Takumi Shibata's speed in snapping up Lehman Brothers assets has created the world's biggest independent investment bank Last Wednesday, slumped around a pain-soaked shot bar in central Tokyo, the sharpest suits were contemplating a world gone terribly wrong. The swagger had left the Merrill Lynchians, the men of Lehman Brothers were fulminating against Dick Fuld, the glint was gone from even Goldman Sachs. Only the Nomura boys were partying, boisterously raising glasses to an unsettling new industrial scene in which their stuffy, conservative Japanese brokerage suddenly had become the Toyota of global investment banking.

“It's good to know they were having fun,” Takumi Shibata, the Nomura dealmaker largely responsible for the abrupt transformation and lightning takeover negotiations with Lehman Brothers, said. “This is not an easy market for enjoyment.”

Ebullient, but more restrained than his derivatives traders in the Roppongi district, Mr Shibata deliberately avoided the sort triumphalism that you could forgive in somebody who had just assembled the world's biggest independent investment bank. His breeziness only lightly concealed a sense that signing for the lion's share of Lehman's operations may soon prove to be the easiest part of the deal. If Nomura does integrate its new toy quickly and smoothly, it will be the first Japanese financial house to pull off the feat.

Any temptation to crow is also tempered by a firm grasp on reality. Nomura was not the only Japanese institution to swoop on battered Wall Street assets last week. The Japanese ability to go bargain-hunting on Wall Street arises from the relative lack of exposure among Japanese financial institutions to sub-prime mortgages and the various illiquid assets spewed out by the credit crunch. Some claim that it was planned; analysts tend to believe that it was a rare jackpot for craven conservatism.

“People working in [Japanese] institutions, including ourselves, would say that it was judgment, but the fact of the matter is that we've been a bit fortunate - more so than Europeans and Americans,” Mr Shibata said. “It's a reflection of the fact that the regulatory arbitrage game was not popular on this island. It's the way it is and I suppose that means [the Lehman Brothers deal] was a combination of luck and judgment.” Few, though, can feel quite so satisfied as the opera-loving Anglophile Mr Shibata with the plot twists that the Wall Street meltdown has thrown out over the past fortnight.

“You can't expect to have a plan when responding to opportunities like this,” he said. “but we had been looking at the situation in investment banking ever since problems started erupting in August last year. When people started worrying about the risks to reputable banks, back-of-an-envelope plans had already begun.

We didn't react to last weekend's opportunity like a person without a brain.”

By snapping up the key Asian, Middle East and European operations of Lehman Brothers at horribly distressed prices, a house that only recently started talking seriously about global expansion sealed a deal that could, potentially, trigger a dramatic extension of its reach, expertise and sophistication.

However, Mr Shibata said, if the Wall Street meltdown had taken place six months ago, Nomura probably would not have been ready to take the plunge. The desire and the psychology needed to transform Nomura do pre-date the recent turmoil, but not by much.

The deal has to be understood in the context of recent changes at Nomura that “put two very different individuals in charge of running the show” - specifically Mr Shibata's appointment in April as chief operating officer and Kenichi Watanabe's promotion to president and chief executive in the same month.

Before ceding control to them, Nobuyuki Koga, Mr Watanabe's predecessor, emphasised that Nomura's future lay in emulating the approach of Wall Street and the City to client service and that Nomura would have to adopt a new management ethos to achieve that.

With unusual candour, Mr Koga spoke of the need to tap the energy of younger employees and the growing redundancy of his own conservative ways. Nomura knew that it had to grow internationally and Mr Koga knew that he was not the man to do it, Mr Shibata said. “That was the reason he chose two naughty boys as his successors.”

The nuts and bolts of making the Lehman Brothers acquisition succeed will fall chiefly to Mr Shibata. And running counter to the traditional view of Japanese companies and their job-for-life cultures, he may be ruthless. “Everyone has a right to be anxious,” he said darkly.

Mr Shibata is, after all, among the most kokusaiteki - internationalist - of Nomura managers, making his name internally as a bold expander of the company. He has spent significant time in Hong Kong and a dozen years in London. It was he who brought Nomura into the “G7” forum of big investment banks negotiating ways to improve the European fixed-income market. He also “had the joy of finding and recruiting Guy Hands” - the legendary investor who gave Nomura an “undreamt of” portfolio of 8,000 British pubs.

“If you dread a challenge like integration, you wouldn't do the deal, and if we were really dreading the challenge, Lehman's leadership in Europe and Asia would have sensed it during the negotiations,” he said, adding that outsiders may have underestimated the Japanese firm's ability to assimilate acquisitions, “I've been there. I know what it's like. I've gone through many years of managing people and being managed myself, so I'm reasonably relaxed. There's lots of work to do, but I'm very excited.”

Mr Shibata said that Lehman's international spread of businesses would complement Nomura's dominance in domestic retail brokerage and he noted that Lehman's collegiate ethos would mesh well with Nomura's emphasis on teamwork. He played down the obvious overlap of Nomura's domestic operations and Lehman's substantial Japanese equities business, which formed the core of the American company's franchise in Asia.

Lehman's high-velocity trading tools for use by hedge funds and other institutions, Mr Shibata said, were “exactly the sweet spot” the company had wanted to acquire in its effort to attain world-class investment banking status. He is confident that Lehman's Japanese dealing floors, where desks were emptied a week ago and traders have been twiddling their thumbs without the right to trade, can be plugged back in with relative ease.

Looming over all of this is the question of risk management and how far, internationally, the Nomura and Lehman attitudes to risk can be conflated. For many Japanese, Lehman's approach to risk was

suspect long before its bankruptcy - this year it was Lehman that fell victim to a multimillion-dollar confidence trick involving forged contracts and bridge loans after the fraudsters had unsuccessfully peddled the same deal to other houses.

Despite the seemingly momentous upheaval of the past few weeks, Mr Shibata emphasised that the world had not changed. The style of risk management will change and it will probably be the legacy parts of Lehman that will undergo the most marked alterations. However, he said, nobody in investment banking is immune to criticism these days.

“What is likely to happen, especially in our shop, is the emergence of a culture where top management deals with major risk issues directly,” he said. “That was the kind of culture that made Goldman Sachs successful in getting through this sort of turbulence.

“What killed Lehman was the big mortgage-backed securities positions, the big property positions and the exposure to sub-prime. It wasn't the client-facing business areas that were at fault. The demise did not originate in Europe or Asia. We will impose careful risk management, but it's not a 180-degree turn from what Lehman has been doing, anyway.”

There is some scepticism, however, both outside and within Nomura. One insider suggested the analogy of Microsoft and Apple. Beyond the question of whether “cultural affinity” between corporations is much more than a convenient management myth, there is plenty to suggest that Japanese

and American views on capitalism differ too widely to be compatible. Japan, after all, is a jurisdiction where the M&A market has been stymied by hundreds of nervously installed poison-pill defence strategies and where it is not always clear that shareholders are foremost in corporate minds.

“I worked in London and I worked in Tokyo and I've dealt with US investment banks in both places, but capitalism is capitalism,” Mr Shibata said. “It does appear as if the Japanese place slightly more weight on the interests of stakeholders other than shareholders,” he says, “but in both the US and Japan shareholders truly get the biggest weight. We may be closer, psychologically, to attitudes in continental Europe, but that doesn't take away our right to be called a capitalist country.”

Mr Shibata described, at some length, happy times in London, but he bemoaned the price of Royal Opera House tickets. He reserved a special mention for Thierry Porte, a close friend from Harvard Business School and the chief executive of Shinsei Bank. Before it was reinvented as Shinsei by Wall Street private equity, Mr Porte's company was the Long-Term Credit Bank - one of Japan's more spectacular banking implosions of a decade ago. Is it odd that Japan should now be rescuing Wall Street?

“Japan is back,” Mr Shibata said. “The Lehman spirit will continue, but the Nomura spirit will be even stronger.”

CV

Born: January 8, 1953, in Yokohama

Education: BA in Economics, Keio University; MBA, Harvard Business School

Career: 1976: Joined Nomura SecuritiesTokyo;1988: Seconded to Nomura International, London, head of debt and equity syndicate; 1995: Seconded to Nomura Project Finance International, Hong Kong; 1997: President, Nomura International, London; 2008 deputy president and chief operating officer, Nomura Holdings

Q&A

If you could change one thing in the financial and commercial environment, what would it be?

There is a lot of change going on everywhere already, not just in the financial and capital markets. Powerbrokers and country leaders are changing - we're at a turning point

Who, or what, is your mentor?

London was a very, very good teacher

Does money motivate you?

No, challenges excite me. I like to question the status quo - I don't believe in doing things just because that's the way they have always been done. From start to finish the two Lehman acquisitions took five days. I flew the globe with just two shirts. It was non-stop and extremely demanding, but I was motivated to move quickly as it was in everyone's best interests

What gadget must you have?

Whatever my daughter is using - I like to keep up with the younger generation's latest gadgets

What does leadership mean to you?

I strongly believe in creating partnerships and engendering trust and loyalty. This is what I told Lehman employees in Asia and Europe - I said we will treat them as partners and ask that they treat us as partners, too.

Ability to demonstrate agile, dynamic decision-making is something that I value in a leader, so I try to mirror this in my own work style

How do you relax?

I am a big classical music fan - Mrs Shibata and I frequent the opera and I have been known to carry a tune or two at Nomura Christmas parties. I also enjoy my family