Standalone Tokyo

Chapter 218 Big Companies’ Counterattack
Minako Nakazaki knew about the tomboy who was looking at her curiously, but she didn't care.

Since the opening of Red Heart J, too many powerful forces have sent people to check on the situation of this hotel. That tomboy is obviously one of them, so it's not worth making a fuss about.

For example, in this restaurant, besides Kotaro Taniguchi, the other three people are also spies. One is from the police station, another is a killer from a dark web group, and the last one is from an unknown force and looks a bit like a local gangster.

In short, as long as they don't do anything, you can take your time to look if you want. There are no secrets in the areas open to the public in the entire hotel.

There are not many things that worry Minako Nakazaki right now. For example, the hotel is still in the loss-making stage, but she doesn't care too much.

After dinner, Minako Nakazaki stood up and went back to her presidential suite on the top floor of the hotel to take a nap. Then she woke up at two o'clock in the afternoon and happily ran to the cafe to drink coffee.

"Bagaya road!!!"

As soon as she entered, Minako Nakazaki heard a man roaring loudly. His tone was rude and disrespectful, which made her frown and she looked in the direction where the voice came from.

In the coffee shop, two men were blocking two women. Minako Nakazaki could tell at a glance that the people being stopped were the tomboy and her companion who had lunch in the western restaurant at noon. Even though the former two were wearing suits and looked like decent people, they still couldn't hide their gangster temperament.

In Japan, there are a lot of such beasts in human clothing. They may have a high level of education and a good family background, but they may not necessarily have good manners and character.

Minako Nakazaki hates people like this because she encountered too many scumbags like this when she worked in a beauty salon before, so much so that she is a little allergic to them.

"Someone, give me this person..."

Just when Minako Nakazaki waved to the waitresses nearby to come over and asked them to throw out the two beasts in human clothing who were shouting in public, Jun Tsukino, the person involved, acted faster.

No one could see clearly what Tsukino Jun did, including the man in a suit who was yelling and cursing. He only saw him rushing towards him and then raising his hand to punch...

With a dull sound of flesh hitting flesh, his eyes went dark and his body fell backwards involuntarily.

what happened?
Minako Nakazaki, who was looking at this side out of the corner of her eye, was stunned. She turned her head in confusion and saw the second man in a suit being hugged by Jun Tsukino's arm, then turned around and thrown to the ground with his back thrown.

All of a sudden, the second gangster also fainted.

What beautiful and crisp movements!

Minako Nakazaki couldn't help but clapped her hands.

Amid the crisp applause, Jun'ya Tsukino turned his head to look at the entrance of the cafe, glanced at Minako Nakazaki, and after confirming that the latter was just an unrelated passerby, he turned back and spoke to the waitress who was walking over.

"This is a personal grudge between him and me. You can..."

"It's okay, miss. Such ruffians are not welcome at the J of Hearts Hotel."

Minako Nakazaki walked over and interrupted Jun Tsukino. She first looked down at the two men lying crookedly on the ground, and after confirming that they had just fainted and were not in danger of life, she looked at the latter with admiration.

Currently, Jun Tsukino is wearing a black men's suit school uniform and has a ponytail. There is nothing extra on her face and no makeup, revealing a clean and beautiful face without makeup.

In the morbid Japanese makeup culture, this tomboy's behavior of going out without makeup won Minako Nakazaki's favor, so she decided to help her.

Hearing what Minako Nakazaki said, Jun Tsukino was stunned for a moment. She first looked at the former for a while, then looked at the hotel security following behind her, and she knew her identity.

"thank you very much for your help."

"You're welcome." Minako Nakazaki smiled and waved her hand to let the security guard drag the two men away.

Men's friendship often starts with a small thing, while the interactions between women are a little more complicated. However, after this incident, Minako Nakazaki still doesn't mind sitting down with Jun Tsukino, drinking coffee and chatting together.

During the conversation, Jun Tsukino did not hide his identity and told Minako Nakazaki directly that he had received orders from his father to come to the Red Heart J Hotel to see what was going on there.

Minako Nakazaki didn't mind such things. Jun Tsukino just came to take a look and didn't do anything.

"Well, I remember this area is the territory of the Sumiyoshi-kai. Are you from the Sumiyoshi-kai?"

"Yes, Ms. Nakazaki, I am a member of the Tsukino Group, and my father, Tsukino Taro, is the group leader."

"Oh..." Minako Nakazaki expressed her feelings with her tone, but in fact, she felt calm inside.

As a poker cadre, she didn't care whose territory the hotel was located in. No matter it was the Sumiyoshi-kai or the Inagawa-kai, they didn't dare to come to collect protection fees from the Red J Hotel unless they wanted to die.

Poker cards have achieved their current status not by bragging, but by fighting with guns and blood. The strength is there, and Minako Nakazaki is not afraid of any underworld.

Junya Tsukino knew that the situation of this hotel was somewhat delicate and it was not something that an ordinary businessman could own. After chatting for a while, she had already decided that after returning, she would persuade her father to be cautious in his attitude towards the hotel.

Minako Nakazaki had a very happy chat with Jun Tsukino, from food to fashion. Although Jun Tsukino is a tomboy, likes men's clothing and does not like to wear makeup, she likes desserts very much and is also very knowledgeable about the matching of clothes.

As they chatted, it was already evening, and Minako Nakazaki generously invited Jun Tsukino and her girlfriend to have Chinese food.

Then in the following few days, Jun Tsukino went to the Red Heart J Hotel whenever he had time, and he did not bring his girlfriend with him. He just sat in the cafe and waited for Minako Nakazaki.

They chatted with each other for a few days, and Minako Nakazaki also conducted a background check on Jun Tsukino. After confirming that there were no problems, she finally gave the latter one of her business cards and a VIP card.

"You show this card to the front desk or security, and they will take you to the VIP floor of the hotel, where there are goodies."

When he got this card, Jun Tsukino couldn't help but smile sweetly.

"Thank you so much……"……

Fujiwara Masato was a little annoyed. In the past two days, he received news that someone wanted to take action against his generic drug business.

The news came from a government clerk who was bribed by Minako Nakazaki with money and her beauty. These clerks, who sit in front of computers and can only increase their salary by increasing their seniority and have no chance of being promoted from clerks to officials, cannot accomplish big things, but they can sometimes play a key role.

Just like now.

The French-based Seiyad Group is a well-known pharmaceutical group. In addition to prescription drugs and over-the-counter health care drugs, the group's business also involves deep processing of agricultural products, high-end cosmetics and other industries.

Masato Fujiwara only needed to take a look at the English official website of the Worldview Group and he knew that it was quite powerful.

Compared with Korean poker that is about to monopolize the generic drug market, Manila poker that is rampant in the Philippines, and New York poker that sells generic drugs at drug prices in the United States, Tokyo poker's sales of generic drugs are not large.

Fujiwara Masato originally thought that Manila Poker would be the first to encounter backlash, but he did not expect that Tokyo Poker, which had begun to keep a low profile, would encounter a counterattack from a multinational pharmaceutical group.

Perhaps Tokyo Poker has been too low-key in recent times, which led to this incident, which made Fujiwara Masato a little annoyed.

The Tokyo branch of the Seiyad Group is preparing to lobby Tokyo city councilors to introduce a policy at the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly to increase taxes on the products of all generic drug companies located in Tokyo, while also stepping up crackdowns on black market generic drug sales.

This policy really hits the weak spot of the poker card. Once it is implemented, both legal and illegal generic drugs on the market will be affected!

If the Tokyo branch of the Shiad Group is not happy with the Joker Pharmaceuticals in Poker, it can simply lower the price of genuine drugs, or contact the latter to discuss and come up with a countermeasure. These are all normal business practices.

However, it is despicable to directly lobby government departments to introduce such targeted policies.

The generic drugs that Fujiwara Masato can sell openly are all patented prescriptions of other pharmaceutical companies. The profit margins of the products are not high, barely enough to support the company. The profit on paper is not high, and he makes money entirely by selling illegal generic drugs in secret, using the open business to cover up and launder money.

As a result, even though it is such an open business, the Shiyad Group still wants to wipe out all the companies.

In fact, Fujiwara Masato does not think that the content of "increasing the crackdown on illegal generic drug sales" will have any impact on him. No matter how good a policy is, it will only be meaningful if people implement it.

Minako Nakazaki is very young, but the Peach Blossom Spring Nightclub and the newly opened Red Jack Club she runs are indeed very useful. They are very effective in corrupting low-level officials and law enforcers in Tokyo. With the cover and help of the Masuyama family, the illegal counterfeit playing card business is going smoothly.

The generic drug business has only been busted three times this year, and all three times were done to save face for the Tokyo police, who were deliberately caught to inflate their performance so that their superiors would know that they were not in cahoots with the generic drug dealers.

In fact, the higher-ups also know that there are some problems with the police officers below them, but as long as performance improves and they can explain it to the higher-ups, they will just turn a blind eye.

The salary is so low, there is no honor, and they have to kneel down to serve when on duty on the streets. Under such circumstances, if you don't let others earn some extra money, the grassroots police officers will really resign.

Therefore, Fujiwara Masato is not afraid of cracking down on illegal generic drugs. What he hates is raising taxes. If the taxes are raised, the proportion of money laundering by poker organizations using Joker Pharmaceuticals will decrease.

If the tax goes up by one percentage point, a large sum of money will be lost in the process of turning black money into white money. If we use the game mechanism to describe it, that is, this knife deducts blood according to a percentage. The thicker the blood bar, the more blood will be cut off.

When faced with such a situation, Fujiwara Masato's first reaction was to send a team to kill the president of the Tokyo branch of the World Academy Group and use physical means to deal with the person who raised the problem.

However, after briefly getting to know the French president of the Tokyo branch of the Sealand Group, Fujiwara Masato felt that this matter seemed a bit impractical.

This is not to say that Fujiwara Masato is a Western-worshiper and dares not take action against the French. The main reason is that it is useless to kill the French president, who is only the head of a branch. In addition, the Seiyad Group has a large pharmaceutical factory in the Tokyo industrial area with nearly 5,000 employees.

The French are not that great. It is the low-level employees, researchers, and clerks, a total of more than 5,000 employees, who are the source of Fujiwara Masato's concerns.

Among these 5,000 people, even the low-level workers on the pharmaceutical assembly line have wages higher than the average wage in Japan, which provides a huge amount of tax revenue for Tokyo. In addition, if these 5,000 people and their families are added together, the number of votes that the Seayard Group can influence will be nearly 20,000.

This is the main reason why, although financial oligarchs and Internet companies are interesting, industrialists are more powerful when it comes to influence.

Especially in Japan, which does not have complete sovereignty, the influence of industrialists is even greater. If Internet companies make trouble, the government will take action if it wants to. It can take down an Internet giant and vacate the market, and naturally there will be newcomers to take over seamlessly.

However, if a large physical company goes bankrupt and a large number of employees lose their jobs, it can kill local officials in an instant. The votes and economic tax revenue lost in the process can bankrupt a city.

Once such signs are discovered by local governments, local officials will not dare to close the business even if it means paying them to do so. Since it involves two official titles, no one dares to turn a blind eye.

Therefore, with the support of these 5,000 people, the Shiad Group's political and economic influence in Tokyo is enormous.

It is also because of these 5,000 employees and the votes behind them that the Shiad Group can be so confident in using legal weapons to suppress all generic drug sellers in Tokyo.

With these 5,000 Japanese employees, playing poker will not be of much use in killing the Tokyo president of the Seiyad Group. If they really take action, it will only cause the Tokyo Police Department to lose its tacit agreement and do its utmost to suppress and restrict the sales of generic drugs.

Fujiwara Masato was very upset. He thought about it over and over again, but couldn't come up with any good solution for the time being.

"Let's pass the matter along first and have someone investigate. At least let me know which members of parliament this French guy is lobbying..."

The task was assigned to Minako Nakazaki and Toratarou Taniguchi. The latter immediately used his business connections to investigate, but the former ran into trouble.

"How do I check this?" Minako Nakazaki was a little embarrassed. Her network of contacts was mainly concentrated on small people. Now she had to investigate which congressmen were lobbied by the Seyard Group, which was a bit difficult for her.

After thinking about it, Minako Nakazaki thought of a friend she had met recently.

"Perhaps the Yakuza groups in Tokyo are capable of knowing some information."

(End of this chapter)