For a number of years, Masato Kanda hardly slept.
“Three hours an evening is an exaggeration,” he laughs as he speaks to the BBC from Tokyo.
“I slept for 3 hours consecutively earlier than being woken up however I then went again to mattress, so for those who add them up, I acquired a bit extra.”
So why was this 59 year-old bureaucrat’s schedule so punishing?
Till the tip of July, he was Japan’s vice finance minister for worldwide affairs, the nation’s prime foreign money diplomat, or yen czar.
Key to the position was heading off foreign money market speculators that might set off turmoil in one of many world’s largest economies.
Traditionally, authorities intervened to weaken the worth of the Japanese foreign money. A weak yen is nice for exporters like Toyota and Sony because it makes items cheaper for abroad consumers.
However when the yen plummeted throughout Mr Kanda’s time in workplace it elevated the price of importing important gadgets like meals and gas, inflicting a value of residing disaster in a rustic extra used to seeing costs fall somewhat than rise.
In his three years within the position, the worth of the yen in opposition to the US greenback weakened by greater than 45%.
To manage the yen’s slide, Mr Kanda unleashed an estimated 25 trillion yen ($173bn) to help the foreign money, marking Japan’s first such intervention in virtually 1 / 4 of a century.
“The Financial institution of Japan and the Ministry of Finance are very clear. They intervene not at a specific degree of the foreign money, however they intervene when market volatility is an excessive amount of,” says economist Jesper Koll.
Japan now finds itself on the US Treasury’s watchlist of potential foreign money manipulators.
However Mr Kanda argues that what he did was not market manipulation.
“Markets ought to transfer based mostly on fundamentals however sometimes they fluctuate excessively due to hypothesis, and so they do not mirror fundamentals which do not change in a single day,” he says.
“When it impacts atypical customers who’ve to purchase meals or gas, that’s after we intervened.”
Whereas nations just like the US and UK can increase rates of interest to spice up the worth of their currencies, Japan had for years been unable to place up the price of borrowing as a result of weak point of its financial system.
Professor Seijiro Takeshita of the College of Shizuoka says Japan had no different choice aside from to intervene within the foreign money markets.
“It’s not the best factor to do, however in my view it’s the solely factor they will do.”
The irony is that the yen’s worth jumped in current months with out Mr Kanda or his successor lifting a finger after the Bank of Japan surprised the markets with a rate hike, and the country got a new prime minister.
So was the $170bn bid to prop up the yen a waste of cash?
No, says Mr Kanda and factors out that his interventions truly made a revenue though he emphasises that it was by no means a purpose.
On whether or not or not his actions had been finally profitable he says: “It’s not as much as me to guage, however many say our change administration stopped the extreme degree of hypothesis.”
Markets or historians ought to be the ultimate judges, he provides.
After a long time of financial stagnation, Mr Kanda additionally sounds an optimistic notice about Japan’s prospects.
“We’re lastly seeing investments and wages rising, and we’ve got an opportunity to return to a standard market financial system,” he says.
A extra stunning legacy for this “humble public servant” is him turning into a star on the web after Japanese social media customers celebrated his potential to shock monetary markets with a sequence of AI generated dancing movies.
