Equity finance banker: 'Don't underestimate the Japanese banks' | Joris Luyendijk

Joris Luyendijk travels to Tokyo and talks to a director of equity finance in a major western bank- This monologue is part of a series in which people across the financial sector speak about their working livesWe're meeting in a restaurant in Tokyo one freezing Saturday in January. He is a Japanese man with friendly yet alert eyes, in his late 30s with excellent English. He speaks softly and laughs easily. For lunch he orders a curry with a coffee."There is no real anger at bankers in Japan these days. I don't hide from people that I work in a bank. The gaps in income here are not as big as in the west, and when they are, they are not as widely known. Typical bankers in Japanese banks make slightly more compared with other sectors in Japan. In the middle of the last decade things in Japan got a little bit crazy, as in the west. Now it's normal again."I sometimes feel that some of the criticism of the financial sector is misguided. The sub-prime-related instruments that caused the crisi