Mr. Ghosn, the ousted Nissan executive, wasn’t supposed to succeed in Japan, but he never expected to fail like this. He faces charges of financial wrongdoing at the company he helped save.
Carlos Ghosn was tired. At 64 years old, the chairman of an auto empire that spanned several continents and included Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi wasn’t bouncing back from jet lag the way he used to. Melatonin wasn’t working anymore, and he had bouts of insomnia, phoning his children in the middle of the night or going on long walks around his Tokyo or Paris neighborhood. He planned to retire soon, stepping back from spending his life on an airplane, albeit a luxurious one paid for by Nissan.
Last month, just before Thanksgiving weekend, Mr. Ghosn headed to Tokyo to meet his youngest daughter and her boyfriend and attend a board meeting. He was scheduled to land at Haneda Airport at 4 p.m.
The daughter, Maya Ghosn, 26, had spent most of her childhood in Japan and wanted to introduce her boyfriend, Patrick, to her favorite places. Bringing a boyfriend home is a common rite of passage, but a particularly intimidating prospect when growing up Ghosn — a child of one of the most romanticized and ruthless chief executives the global business community has ever seen.
Ms. Ghosn had made a 7:30 dinner reservation at Jiro, the Michelin-starred sushi counter hidden in a basement in the city’s Ginza district.
On the tarmac in Beirut, Lebanon, Mr. Ghosn opened WhatsApp and texted his four children on a group chain labeled “Game of Ghosns,” for his favorite TV show, “Game of Thrones,” the bloody HBO drama about dynasties under siege. “On my way to Tokyo! Love you guys!” Mr. Ghosn texted as his jet lifted off.
He never made it to dinner.
On Nov. 19, Japanese prosecutors surrounded Mr. Ghosn’s Gulfstream after its arrival and arrested him on allegations that for years he had withheld millions of dollars in income from Nissan’s financial filings.
Ms. Ghosn was staying at her father’s corporate apartment, and when he didn’t show up she checked with his longtime driver at Nissan, who assured her his flight had probably been delayed. She texted: “Hey, just heard your flight got delayed. Please let me know when you land, worried about you.”
[Breaking a silence, Mr. Ghosn’s daughters said they suspected that the charges against him were part of a revolt within Nissan.]
Exhausted from jet lag, she took a nap. Patrick woke her when he saw a tweet about Mr. Ghosn’s arrest. “I was in shock,” she said in an interview.
Minutes later, the doorbell rang. Two Japanese men in black suits slipped off their shoes to enter the two-bedroom apartment and showed Ms. Ghosn a brief note in English.
“There is a case against your father,” it read, according to Ms. Ghosn’s account. “The Tokyo judge has warranted us access to search the house. We need a witness. Thank you for cooperating.”
Fifteen men, also in suits, followed. They locked the front door, told Ms. Ghosn that they were prosecutors, warned the couple not to use their phones and suggested that they might tap the apartment. They rummaged through Mr. Ghosn’s drawers, studying family photos, Maya’s 10th-grade report card, personal letters, her parents’ divorce papers.
“I wanted my dad to know that in this situation I was polite and handled it maturely, and I didn’t want to give them any reason to feel satisfied by an ounce of despair in my eyes,” Ms. Ghosn said. “But inside, I was shaking. I couldn’t stand up. I had to hold the wall.”
Six and a half hours later, at 11:30 p.m., the men left.
Worried that anything they said was being recorded, Ms. Ghosn and her boyfriend went into the bathroom, climbed into the shower fully clothed, turned on the water and whispered about what to do next. She called her siblings to figure out how to tackle Japan’s labyrinthine legal system.
Told by the authorities that she was forbidden to contact her father, Ms. Ghosn waited at the apartment for nearly two days until an American lawyer working for her family called.
“We got very clear instructions to leave as soon as possible for fear of being detained or interrogated to extort my dad,” she said. “So we got on the first flight out.”
Carlos Ghosn wasn’t supposed to succeed in Japan, but he wasn’t supposed to fail like this. He first made headlines in 1999 when, in a nation known for its distrust of outsiders, Mr. Ghosn, a brash Brazilian-born and Lebanese- and French-educated engineer, showed up in sunglasses and a pinstripe suit with plans to carry out an American-style restructuring of a failing Nissan. The Japanese carmaker had $35 billion in debt, provided lifetime employment to a bloated work force and produced a fleet of the kind of cars you’d dread getting at the rental counter.
Mr. Ghosn, then 45 and a vice president at Renault, had helped oversee a turnaround at the middling French automaker, which had agreed to spend $5.4 billion to buy a 36.8 percent stake in Nissan Motors.
John Casesa, then a top auto analyst at Merrill Lynch, advised Mr. Ghosn to rent a house in Tokyo rather than buy one.
“The widely held consensus was that he would fail, that Nissan wasn’t worth saving and it couldn’t be done,” Mr. Casesa said.
At the time, Bob Lutz, the loquacious vice chairman of General Motors, assessed the deal this way: Renault would be better off “taking $5 billion, putting it on a barge and sinking it in the middle of the ocean.”
But Mr. Ghosn, with his severe black eyebrows and puffed chest, was undeterred. He closed factories, slashed suppliers, laid off 14 percent of the work force and invested in design. Six years later, Nissan had surpassed Honda to become Japan’s No. 2 automaker, its market capitalization had quintupled and its operating margin had risen tenfold. Altima sedans, Titan pickup trucks and Murano S. U. V.s made Nissan a major player in the United States market — an achievement that Wall Street once deemed impossible.
By the early 2000s, Mr. Ghosn was head of the Renault-Nissan alliance and the first person to simultaneously serve as chief executive of two Fortune Global 500 companies, the type of chief executive who even if you didn’t know how to pronounce his name (rhymes with phone), you’d know his products.
The enigmatic “gaijin” (as foreigners are called in Japan) had achieved a status bestowed on only a handful of chief executives, akin, at least in Japan, to Steve Jobs, Warren E. Buffett or Elon Musk. Paparazzi swarmed. Fans asked for autographs. Japanese businessmen, eager to emulate the Nissan chief, inquired where Mr. Ghosn had bought his rectangular sunglasses and custom suits.
In 2004, Emperor Akihito awarded Mr. Ghosn a Blue Ribbon Medal for his extraordinary contributions, making him the first foreign business leader to receive the honor. A manga comic book, “ The True Story of Carlos Ghosn,” heralded a shadowy hero from a faraway land. Lebanon put Mr. Ghosn’s face on a postage stamp.
But even as many in Nissan celebrated the comeback, others scoffed at Mr. Ghosn’s celebrity.
From the start, he faced distrust from the Japanese policymaking and business establishment. The very idea of an outsider’s bringing free-market capitalism to Japan’s quasi-socialist corporate culture jabbed at historical wounds.
“When MacArthur came after World War II, the Japanese just surrendered to his leadership,” a retired Nissan executive told Newsweek .
Mr. Ghosn pulled on a white jumpsuit to tour factory floors, but beyond the photo ops, there were signs that his splashy — some would say autocratic — presence was out of sync with modest Japanese culture. In 2004, Mr. Ghosn grazed a motorbike while driving a Porsche in the Roppongi area of Tokyo, a haven for moneyed foreigners. (The couple on the bike had minor injuries.) The Japanese media groused that Mr. Ghosn wasn’t driving a Nissan.
Then the man whose militant approach to cutting jobs (21,000, if you’re counting) earned him the nickname “Le Cost Killer” spent more than $200 million for Nissan to be a sponsor of the Rio Olympics in 2016, casting himself in the Olympic torch relay. He hopped between homes paid for by Nissan. In 2017, he paid a Lebanese artist and friend $888,000 to create a statue, “ Wheels of Innovation,” for the entrance of Nissan’s Yokohama headquarters. (Having a lavish second wedding reception in Versailles the same year, with Marie Antoinette-themed costumes and, yes, lots of cake, did not help.)
“He was a person who was above the clouds,” said Yuichi Ishino, who worked in Nissan’s finance department from 2002 to 2005.
