Biography|Hiroya Masuda — He Took Japan Post Here After the Insurance Collapse

On 6 January 2020 Hiroya Masuda became president and representative executive officer of Japan Post Holdings.

The appointment was dated the day after Masatsugu Nagato, Kunio Yokoyama and Mitsuhiko Uehira resigned over improper sales of Japan Post Insurance products.

That morning he spoke to about two hundred group officers at the holding company's head office in Otemachi Place, 2-3-1 Otemachi.

He told them the scandal was the gravest crisis the postal group had faced since it was formed, and that the first job was to finish the investigation and put customers back in the position they should have been in.

Those remarks were reported the same day by Nikkei, Asahi and Jiji. The wording here is a paraphrase of that coverage, not a transcript.

Otemachi Place opened in August 2018 on the old sites of the Teishin Building, the Tokyo postal-administration hall and the Tokyo International Post Office.

The West Tower, where the group keeps its headquarters, is the 35-storey block at the same address.

Masuda had already touched this file as interior minister in 2007-08 and as chair of the government's postal privatization committee from 2013 to 2016.

He had turned the job down in 2019, then accepted after the Financial Services Agency and the Ministry of Internal Affairs ordered a three-month freeze on new insurance sales on 27 December 2019.

He stayed until 25 June 2025.

The tower is a working office, not a museum.

A visitor can stand on the plaza and see the building that houses the holding company, the bank and the insurer.

The moment that belongs to this pin is the morning a former governor and minister walked in to run a group that had just lost its top three presidents in a single weekend.

Photo: Cabinet Public Relations Office portrait of Masuda, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Tower: Otemachi Place West Tower, Beryllium Transistor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.