On stage, the spotlights illuminating him with an unearthly glow, Ma-sayoshi Son turns to the crowd. "Embrace your dreams," cries the president of Softbank. For thousands of young, high-tech entrepreneurs in Japan, hearing the boss of the biggest Japanese Internet company speak is a near-religious experience. It is not just that the Internet has made "Son-san" fabulously wealthy. His more ennobling project is to change his country. Mr Son, say his followers, will uproot Japan's corrupt business establishment and plant in its place the seeds of a bright, high-tech future. Now that a consortium led by Softbank has won the right to buy Nippon Credit Bank (ncb), a big, old-fashioned lender, the faithful are poised to follow Japan's Internet messiah into the old, industrial economy.
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