Ibuka Masaru
Ibuka Masaru (born 11th April 1908) is the CEO of Fujitsu, and a potential leader of the State of Guangdong.
In-Game Description (1960s)
Few can compare with Ibuka Masaru's talent and relentless drive for excellence; even fewer can compare to his boundless ambition and political and business acumen. A relentless advance up the corporate ladder, endless lobbying, politicking, and economic maneuvering has made Ibuka few friends and many enemies.
From ostracizing Tokyo Telecoms co-founder and his one-time friend Morita Akio to merging with and consolidating his control over what is today known as Fujitsu Limited, Ibuka's relentless ambition would see Fujitsu expand its operations to the Pearl River. An expansion that would see Ibuka clash with Morita's Sony in a legendary legal battle over control of Guangdong's radio market.
Those days, however, are in the past. Following the collapse of Suzuki's government in the Yasuda crash, Ibuka once more maneuvered Fujitsu into a position of dominance. Now, as Guangdong's undisputed master, Ibuka Masaru finally has the freedom necessary to finally bring about his vision for a new, transistorized, digitized world.
No longer restrained by the whims of his fellow executives or beholden to shareholders in Tokyo, Ibuka alone can see the future, and Ibuka alone can bring about the new tomorrow. With Guangdong as his canvas, his only limit is ambition, and Ibuka has no intention of coming up short.
In-Game Description (1970s Persistence)
Deep down, Ibuka never quite left being a child. All those years that certain tinge of naïveté had coated his spectacles, through which alone he was able to see, and then make sense of, himself and the world around him. Only a child refuses to believe in lost causes. Only a child refuses to apply "normal physical and mental faculty" and "imbecility" to the same individual. Only a child gives his unconditional love to all those people, and want anything more than putting each and every one of them six feet under.
Sure, he might've had his precious vision torn apart by the Riots and then reality shoved in his face - a reality infested with ingrates, dimwits, and asinine geopolitical tussles. He might've had the chance to mature and move on. The epiphany that eventually came to him, however, is of another kind entirely: if all this travesty, all this... depravity, is what it takes for someone to grow up, then he would rather not. He would rather be the child that always looks ahead. Japan, China, they're all free to drown in their own excrement. It's not his problem.
In a better time he would've been world-renowned as the brightest innovator of them all, showering in the spotlight and the wholehearted, unalloyed adoration of the planet; in another life, perhaps, Akio would've shared the glory by his side. The three-year-old child, however, paints over it all with abandon and a million drops of blood and tears - and upon the pure, pristine, reborn annals of Guangdong, blow by blow, joyously carves out the word that Ibuka Masaru shall be remembered by for the rest of his life:
SINNER!
In-Game Description (1970s Reconcilation)
What, then, has Chief Executive Ibuka Masaru's vision of Guangdong amounted to in the end?
What was this last decade but a quixotic crusade to prove himself infallible? To promulgate — with the same ruthlessness as the Inquisition and the Imperial cult — a dogma that everyone was 'supposed' to fight tooth and nail for excellence, forgetting bonds of blood and friendship, all in accordance with the diktats charted out in the top floor of Fujitsu?
Ibuka knows now - always has known, in fact - that what he proposed was no truth at all. There exists no such thing as 'objective' truth when it comes to personal relationships, let alone nation-building. The only reason Ibuka decided that he had to pull such a truth out of his ear then force it down everyone else's throats was so that he, with all his groundless, senseless self-assurance, could make it true.
So that he could lie to his conscience and feel better about it.
It was all thanks to the Providential way in which the Oil Crisis and Riots played out that Ibuka Masaru has snapped out of this decades-long trance. The scales are stricken perforce from his eyes, and Ibuka now knows for certain that there are more ways than his own to success, let alone to perfection. And when, as Heaven has predestined, China returns for its stolen Pearls, those days will also bring the final judgment for Ibuka Masaru — whether he deserves to carry on, or be stopped forever in his tracks.
And the Chief Executive, weary and contrite, would take all that he could get.