Fifteen years ago, I became mesmerised by the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. That was partly because of architecture: its lobby, with lofty ceilings and magnificent pillars, is designed with the soaring ambition of an Egyptian pyramid or medieval cathedral.
But the main reason for my fascination was that I was writing a book (Saving the Sun) about the rise and fall of the postwar Japanese economy, using one of its premier banks — Long Term Credit Bank, or “Shinsei” as it was later renamed — for the narrative structure.
One intriguing chapter in this saga concerns the fact that during the 1980s LTCB lent vast sums to a shadowy Japanese company called EIE to build that Four Seasons Hotel on 57th Street. Those majestic pillars, in other words, were a potent and costly symbol of Japan’s bubble-era desire to make a statement on the global stage.