It was perhaps the biggest financial story of postwar Japan — or it should have been.Yamaichi Securities, one of the nation's four top brokerages, which was among the world's six largest in the 1980s, had in 1992 started to illegally bury millions of dollars in red ink off the books, setting up dummy foreign companies to absorb the losses. For good measure, its bosses were paying off sōkaiya (corporate extortionists) to stop them blowing the whistle on this practice.

In 1994, though, after weeks of old-fashioned digging and trawling through financial statements, journalist Shigeo Abe had the scoop of a lifetime — he and a team of reporters uncovered the entire mess.

But instead of running the story with banner headlines, Abe says his bosses at the Nikkei newspaper spiked it, sent him out of the country and allowed Yamaichi to stagger on for another three years.