TOKYO — The motorcade taking Takafumi Horie across Tokyo's elevated expressways was broadcast live to a bewitched nation Monday night, its aerial shots and excited commentary just the sort of media circus the 33-year-old Internet mogul always coveted, even cultivated.
This journey, however, was taking him from cocksure celebrity to accused stock cheat.
The founder and chief executive of online portal Livedoor Co. was arrested Monday night, along with three key partners, on allegations that they spread phony financial information to pump up the company's stock price ahead of a takeover. Prosecutors are also investigating whether Livedoor padded its books to show a more profitable bottom line.
The televised trip to a detention center was the culmination of a weeklong drama that began with raids on Livedoor's offices in Tokyo's swank Roppongi Hills complex, the headquarters and after-hours playground for Japan's flashy, young infotech crowd.
It ended with the company that has been the symbol of Japan's emerging entrepreneurial wave in near ruins, its market value in free fall from $6.3 billion to just over $2 billion.
Horie has not been charged with a crime. But the swiftness of his fall from grace is remarkable for more than just its whiff of hubris. The humbling of Horie shows there still are teeth in "old Japan" -- the conservative establishment that has ruled business, politics and media from the backrooms for more than half a century.
The "Livedoor shock," as the affair has been dubbed, has been a head-on collision between the ostensibly civil and gray business class and a bold and impatient avant-garde, symbolized by Horie's spiked hair and signature T-shirts.
Horie was the personality and voice of that new generation, the unofficial chief of the "Hills Tribe," as the Roppongi crowd is known. He was the geek-turned-rock star businessman, one part Bill Gates and one part Bono, without either man's charitable impulses.
"He offered me and other young people a new value and opened a new path," said Akihito Hotehama, 21, a Tokyo University student and former Livedoor intern who said Horie inspired him to start up a small educational materials business.
"Before he appeared, there wasn't this boom in starting up new businesses," Hotehama said. "He gave us a dream."
