Ichizō Kobayashi
As a corporate executive, Kobayashi preferred to take on a wide-ranging role akin to a theater producer, rather than simply issuing orders. And he occasionally demonstrated the literary skills sharpened by fiction writing, as when he wrote, printed, and distributed 10,000 pamphlets to promote the Minō Arima Electric Railway at the moment its launch was running into trouble, dubbing it the “most promising of rail companies.” He was also known to write pamphlets to publicize the sale of land and new houses.