The man who went head-on against the West in 1997 - and won

EISUKE Sakakibara became widely known as "Mr Yen" during the late 1990s because of Japan's frequent currency market interventions while he was the country's vice-finance minister for international affairs. Yet, the term (coined by The New York Times) did less than justice to his contributions to Asian economic independence.

He was the man who battled almost single-handedly to "save" Asia from the heavy-handed ministrations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the time of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, and whose often-unrecognised legacy is an Asian Monetary Fund or AMF (in all but name).

It was he who in 1997, at the height of the crisis and during the IMF and World Bank annual meeting in Hong Kong, proposed the revolutionary idea of an AMF as a counter to t…