Teruo Yabe had spent 39 years at JR East, working in safety, operations and management. In 2005, at retirement age, he was sent to Tessei as a senior executive.
He did not start in an office. For his first month, he worked alongside the crews.
What he found surprised him. The workers, he later said, were working much harder than he had imagined. On the front line, the feeling about the people upstairs was blunt: "Headquarters doesn't know anything."
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Yabe decided Tessei was not a cleaning company. It was a service company. Its workers were skilled technicians who kept the bullet trains running.
"You can have second-class or third-class strategies," he told them, "but let's have first-class performance!"