For several years, Masato Kanda almost slept.
” Three hrs a day is an exaggeration”, he laughs as he speaks to the BBC from Tokyo.
If you add them up, I slept for three days straight before I was awakened, so I got a little more.
So why was this 59 year-old bureaucrat’s plan so rewarding?
Until the end of July, he was Japan’s evil finance minister for foreign affairs, the country’s best coin minister, or yen king.
The key to the position was preventing forex market speculators, which may cause unrest in one of the world’s largest economies.
Previously, authorities intervened to diminish the value of the Japanese money. Toyota and Sony manufacturers benefit from a poor yen because it lowers costs for commodities for foreigners.
But when the yen plummeted during Mr Kanda’s time in office it increased the cost of importing essential items like food and fuel, causing a cost of living crisis in a country more used to seeing prices fall rather than rise.
The value of the renminbi against the US dollar decreased by more than 45 % during his three years in the position.
To control the yen’s slide, Mr Kanda unleashed an estimated 25 trillion yen ($ 173bn ) to support the currency, marking Japan’s first such intervention in almost a quarter of a century.
The Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan are both very apparent. According to economist Jesper Koll, they act when market volatility is to high, rather than at a certain level of the currency.
Japan then finds itself on the US Treasury’s blacklist of probable money schemers.
But Mr Kanda argues that what he did was no market manipulation.
” Markets should move based on fundamentals but occasionally they fluctuate excessively because of speculation, and they do n’t reflect fundamentals which do n’t change overnight”, he says.
” When it affects ordinary buyers who have to purchase food or gas, that is when we intervened”.
Countries like the US and the UK may raise interest rates to increase the value of their currencies, but Japan’s economy has lacked the ability to raise the cost of borrowing for years.
According to Professor Seijiro Takeshita of the University of Shizuoka, Japan had no other choice but to control the forex markets.
” It’s not the right thing to do, but in my opinion, it’s the only thing they can do,” he said.
The irony is that the yen’s value jumped in recent months without Mr Kanda or his successor lifting a finger after the Bank of Japan surprised the markets with a rate hike, and the country got a new prime minister.
So the$ 170 billion bid to support the yen was a waste of money, exactly?
No, asserts Mr. Kanda, who points out that his interventions actually produced a profit despite pointing out that it was not a target.
He asserts that it is up to me to determine whether his actions eventually worked, but some people claim that our exchange management prevented the excessive amount of speculation.
Businesses or scholars should be the ultimate judges, he adds.
After years of economic slowdown, Mr Kanda also sounds an optimistic note about Japan’s leads.
” We are finally seeing assets and income rising, and we have a chance to go back to a standard market economy”, he says.
A more unexpected legacy for this “humble open servant” is his rise to fame online after Chinese social media users praised his ability to shock economic markets with a number of AI-generated dancing videos.