Somehow, the Roppongi Lamborghini dealership says we’re close. In a minute we’re swallowed into a basement garage to begin the Japanese parking ritual where the driver goes back and forth till his head is ready to fall off from constant swiveling—and the car achieves the precise attitude for arcing back into the smallest space ever allotted Parking Man.

But the result is something—neat, razor-straight ranks of gleaming cars marshaled like Grenadiers—almost the exact opposite to the shambles prosecutors reportedly found upstairs when they raided the 37th floor of the Mori tower of Roppongi Hills, Tokyo’s tallest and sexiest office and residential complex.

The 37th floor is the home of livedoor, Japan’s famously de-listed web portal that shredded its market cap so fast it shut down the Tokyo Stock Exchange trading system—and saw CEO Takafumi Horie charged with securities fraud and carted off to jail. Hours before investigators struck on January 16, livedoor was trading at ¥696 ($6.24); by D-Day on April 13, when it was de-listed, the stock had sunk to ¥99 ($0.89). Livedoor’s market cap had plummeted from a 2004 high of ¥900 billion ($8.06 billion) to ¥97 billion ($869 million).

It was a big comedown for Horimon, as his worshippers call him. Only months earlier Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had touted him as a model of with-it, new-look corporate Japan, and drafted him as a Liberal Democratic Party candidate in last September’s lower house parliamentary elections. Here was a story packed with irony: the PM had called the vote to flush out the old special interests within the LDP—and Mr. Horie’s candidacy symbolized all that was unfettered and new.

Mr. Horie lost, as it happened, freeing him to get back to business. Livedoor still played third fiddle to first violin YahooJapan, Softbank’s billion-dollar-selling portal with triple livedoor’s traffic, and second-string Rakuten. Whether Mr. Horie and three other executives arrested with him broke the law won’t be determined until the trial, which opens this month; whether Japan has room for three big general portals isn’t clear, either. But what is clear is that livedoor stepped on toes in its rush to catch up with Japan’s top portals, and if it survives this latest test, corporate Japan could see more renegades—which wouldn’t altogether be a bad thing.

Red Herring arrived at livedoor the day Mr. Horie (pronounced Ho-ree-ay) was set to be released after three months of incarceration in TokyoDetentionCenter, 18 pounds and ¥300 million ($2.69 million) in bail money lighter. Though Mr. Horie would be heading straight for his Roppongi Hills apartment, Kozo Hiramatsu insists he has no plans to meet him. “We cannot meet,” he repeats several times, sounding both purposeful and distracted all at once.

You could see why a meeting might be difficult. Mr. Hiramatsu had taken over as livedoor’s president in January, and pledged to clean up the company. Like a man struggling to get the ignition firing to get away, Mr. Hiramatsu held eight press conferences in his first seven weeks to assure everyone that livedoor would rebuild and go forward.

“I even bowed to express my regret!” he says. So consorting with Mr. Horie now, even if he remained livedoor’s biggest shareholder with 17.25 percent, just didn’t seem like a good idea, especially with shareholder suits possibly on the horizon. “It was like a smaller version of Enron,” Mr. Hiramatsu says. “Every day the newspapers and TV had ‘the livedoor scandal.’ Although it was much, much smaller than the Enron case, the media was reporting it like Japan’s Enron.”

Mr. Hiramatsu says most employees joined livedoor because of the charismatic Mr. Horie, and they were truly stunned to see their hero go to jail. Whole families, he says, felt an emotional knock because any family member who worked for Horimon had a flicker of credit for sticking it to Japan’s business establishment of wheelers and dealers. And no one could fathom how things had come to this.

But something was coming, surely. “He was always on the mound, always pitching,” Mr. Hiramatsu says. “And when it was time to bat, he was always up at bat.” Livedoor was a one-man band—okay for a young, small company but times had changed, Mr. Hiramatsu says. “When you’re a company with 2,000 staff and 200,000 shareholders, people expect some corporate responsibility.”

Team Approach

Mr. Hiramatsu prefers to build teams and manage from the dugout. “I like to watch others work,” he jokes. And although that’s a big change in style from what went on before, he has watched the cloud hanging over everything start to lift: “You can hear people laughing again,” he says. The turnover rate, in fact, hardly budged: the parent company of 700 still averages about 12 departures and 12 arrivals a month, he says.

How outsiders see things is difficult to gauge. The number of analysts who declined to comment on livedoor’s prospects could fill a room. But one analyst at a top-tier securities house, speaking off the record, seems to think Mr. Hiramatsu has a decent chance of turning things around. “He has a track record of operating a steady ship,” he says. “There are still key personnel left from Horie’s era who seem prepared to take the company forward. With the business in no danger of going under, it will be a long process, but the company appears to be in capable hands.”

The “steady ship” was Yayoi, originally Mountain View, California-based Intuit’s Japan subsidiary selling Quicken accounting software, before Mr. Hiramatsu led a management buyout with the help of Tokyo-based Advantage Partners. He says the venture was delivering annual revenues of $85 million and margins of over 40 percent when he sold it 18 months ago to livedoor. (Before Intuit, Mr. Hiramatsu was CEO of AOL Japan briefly—before it was taken over by NTT DoCoMo—and before that, at American Express, and before that, at IDG for 16 years, and before that, at Sony for 13.)

Staying on as Yayoi president after its sale to livedoor, Mr. Hiramatsu got himself in with odd company. At one point, Mr. Horie was going to buy a racetrack, at another a baseball team.

Currying a reputation for T-shirted showmanship in this nation of suits, Mr. Horie announced in 2004 that he would rescue the cash-strapped Osaka Buffaloes, winning instant acclaim in this baseball-crazed country. His bid was quickly knocked out of the park, but it still added to the lore.

Starting out in 1997 as the prophetically named “Livin’ On the Edge,” the company went public on the TSE’s Mothers startup board in 2000, piling up enough cash to start an acquisition binge that enabled it to grow into an empire of 50 companies.

But its fast-paced, jerky style eventually made regulators wonder if everything was above board. Last year, livedoor either acquired or partnered with companies that opened the way to online banking, futures trading, gaming, and other businesses. Stirring up Japan’s business establishment a little more, Mr. Horie launched a suit against Fuji Television—itself the target of a Horie takeover battle earlier—for its alleged role in blocking livedoor’s attempt to acquire Nippon Broadcasting System.

Something had to blow the lid off Mr. Horie’s steaming cauldron. And when mid-January 2006 arrived, he was formally charged with making false statements to ramp up a listed subsidiary’s share price, inflating group revenue figures, and other transgressions. In no time, investigators from the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor`s Office and the Securities and Exchange Surveillance Commission were all over him and other top executives, raiding their homes, livedoor`s headquarters, and subsidiary offices.

The scandal sent the portal’s ad business crashing, hardly surprising since companies advertise to burnish their image and livedoor’s was disintegrating. But other businesses, including its Linux, financial services, and Yayoi accounting software businesses, took only light hits. Even gaffes seemed to pass without much effect. Yayoi’s flagship ad—featuring Mr. Horie proclaiming, “I built my company with Yayoi!”—was only pulled a month after he was indicted.

Mr. Hiramatsu reckons re-listing can’t happen for at least two years. But he’s got more immediate problems, like firing up advertising again, to tend to anyway. “We are told that major national clients need a tangible reason to resume advertising—a total cleanup, control-alt-delete,” Mr. Hiramatsu says. Translation: all current directors must quit with the June 14 shareholder’s meeting. Not wasting time, he’s already come up with two strong nominees: Teruo Masaki, the former executive vice president and general counsel at Sony, and Yoshio Omori, ex-managing director of NEC.

Mr. Hiramatsu, who is president but not a director, should also get the nod. “We need to rebuild as soon as possible,” he says. “I know I have no time—the market and the shareholders, they’re not patient—and that’s why we made a decision to go with a partner.”

Deciding whether to look for a financial or strategic partner was easy. “We are very lucky,” he begins. “We have enough cash in CDs, convertible bonds, and other assets,” he adds, not offering any details. “We don’t have immediate need of cash, so in this case we need a strategic partner, preferably an IT company that isn’t a competitor.”

But who? Company Y and Company G, Mr. Hiramatsu’s code for Yahoo or Google, were bandied around in internal brainstorming sessions, before another name came into the conversation: Usen, the Tokyo-based cable TV company. Usen President Yasuhide Uno, in fact, had just in March agreed to take over Fuji Television’s 12.75 percent livedoor stake personally, making him the second-biggest shareholder after Mr. Horie. Whether he can sell that stake to his publicly listed company later depends on how due diligence proceeds, according to Mr. Hiramatsu.

Google

Certainly Usen has much to offer, perhaps too much. It has 1 million registered small business users, many potential Yayoi customers. Usen also boasts 400 consumer sound channels and a rich video menu, “while we’re very strong in information and media,” Mr. Hiramatsu says, referring to livedoor’s 2 million registered users who stream in for blogs and news. Among other things, Usen streams “hearing” music into offices and factories to pump up productivity, or so the theory goes, and into dental clinics to ease patients into enduring their miseries.

Mr. Hiramatsu judges Usen a nice fit in other ways, a partner with the right chemistry and speedy style. He also views Mr. Uno as an accomplished entrepreneur, having started up an IT recruiting site and taking it public before turning around Usen, a company his father founded, and listing that, too. “So he made two companies public and he has a reputation as a startup entrepreneur and turnaround manager—in one man,” Mr. Hiramatsu says.

Tight Fit

Even before the press conference announcing a business alliance, the two agreed to establish coordinating committees covering management, web offerings, and infrastructure and IT. “A month ago, we announced five joint projects,” Mr. Hiramatsu continues. A big one: devising a formula allowing users to use their IDs to get into the other company’s portal. “And yesterday we announced cross-selling of our Yayoi channel and their small business channel.” That move pools 750,000 small business users from Usen and livedoor’s 550,000 business customers.

“Usen is making a strong push to realize the advertising potential of web-broadcast video,” says Ben Reneker, an analyst with Monterey, California-based Kagan Research. “They’ve spent the last year securing content and distribution channels, and clearly livedoor’s operation has been of interest to them for some time.”

Monterey, California-based Kagan Research

Mr. Reneker says gaining access to livedoor’s subscriber base also extends Usen’s demographic reach and adds traffic. “Japan is among the most advanced web-video markets in the world and competition for loyal visitors will undoubtedly grow fierce in the coming years. With livedoor’s user base in its arsenal, Usen will be in a strong position to gain early share in Japan’s burgeoning IP-video market,” he says.

Our nameless securities analyst agrees that Usen is looking at the bigger picture. “CEO Uno has made it clear that it is not just the portal he is interested in,” he says. Indeed, a Kyodo report last month reported Mr. Uno expressing interest in seeing his cable TV company take a majority stake in livedoor and folding it into his company—though he conceded that Mr. Horie might not take to the idea.

For his part, Mr. Hiramatsu doesn’t exactly dismiss the idea. “As for our relationship with Usen, nothing has been finalized,” he says, adding that the cable operator would be nominating two directors for the livedoor board. “We have agreed to discuss the next step when due diligence is completed.”

Mr. Hiramatsu has a way of being around for handovers. He was AOL’s chief executive in Japan when the Japanese unit was bought out by NTT DoCoMo, he was the mastermind behind the Yayoi MBO, and he was on hand when Yayoi was sold to livedoor.

He admits to being in a dilemma. “I don’t want to get into whether Horie is guilty or not guilty but the fact is, he caused that huge confusion,” he says. “He confused the market, and the valuation of the company dropped to one-eighth.”

Life might be easier if Mr. Horie wasn’t livedoor’s biggest shareholder at the moment, but that was beyond Mr. Hiramatsu’s control. “A month ago, we got two comments from him through the lawyer—he said he was glad to know we were making a deal with Usen, number 1, and number 2, now and in the future he will support new management.”

That sounds like livedoor’s biggest shareholder has left Kozo Hiramatsu, a Harley owner who likes to move fast, with a wide-open mandate.