In regards to bringing syndication loans to Japan:
The first was Citibank, absolutely. But Citibank could never be considered as the pioneering deal of syndication because they didn’t explain it in that way; they didn’t call it that. What I did was main stream. Sometimes, doing the deal is not important; the record that you did a deal each year is not important. How that deal affected the entire market, how that deal gave imagination to the people, that is more important, that’s the key. They might insist: “We did the first syndicated finance”. So what? Whatever they did, it did not have a significant impact on society. And it’s the impact on society that counts.
-Shusaku Minoda, from “The Paradox of Foreignness” by Jesper Edman