The life and times.... by Dean Ashley Owen
People will remember the Autumn of 1967 for different reasons.
On the 9th October, Guerrilla leader Che Guevara was executed in Bolivia.
On 18th October, Walt Disney released it full length animated masterpiece, The Jungle Book.
On 21st October, tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters march on Washington DC.
And on October 20th, while The Beatles were marching to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, in a small private room at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, a child was born that will, a whole forty years later, write a blog.
Born to a Jeweler turned Racing driver and a Japanese business woman, I was fortunate to have been born half British, half Japanese (although growing up Eurasian was tough, and I would only realize how fortunate I was years later).
Now I can't account for the validity of the story and can only convey what I had heard growing up, but it goes something like this....
My father was in hospital from a racing accident, my mother for a common cold. And that's how they met !!
Arthur Owen was no master businessman, just a man with simple ideas and gentle character that did well selling gems in Hatton Gardens.
Apart from annual record breaking attempts culminating in a few notable records, his crowning achievement came in 1962 when he won the British Hill Climb Championship in a Cooper-Climax T53.
My mother, so the story goes, left her mother and 5 sisters in Japan after an argument, and boarded a boat, a sweet little 18 year old, to England. Within a few years, from the depths of poverty, she had started Europe's first Japanese restaurant, Hiroko in a trendy London shopping district. Other restaurants were to soon follow, and Hiroko was quickly becoming the haunt of choice, not just for wealthy Japanese businessmen, but also British Rockstars and fashion icons. On any one night, there were atleast three Rolls Royces parked outside.
Now although it is hard to verify, from what I understand, my father married 7 times and my mother was number 5 in the limited edition series of Mrs Owen's. I had two true older brothers, Barclay and Spencer who I havn't seen or heard from for years and years, but we'll get to that later. My parents got divorced when I was supposedly at an age where it shouldn't really affect me (below 5yrs old). Well whoever assumes these notions is wrong. Granted it affected my older brothers much more. Granted I accepted my stepfather as my new dad much quicker. But still, not being with my true father did have a major impact on my life.
So there I was, born with a nouveau riche silver spoon in my mouth. My stepfather, who my mother initially introduced to me as "the chauffeur" for fear it would somehow send me into a spiral of despair, turned out to be quite a genius and major entrepreneur. Born in 1943 in Yokohama, Japan, Tadayoshi Tazaki, or "Taz" as friends would call him, went to public school in Bath where good results landed him with a place at Downing College, Cambridge. He graduated with a BA and an MA in Maths and Economics as the first Japanese undergraduate ever of Downing, and has since become a fellow of that college. He married my mother when I was seven, and in 1974 left his job at Sumitomo to set up business that catered to the expat community in London. His property agency helped ex-pats to find accommodation, Tazaki Foods supplied them with Japanese delicacies, and JAC Recruitment found Japanese-speaking employees for their businesses. This was the genesis of what was to become the Tazaki Group empire.
So this man was going to be my dad and a major influence on my development as an adult. He was nice enough!
So anyways, for reasons that I will never comprehend, my oldest brother Spencer went to live with our real dad, and Barclay and I stayed with mum and "Taz".
Although I embraced "Taz" right from the start, a real treat came every Saturday when our real dad would take us out for the day, either to the zoo, or to a movie, or to Madame Tussauds, or our absolute favourite, Hamleys toyshop. First, no questions asked, we would go for a proper English meal at some London hotel. Roast lamb with mint sauce was usually the meal of choice for young Dean. Then we'd go off on our outing, with Dad and grandma. (Mrs Cohen).
Now I don't know much about either of my grandmothers, but Mrs Cohen was a Polish Jew whose husband, apparently a Jazz Player, died just after the war. I'm not sure when or how, but the Cohen's ended up in England, and my father changed his surname from Cohen to Owen, more, I assume, to blend in. Grandma never remarried and passed away when I was around 15.
My dad seemed to change cars every year. And you could kind of tell how he was doing in life according to his cars. He loved big American open top cadillacs and taking a ride in one of those on a sunny day on the way to Chessington Zoo listening to a Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe showdown on the radio is just one of those blissful memories that stay with you.
One year you could tell times were tough and he wasn't doing too well, because he turned up in a Mini Metro. A man of many business, he never really managed to hit the jackpot. He had nice French restaurants in Chelsea, a Taco restaurant, "Viva Tacos" in Finchley, a Baskin and Robbins Icecream franchise in Windsor and numerous other ventures, but nothing seemed to last.
On the other hand, "Taz" was doing extremely well, having incorporated all my mother's restaurants into the business, and expanding JAC, Tazaki Foods and starting Barclay vouchers in Japan. We lived in a very nice Mews house just off Sloane Square in Chelsea. I remember seeing my stepfather so excited one day when he came to my brother and I and told us he had a surprise to show us. He led us outside, and down the road, and there in front of us was the most beautiful car I'd ever seen.
Yes, it seems times were good and I was lucky. I vaguely remember having a chauffeur take me to school in one of those huge Daimler State limousines with the glass partition. And by school I am talking around the block ! How completely embarassing and daft at the same time. Sometimes I'd come out of Sussex House, my "priviledged prep school" and see the car waiting there as if I was some sort of VIP. I'd often tell the driver "I think I'll walk back today" and then walk with my mates and be a real kid in a real world. To this day I resent being brought up spoilt. Yes, I had everything I could ever ask for. But I remember going on holidays to Cannes, Marbella or the Algarve and being stuck with the nanny the whole trip. We were a classic "dysfunctional family". When guests came to the house, we were told by our mother to hide. We were not allowed to call her mum, or mummy. Nope, it was Akiko-san !
I appreciate having good food to eat, and having nice clothes and frequent vacations, but it never really felt like a true family.
When I was at boarding school in Surrey, during half-term or the weekends we were allowed to go back home, I'd very often choose to stay at school very simply because I didn't like being at home. And besides, with the school empty aside from some Hong Kong students who couldn't go home, and no lessons, we could enjoy using all the sports facilties freely.
So anyway tension built up to a point that one day following an arguement with my mother about wanting to see my real dad, I said I'd had enough and was leaving. I remember mother saying "if you miss him that much why don't you go and live with him?" So I did. I turned up at his doorstep in Little Venice and asked politely if I could come and live with him, his "latest" wife, and new baby boy, Sinclair. That lasted about two years after which it became unbearable for me to live with my new step mother, the batty beautiful Irish/Swedish blond bombshell that my father just doted over. On hindsight, I think with Eileen, dad finally found his soulmate. They remained totally in love with each other for many many years until he finally passed away in Portugal where he chose to retire. And she still loves him and visits his grave to put fresh flowers down every week.
And so I was back living with Akiko-san and Taz during my acne riddled teen years.
Boarding school was fun, so much so that I barely made it through with decent enough grades, thus ensuring me, by the thinnest margin, a place at my compromise choice, Kingston University. A good result in my economics A-level made up for my poor showing in English. I blame my English result on a British author, D.H. Lawrence who I am only now beginning to appreciate. Back then, his books just bored me to tears and I had difficulty getting past the first chapter. Had they given me James B Stewart's "Den of Thieves", or Bryan Burrough's "Barbarians at the Gate" as part of the syllabus, I would have indeed gotten an A. But no, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Chaucer and the dreaded D.H. Lawrence were the order of the day.
And it was during my second year at Kingston when I got struck down by lightning, and her name was Roxane. I was beginning to think I was gay, but then it dawned on me that, nope, I was just unfortunate to have been living my teen years in England where beautiful girls are certainly a rare and endangered species. (Although beautiful women in England are rare, the beautiful ones are truely stunning (like Jenny Agutter)). And then I come across this exotic Half Russian/Italian wisper of a girl Roxane, and BOOM ! ... nothing else mattered.
So anyway I met Roxane through my Egyptian friend at University. She was perfect in everyway .... spoilt, rich, sophisticated, stunning, well mannered, and high maintenance. I've not met a girl since that could match her on any level. And to this day, I can't quite see what she saw in me. I'd got my own little (and I mean little) pad in South Kensington. I was driving what I thought was the coolest car on the block, a run down BMW 318 courtesy of stepdad, and I'd pick her up and we go off on a date to my favourite restaurants at the time (Le Souquet or Cafe Pelecan or Joseph). I'd been working in the local supermarket and doing odd jobs distributing leaflets, or working in Tapas bars just so that I could afford to take her out and once in a while lavish her with her favourite jewelry (from Butler & Wilson). At the time, Miami Vice was chic, and I'd turn up in my bright coloured and slightly shoulder padded blazer, whilst she'd be a picture of perfection in YSL.
One night, after spending pretty much the whole night with her cuddled up in front of my fireplace with Champagne and strawberries (her favourite Cuvée Perrier-Jouët Belle Epoque) it was getting late and we decided it best to get her home before her parents called. We were, to say the least, rather splendidly drunk and somehow she pursuaded me that she would drive. It was only a short drive from South Kensington to Holland Park where she lived with her parents so we were quite surprised to see the esteemed London Metropolitan Police car flashing us to stop through the side mirrors. Not surprisingly she ended up in a cell for a couple of lonely hours when finally her parents came and bailed her out. They never blamed me. They said they understood that little Roxane could be truely pursuasive.
We'll I like to think it lasted a full Nine and a Half Weeks. We had decided to go to my favourite Island in Greece together (Hydra) for the summer. I'd bought tickets and all. Then one day, at a Tapas bar in South Ken, she told me she'd decided to go to the South of France with her girlfriend instead. I've no idea why, but I just stood up, called her something harsh, and walked away. And that was it.
Out of pure heartbreak and despair I guess I latched onto a fellow student at Uni, a true English Rose by the name of Jessica. We actually got engaged, ring and all ! Her father, a retired Brigadier of the British Army and a collossus of a man, despised me. I remember dropping Jessica off one night very late and he was there, standing outside the gate, waiting. I stopped about 10m from the house and let her out, then quickly drove away. Well I guess he decided to pursue and within seconds was pounding the roof of my poor little brandnew Renault 5 Rio with his fist. Ahh memories.
It was around this time that my brother Barclay was going a bit loopy. He was for so long my hero. Good looking, successful and stylish. Over the previous years he had been showing signs of wierdness, sometimes talking to himself or to the lamposts. Well I'm not quite sure of the incident or incidents that led up to Barclay becoming suicidal but I do remember the incident that was to change the direction of my life.
On a number of occasions Barclay had been in some nasty accidents, once totalling a car rental in Portugal. The police wanted to arrest him and throw him in jail for driving without a license, but my stepfather stepped in and paid the whole cost of the car plus a little extra to the rental company and they let him go. Barclay also had a knack for falling off buildings. It was one such occasion, when Barclay came to live with me, that I'd left him alone in my pad. I went to Greece for a couple of weeks with Samantha, my gorgeous neighbor who lived upstairs. When I got back, I'd found Barclay had once again "carelessly" fallen off a building. He was in bad shape and hopitalised with numerous broken bones, but was ultimately lucky to have survived. It was then that both the doctor and my mother said I should build a distance between my brother and I. He was diagnosed with a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disorder called schizophrenia. I was told that if I let him be too dependant on me, he would tie me down and I would not be able to live the life I wanted. So my mother suggested I go to Japan to study for a while. Reluctantly I agreed although at the time I had no interest or felt no natural affinity to Japan.
And so it was I found myself on a plane to Japan with my Walkman and picture of Roxane in my bag. Although I was engaged to Jessica, I was still very much in love with Roxane, and Jessica knew it. Back then I thought that there was only one person in the whole world that was the perfect match for anyone. I had already met and lost her, so I figured it doesn't really matter who I married now, as long as she loved me. And Jessica loved me very much.
Jessica would wait for me in England while I studied. She came to visit me over Christmas, but I had already discovered a whole new world. A world that was delicate and polite, simple and pure, innocent and enticing. Her name was Kaori.
And so was to begin a new part of my life. A life in Asia.
It was not long before I mastered the native language. It seems that although I could not speak a word when I left England, I guess listening to my mother speak to some friends over the year was, in effect, a kind of subliminal learning process.
Jessica and I grew apart quite natural. We officially like to blame the "long distance" thing, but in actuality, I was, as have many foreigners before me, "discovering" Japan. I will not go into detail, but what followed were a string of wonderful memories (Kaori, Yuko, Sachiko, Yuko, Ai, Koko, Keiko, Yuko .... yes, three Yuko's I recall). University life in Japan is not what you would imagine. Rather, I think the system is that students work so hard trying to get in University, that once they are in they just party the whole time. They know that once they graduate, they may well be stuck in a life-long employment blue collar job for the rest of their lives, and so they really make the most of the Uni years.
And as with many others, I had originally planned to stay in Japan a short while, but ended up staying a very very long time. Jobs were plentiful for bilingual foreigners, and I landed my first job, courtesy of the classified section in the Japan Times, at a money broker called Hatori-Marshall's. To be honest I knew absolutely nothing about the job I was about to do. At the interview, Clive Turpin walked me around each section explaining briefly what they did. There was the Spot desks, the forwards desk, the Third World Currencies desk and the currency options desk. Then Clive asked me which desk I would like to work on. I chose currency options for no other reason than that was the only desk where each staff had a computer! So there I was, in the spring of 1990, a currency options broker, starting salary JPY 300,000.
I did enjoy my time at Marshall's and it paid well enough to pay for a bowl of ramen and the odd holiday to Fiji, but after four years broking options, the market kind of decided there wasn't room for so many brokers and so consolidation was the order of the day. I left before it got nasty, getting offered the opportunity of joining Credit Lyonnais Rouse, a Futures Broking operation on the sole merit that my employer saw that I had actually gone to the same school in England as him, St. John's Leatherhead.
It was around this time when Barclay's symptoms were really starting to show through. He would call me up asking for money so that he could buy the equipment to make a specially designed helmet to wear in order to block out white noise signals that he was receiving from Morgan Grenfell. You see he claimed that Morgan Grenfell had implanted a chip in his brain to control his actions. He said that crashing the car, or jumping off a building were actions beyond his control. It was the chip in his brain. Barclay actually drew me a complex diagram of the helmet he proposed to build, very detailed.
I am not clear on the details, but I think this all started when the Serious Fraud Squad were looking to talk to my brother in relation to his potential involvement in the Hamanaka copper scandal where a rogue trader at Sumitomo Corporation was trading unauthorized large positions in Copper that resulted in losses totalling $2.6 billion.
Barclay had worked for a short time at Rudolf Wolff & Co in Tokyo where my stepfather, Tadayoshi Tazaki, was Managing Director. In 2000, "Taz" was branded "not fit and proper to be registered in any capacity" and banned by the Securities and Futures Authority for seven years.
"Mr Tazaki had worked as the head of the Japanese subsidiary of Rudolf Wolff and Co, a London copper trader that was reprimanded, fined £375,000 and ordered to pay £125,000 costs for failing to put in place sufficient safeguards to prevent its Japanese subsidiary from providing Sumitomo with a large number of false documents." (Source: "The Times, 17th August, 2004")
I suspect it was the stress of all this that might have "triggered" Barclay's first-rank symptoms of Schizophrenia although as far as I know he had nothing to do with any part of the Hamanaka scandal.
Since leaving England I have only seen Barclay a couple of times. We have completely lost touch. My mother, who sends a small amount of money everyweek to his bank account, will not tell me where he is. The last time I saw him was when I went to England on a stopover to Portugal with my first wife over 14 years ago. He had just come out of a half-way house and was dating a very nice girl also diagnosed with Schizophrenia. And then two years ago, out of the blue I got an e-mail from him. All it said was,
" Hi Dean, how are you? I heard father died. Did he leave anything for us? Barclay"
I was actually overjoyed to hear from him so I sent back a long e-mail telling him what I was up to, and that yes, dad had died and I went to Portugal for the funeral, and I hadn't even asked if we were in the inheritance. I asked for his number and contact details and was looking forward to catching up. He never replied back. Apparently he hadn't even sent the e-mail on his own address, but had used a friends computer. And that was the last I heard from him.
Actually the death of your father is one of the handful of key events in your life. Although growing up I only spent a little amount of time with him and sometimes went years without seeing or even talking with him. As a son, you always manage to forgive your father for whatever you hold against him. And it was only during the few years before he died that I began to get close to him.
I had visited my father, Eileen and Sinclair in the Algarve with my first wife Yasuko.
They had opened a continental restaurant called "The Snooty Fox" in the trendy marina Vilamoura. Then in 2001 I went with my then girlfriend and soon to be second wife Mariko. We enjoyed so much the time we spent hanging by the pool in my father's villa and going to clubs with my little half brother Sinclair. A dad looked happy and at peace. He was clearly still very much in love with Eileen and a proud father of Sinclair. And my father really thought Mariko was a wonderful girl for me. And so we planned to return soon to the Algarve, and I wanted so much for Mariko and I to get married in Tokyo, and then in the Algarve so that my father could be there for our special day.
And then I got a call one day in Tokyo from my brother Sinclair...
My father had died.
I hated myself for not having the chance to say goodbye.
We were devastated, Sinclair even more so as father had actually fallen down and died in my brother's arms.
And we were planning to get married there that summer. I had so wanted to have dad see how happy I was getting married to Mariko, a girl he really liked.
Mariko and I hopped on a plane and headed down to Portugal, not to get married, but for a funeral.
I didn't even stay for the reading of the will. I didn't care. If there was any money left over I wanted Eileen and Sinclair to have it. He was their rock, their castle, their life. And now he was gone.
My mother meanwhile was going through tough times of her own. I was surprised to hear one day that she was getting a "friendly divorce" with my stepfather. To be honest I had not seen this coming. I thought they would be with each other for ever. She was the driving force behind his success. They had been married more than 25 years. I had no clue why, but was later to find out that he was having an affair with one of his employees.
I think the divorce settlement was far from fair with my mother getting a couple of properties and a restaurant, and the Tazaki empire still intact with my stepfather.
I remember during my childhood we used to do an annual trip with many of their staff during New Year to the Algarve. It was during one of these trips that my stepfather took me aside and said, "Everything I've built and everything I have will one day be yours".
At one stage during the early years he had wanted to fully adopt Barclay and I, but our real father said no.
Taz only once had a child of his own, with my mother. They had a baby girl together when I was around fifteen.
Natasha Momoko Tazaki my sister.
I will never forget when I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of loud voices saying "she has turned blue". I heard the sound of ambulance sirens and screaming, but was almost to afraid to go outside. And then quiet...
My baby sister had been taken to the nearest hospital where she later died a cot death (Sudden infant death syndrome). She was five months young. My stepfather later told me that that day he cried for the first time in 40 years.
He never had another child.
My sister would be 25 years old had she been alive today.
My first daughter Jenny Azusa Owen was born on the same birthday as Natasha.
Japan
The bubble was on the verge of bursting, and Japan was about to enter a prolonged period of instability, and a rapid succession of Prime Ministers that left no lasting impression. My old boss called it "The Gucci Recession". Young women, earning a decent salary and staying with their parents, still had money to spend on all things trendy. And so I found myself in a society of well dressed and ever so polite young ladies whose primary goal in life seemed to be catching a stable guy. I think doctors topped the list of favoured professions.
As one does during your early years in Japan, I found myself subsidizing my romantic exploits with a little English teaching. It was also a good way to meet members of the opposite sex.
Once, I was hired by a neighbor to teach her son English. After a couple of lessons, there developed a fondness between the mother of the child, about 15 years my senior, and myself. The result was a pleasant night at a well known Akasaka hotel.
A couple of weeks later, I got a call from the mother saying that her best friend and tennis partner had seen her walking out of the lobby of said hotel with a gaijin. Her best friend had actually taken to blackmailing the mother, asking for JPY 2 million to maintain her silence. The mother, who had not once been disloyal to her husband until this time, paid up. A month later, and another blackmail threat, again for JPY 2 million. The mother was calling me to ask if I could help her pay!
My advice was that she record the telephone conversation with her blackmailer next time she called, and then threaten to take her to the police.
I never heard from the mother again.
A year and a half of learning, teaching, and in general having a blast of a time as an International Student of Keio University, and it was time to pull my socks up and enter the real world.
I joined a currency options broking desk at Hatori-Marshalls where I was quickly assigned two small clients. As a broking desk we sat in a square formation facing each other, and we each had microphones where we could shout prices to our clients. This was the interbank market, and my two clients were a British Bank that no longer exists, and a Swiss Bank that still exists today, but has fallen victim to massive writedowns following the sub-prime meltdown. During the trading hours, a client might shout down the box to the desk that he need a price in a 3month 30 delta strangle in 50 a leg. Frantically we'd relay the request down our boxes and hopefully, our clients would volunteer a price.
We'd collate the best buy price, (bid) and the best sell price, (offer) and show the client that asked. Hopefully the client would then either shout "Mine!" or "Yours" meaning that he would either sell at the bid price, or lift the offer.
Sounds pretty brainless, but there are certain skills involved in being a broker. Not only was it a relationship game (the clients could basically choose which broker they used), but you needed to be sharp, on the ball, and very personable. You needed to be able to utilise your voice to your advantage. And most of all, you needed to have a good grasp of where prices should be. Very often, if you were at one of the lower ranking brokers, a client might call for a price on a certain option, and after a few minutes of the whole desk asking around begging for a quote you might not have a price. But rather than tell the client you couldn't get him a quote (for fear he'd never ask you again), you'd "float" a firm quote based on where you think the market price should be for that option. Now hopefully you floated an accurate quote, but once in a while, the client would "hit" your price, at which point you'd click out of the microphone a shout to your colleagues that you were a seller at said price, and you were "stuffed" if you could not get it done. If you failed to find a buyer at that price within a minute or so (depending on how much you could delay the client), you'd indeed be stuffed, meaning that you'd probably have to find the next best buy price, and cash adjust the client to the level he hit your "firm" bid.
I did that for four years and then consilidation hit the industry and I bailed, landing myself at Carr Futures on yet another broking desk, this time broking listed products (ie products listed on an Exchange). Our main products at the time were 3 month Euroyen Interest Rate Futures, and Japanese Government Bond Futures (JGB's).
