As most of you will have probably seen in the business pages, the papers are rubbing their hands in glee at the upcoming trial for stock manipulation of shamed Japanese entrepreneur Horie Takafumi. Mainly because we all love fall-from-grace stories almost as much as rags-to-riches ones, and to be reminded that humans are at heart irrational, greedy creatures. But above all else we like to see those at the top of the tree taken down a few branches.

For those not in the know, Horie, nicknamed Horiemon after famous cartoon character Doraemon, was the erstwhile chief of Livedoor, one of Japan’s premier internet companies – an ISP, portal and more besides – originally started by Horie in '95 as a web consultancy called, wait for it, Livin’ On The Edge. Presumably Horie took those words as his personal mantra, as the company regularly courted controversy in one of the most conservative markets in the world for its frequent acquisitions and stock swap mergers.

Now, there are always portrayed to be two trains of thought when it comes to the 'is-he-or isn’t-he guilty' question. In the yes camp is the establishment, which sees him as an arrogant, media-obsessed young upstart with no respect for the rules, who has the audacity to turn up to business meetings wearing a t-shirt and jeans and, horror of all horrors in the land of the rising sun, no shame. And on the other side is the nation’s youth, who view him as the embodiment of a free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit which has so long been missing from Japanese society; a spiky-haired rebel livin’ on the edge and not afraid to tell the grey-suited hordes where to stick their traditional business values. But in reality I know plenty of Japanese ‘youngsters’ and a fair proportion of them think he is a bit of a tool actually, or at best have no opinion either way.

But the media continues its obsession with this internet entrepreneur, tracking and analysing his every move. The Japanese public, we read, are also “obsessed” with the trial, although getting the Japanese public to obsess over something (cherry blossom, imperial heirs, internet suicide pacts, schoolgirls’ panties, the list goes on) is about as difficult as getting Gordon Ramsay to say f*** on TV. That said though, Livedoor was a big deal in its day, a dot com survivor that added search, gaming and e-marketing strings to its bow – imagine the CEO of Yahoo getting done for insider trading, for example. I’m sure we’ll all watch with interest to see if Horiemon can get out of this one. Or maybe not.