11/28/2000

The last Kuosunakai of the year was held this evening. It had a strong north wind and was the coldest in this autumn. In spite of bad weather, ten classmates got together, namely Messrs. Kambe, Kitagawa, Iino, Uwano, Sassa, Matsuoka, Asakawa, Tsuchida and Kawahara. Messrs. Yamada, Uematsu and Muraki, who were in good heath through last year, are now under medical treatment. Mr. Yamaguchi was absent due to sickness of his wife. Mr. Ushida, who left hospital recently, was absent because of cold weather and also inconvenience of transportation, I presume.

I met Mr. Tsuchida for the first time since our trip to Nepal. Together with Mr. Matsuoka, we talked about Nepal and Nepalese. We agreed that Nepal has some mysterious attractiveness. We will go there at any time when we have chance to go. Mr. Tsuchida volunteered for fifteen years to help various development plans in Nepal including education at a university. Not to bring up them indulgently is very important, he emphasized.

When a Kruosunakai golf match was held a few days ago, most of us canceled the play because of bad weather. But Messrs Kitagawa, Iino and Inoue played golf under stormy weather. They reported this evening that they got comparatively good results of fifty one to fifty three strokes.

The day before yesterday, I reported on this diary about Mr. Jurgen Schrempp, chairman of DaimlerChrysler, that he took over Chrysler by cloaking it as a merger of equals. Mr. Kirk Kerkorian, third largest shareholder of DaimlerChrysler sued the company and its top officials yesterday and filed in U.S. District Court in Delaware to ask the court to order Daimler to pay him eight billion dollars in damages and possibly to dissolve the merger. Big newspapers, such as Wall Streets Journal, Financial Times or New York Times reported in chorus.

It seems to be difficult for plaintiff to win but it would be a most probable solutions to cut off ties with Chrysler and make it an independent company. Although it might be good for Benz to eliminate the origin of deficit, the renovation of Chrysler would be quite a hard work for them.

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