Biography | 稲盛和夫 Kazuo Inamori — The Tennoz Tower He Entered to Rebuild Japan Airlines

People talk about the JAL rescue as a parable about willpower. It was also a government appointment into a specific office tower. On 19 January 2010, Japan Airlines and two group companies filed for corporate reorganization at the Tokyo District Court. In February 2010 Inamori, then seventy-seven and long retired from daily management at Kyocera, accepted the chairmanship at the carrier's head office in the building now called Nomura Real Estate Tennoz Building, 2-4-11 Higashi-Shinagawa. The post was unpaid. He had never run an airline. The Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corporation of Japan stood behind the filing. The work that followed included route cuts and a large reduction in the payroll, later reported at about a third of the group workforce. The company posted a profit the next year and relisted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2012. Inamori moved from representative director and chairman to chairman emeritus in February 2012, then honorary adviser in April 2015. This pin is the public headquarters, not a home. The tower still houses the airline's registered office. A visitor at Tennoz Isle is standing outside the building he walked into after the court filing, not at a grave. Photo: later portrait of Inamori, Naotake Murayama, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The photograph is from Palo Alto, not from this tower.