“We are not motivated by profit or ego. There are far better investment opportunities than universities.”
His formal involvement with Bond University was short-lived, co-founder Alan Bond got the naming rights, and the bell-maker misspelled his name. But the legacy of Harunori Takahashi will echo forever through the history of the university he helped establish.
An entrepreneur and rampant dealmaker whose investments spanned from Sanctuary Cove to Tahiti, New York to Sydney, Mr Takahashi amassed a real estate empire valued at 1 trillion yen at its peak. His extravagance was legendary. He would host 10 to 20 guests nightly at his favourite Tokyo restaurant at a cost of $340 a head. When his accountant said Mr Takahashi was spending so much money at the establishment he might as well buy it, he did. The New York Times headlined a story about him ‘A Japanese symbol of excess’.
Yet when he spoke about his investment in Bond University, he sounded purely altruistic. Later when the university battled for survival, he would back his words with deeds.
Mr Takahashi came from a family which could trace its roots back to the Samurai. His affinity for Bond can perhaps be found in his alma mater, the prestigious Keio University, Japan’s first private institution of higher learning.
He worked for Japan Airlines for a time before taking over EIE International from his father and a friend in 1983. EIE stood for Electronic and Industrial Enterprises and was a small company specialising in importing computer and electronic components.
Mr Takahashi had bigger plans, taking EIE public just as Japan entered its ‘bubble economy’, marked by easy credit and an unbridled real estate market. Fuelled on cheap money, he went on an asset spending spree with a particular interest in the land Down Under.
By the late 1980s he would be the biggest foreign investor in Australia and was doing deals with another free-wheeling businessman, Alan Bond.
“Alan is a superb businessman with an ability to smell a good deal from a bad deal that is rare even among successful international businessmen. We have a lot of respect for that," Mr Takahashi told the Australian Financial Review in 1987.
When the pair crossed paths in Tokyo, Mr Bond had a proposition him. He was thinking about building Australia’s first private university. Mr Bond already had the land; EIE just needed to chip in the capital in a joint venture deal. Mr Takahashi was already on the board of several private institutions in Japan and was keen to bring the concept to Australia.
There was a trademark indulgence — the Arch. Mr Takahashi had insisted his countryman Arata Isozaki, one of the world’s greatest architects, design a statement building.
When the bells rang out to proclaim the beginning of a new era of education in Australia, no one had the heart to tell him that the Netherlands foundry that cast them spelled his name wrongly. The inscription reads: “These bells first chimed to call students to Bond University as built by the founders Alan Bond and Harunori Takahaski in 1989,” replacing the Japanese ‘shi’ with a ‘ski’.
By 1991 Mr Takahashi had been described as the most highly leveraged man in the world and — like Mr Bond — a changing financial climate and the law would catch up with him. In 1990 Bond Corporation went into receivership with losses of $2.2 billion, at that time biggest in Australian corporate history.
EIE International assumed control of the University, with Mr Takahashi continuing to finance day to day operations to the tune of up to $500,000 per week. The largesse could not go on forever. Banks withdrew their support for EIE and in August 1993 receivers were appointed to the University, marking some of its darkest days.
Mr Takahashi was arrested in 1995 and found guilty of breach of trust in an illegal money-lending business. He was in the midst of appealing his conviction when he passed away at the age of 59 due to a brain haemorrhage.
Bond University maintains a strong connection with Japan through the BBT Global Leadership MBA which specialises in the interaction between Asian economies, specifically Japan, and the rest of the world.
In 2016 the University honoured Mr Takahashi and Mr Bond by unveiling statues of the pair in Founders Corner — two flawed, brilliant men who left an indelible mark on the world and higher education in Australia.
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