Japan toys with shareholder capitalism just as the West balks

AYA MURAKAMI hardly looks like a corporate raider. Dressed in black, the slight 31-year-old is, if anything, more like a kunoichi, or female ninja. In her office above a 7-Eleven store in Tokyo, she is disarmingly frank. She tells how, as a youngster, her father Yoshiaki Murakami, a well-known bureaucrat turned activist investor, taught her the value of money by making her bet on the cost of dinner. As a teenager, she once caught a glimpse of him on television on a flight home from boarding school in Switzerland. Shortly afterwards, in 2007, he was convicted of insider trading. At university in Japan, her fellow students pointed fingers at her.