Father-daughter succession fight evokes looming crisis in Japan

Tokyo

IN a country where family conflict is usually kept under wraps, the boardroom fight at Otsuka Kagu was as titillating as reality TV.

The company's 71-year-old founder tried to fire his daughter five years after naming her president of the high-end furniture retailer, which is a household name in Japan. It was dramatic, garish, and ugly - and it got everyone's attention the moment Katsuhisa Otsuka used a February news conference to call his daughter Kumiko, one of Japan's few female business leaders, a "bad child".