On a clear day the view to Mount Fuji was breathtaking but it had been a long time since anything had lifted his jaded mood. He had thrown up many such great blocks by the power of his will. He built what he liked because no one dared stop him. He built with the huge debt he was allowed. He owed his banks so much money that only by constructing newer buildings, bigger and higher, could he justify his empire having the assets necessary to cover its giant liabilities. Like a staggering man about to fall, he had to run headlong to stay upright. Without forward momentum he would come crashing to the ground. Money was a fiction, an illusion built on confidence. They saw his towers and could not value them, so everyone was happy when he told them he was easily able to continue to pay what was due. Yet they all knew that it was only the negligible interest rates in Japan that let the fiction roll on. If they had to be sold, Kim’s assets could not cover his mountains of debt. His ten billion dollars of loans were secured by no more than five billion dollars of property, if he was forced to sell them in the depressed market that had dragged on in Japan for more than two decades.
