The number of corporate bankruptcies due to succession difficulties reached a record high of 456 in 2023, and is even on pace to exceed 2023 in the first half of this year. There has also been an increase in the number of specialist firms and financial institutions promoting intermediary matching in order to somehow avoid the worst and leave their imprint through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Companies that are struggling to find successors often regret that their strengths (know-how), which they have finally arrived at through a long process of trial and error and which are difficult for competitors to imitate, will be lost or passed on to someone else unintentionally.
 
Some takeovers are said to be fraudulent. A news programme showed that this is an outrageous method of quickly extracting the remaining assets and leaving the debts untouched. Similar stories are sometimes heard of people who avoid taking care of their elderly, disabled parents as much as possible, but then brazenly demand a division of their inheritance after they pass away. They are like claimants who loudly assert their rights without fulfilling their obligations.
 
The following is my own experience of the title ‘ succession’. When someone leaves a company, someone has to take over the tasks that the employee was responsible for. But no one is willing to do that. Everyone runs away with strange momentum. If they take over, they lose. There is an overwhelming lack of information and a manual response is required. Therefore, the disadvantages of taking over are extremely greater than the advantages, and trouble is inevitable. In such a situation, it is always the obedient, non-complaining people who suffer. It is a great pity that while such slow and good-natured people are forced to struggle with troubles, those who are dexterously running away from them are criticising them like critics. There are times when you have to assert and reject firmly. Otherwise, it's worse.
 
Those who do not struggle will laugh at your songs of struggle.
Miyuki Nakajima
 
The next section describes a book I have been reading recently. In Haruki Murakami's novel ‘The City and Its Uncertain Walls’, the protagonist makes it his profession to decipher old dreams. Reading the scenes of his work, I realised that many people die without telling anyone about the dreams they secretly hold on to, and with that, the dreams naturally disappear without anyone noticing. If such dreams had been passed on to someone else, even if only a little, how many of those who had gone away would have been saved? I couldn't help thinking.
 
My father died suddenly due to illness. It was two months after he was hospitalised for something that was a bit wrong. It's been four years now, but what did he want to leave me? I still think about it from time to time. But what did my dead father really want to tell me? It is difficult to know exactly. Even so, I often wonder what my father would have thought when it came time to make a decision. I am often conscious of this. Such things may be a small way of making a memorial service.
 
After my father's death, I often think that I am no longer young and that I don't know when I will die either. So I want to take care of passing on my thoughts and feelings to my sons. Furthermore, I want to dive into things that I feel I want to do, even if they may seem uncool to others. By showing them this, I hope that I can pass on my thoughts and feelings to them as correctly as possible.