Coming from elsewhere, Carlos Ghosn shook the Japanese business world to become an undisputed popular star in Japan, a manga character, but his sudden fall under the hoots rings for many as the rejection of an outsider.

Charged with financial malpractice, the 64-year-old CEO of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Motors alliance, which he made the world's number one car, is about to be ousted from the position of chairman of the board of directors. two Japanese groups he came out of the doldrums.

But above all, overnight, everything that made him adulate, treat as a kind of management genius, seems thrown to the winds.

"A dynamic leader, a sudden fall", "the shock of betrayal", "a strong leadership, supernatural powers darkened," headlined Tuesday the Japanese press.

Mr. Ghosn pointed to the consensual practices of most Japanese bosses. "What he did is unprecedented in Japanese business history," commented Kosuke Sato, an economist at the Japan Research Institute.

"When we have Ghosn's profile and we did what he did, we have by definition many more enemies," notes Robert Dujarric, director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo.

From one-man-show to detention

In the 1990s, one of the jewels of the Japanese car industry, Nissan, is at its worst. In 1999, a French Polytechnic born in Brazil and of Lebanese origin, arrived in Tokyo to revive society.

The foreigner, become CEO two years later, abrupt habits, shocks by massively firing, pulls the purchasing policy from the rut of unwavering loyalty to the same suppliers and introduces more marketing.

In the early 2000s, the results reached record highs. Ghosn is in all newspapers and on all television channels, its launches of new models are real one-man-show orchestrated in huge amphitheatres, piles of books on his person line the aisles of major bookstores.

Nearly twenty years later, on a rainy November evening, picked up on arrival of his private jet in Tokyo, he is behind bars for concealing a large part of his income.

Meanwhile, he chose last year as successor to the position of Nissan Executive Chairman, Hiroto Saikawa, after a very brief reminder of what he has achieved, pronounces in front of a crowded room of journalists words very hard, exposing hours during his "dark side", a power too concentrated according to him for years in his hands.

Flamboyance against discretion

Moreover Mr. Saikawa refuses to yield to the tradition of the deep bend of contrition vis-à-vis customers, shareholders, the public, by which he would have shared some responsibility for the stigma thrown on Nissan. He announced that the builder plans to propose to remove Mr. Ghosn from his position as Chairman of the Board. A few hours later, Mitsubishi Motors followed suit with his compatriot.

"The Japanese business world is used to scandals in recent years (...) but I have never seen a fall so dizzy," commented on his Twitter account David Fickling, columnist at Bloomberg.

Some liken Ghosn's case to that of flaw concealment scandals that led to deaths like Takata's air bag manufacturers whose bosses did not end up in jail. Or that of a senior British official who, just hired at Olympus had evaded cases of fraud and was then quickly fired while executives involved were escaping prison.

The case of Carlos Ghosn differs in that it concerns accusations of personal enrichment.

Already, he "was much better paid than any Japanese CEO," notes Mr. Dujarric, for whom he made "envy". "At Ghosn there was a lifestyle of CEO, the big Japanese bosses are quite discreet".