilities Co. is located in the building at the lower left. (Hiroyuki Yamamoto)

A former high-ranking transport ministry official resigned as vice president of a company to which he had close ties when he worked for the government after his bullying tactics to gain the position were exposed.

Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, 63, was named executive vice president of Tokyo-based Airport Facilities Co. in June 2021 after a directors meeting in which he suggested that the transport ministry had made clear it wanted him in the post. He also indicated that complying with the request would prove beneficial to the company.

Airport Facilities must gain approval from the transport ministry to carry out some of its business operations.

Company officials announced April 3 that Yamaguchi had handed in his resignation in the aftermath of media coverage on how he steamrolled himself into the job.

“I had no intention of using overbearing words and deeds, but I must apologize if people took it that way,” Yamaguchi said about an April 2 article in The Asahi Shimbun on comments he was reported to have made to company officials when he seemed to brook no opposition to being named to the post.

Documents obtained by The Asahi Shimbun, along with recollections of what was said at the May 31, 2021, meeting among some of those who were present, sealed his fate.

During the meeting to discuss personnel matters, Yamaguchi said he had all the credentials to be named executive vice president, warning those present to consider how the ministry would react if its wishes were not granted.

Some of the seven other directors at the gathering expressed concerns that the ministry was interfering in company personnel matters, to which Yamaguchi replied it was unavoidable.

He added that ministry officials would be assuaged once he was named executive vice president.

His name was submitted the next day to the company’s nominating committee, which makes decisions about top executive posts, and approved. A directors meeting then formally approved Yamaguchi as executive vice president, a position that allowed him to represent the company.

As such, it was a potentially very lucrative position that smacked of “amakudari,” a supposedly banned practice whereby senior Japanese government officials were able to land cushy post-retirement employment in the private sector.

It now turns out that Yamaguchi’s comments at the directors meeting were not presented to the nominating committee, which might not have looked kindly on the lobbying tactics used by him.

Yamaguchi’s name first came to media attention on March 30 after The Asahi Shimbun broke a story about Masaru Honda, a former top transport ministry bureaucrat, meeting with the chairman and president of Airport Facilities and asking that Yamaguchi be named president when that personnel decision is made in June.

(This article was written by Shuhei Shibata, Sotaro Hata, and Yoshitaka Ito, a senior staff writer.)

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