Greengrocer on the Peak who shed his skin
Only one residence would do when Yaohan International chairman Kazuo Wada, now 68, moved his family and company to Hong Kong.
It was the legendary Skyhigh, a 20,000-square-foot latter-day palace on Pollock's Path at the highest point of Victoria Peak.
In 1991, Mr Wada bought the house from Hongkong Bank for $85 million. When Yaohan hit financial trouble in October last year he sold it for $375 million.
The Japanese businessman, born at the hot-springs resort of Atami near Tokyo, arrived in Hong Kong with a splash. His decision to move Yaohan's headquarters here from Japan just three months after the Tiananmen Square massacre raised eyebrows.
Mr Wada snapped up a Hong Kong Golf Club membership - reputedly for a bargain $3.8 million rather than the usual $4.5 million - and embarked on a Macau shopping centre development with Stanley Ho Hung-sun's Shun Tak group.
The Wada family gave millions to charities ranging from mainland flood relief to the Hong Kong Language Campaign, and made every effort to fit into their new home. When Mr Wada and his wife, Kimiko, hosted 1,200 guests at a wedding party for their second daughter, Hiroko, in the Regent Hotel ballroom in 1990, the couple wore kimonos but changed into Chinese wedding costumes.
The chain grew from a single greengrocer's. Mr Wada's parents, Ryohei and Katsu Wada, opened their first yaohan (green shop) business in Atami in 1930.
'I was born in the Year of the Snake,' Mr Wada said in 1989 - the pivotal year in which he turned 60 and moved to Hong Kong.
'A snake has to shed its skin in order to grow.' 'My plan was to secretly save money to give my children an education,' Mrs Wada said. 'I wanted them . . . to have nice clean office jobs, not work with dirty vegetables like we had to.'
