Can Nomura crack the Chinese market?

HONG KONG/TOKYO -- Koji Nagai, the group chief executive of Nomura Holdings, likes to tell a story about his first job at the Japanese bank. It was 1981 and the recent university graduate was sent to a branch in Takamatsu, the capital of Kagawa Prefecture. Nagai was there to learn the basics of selling shares, bonds and mutual funds to individual investors, and his timing was good: Japan's great stock market run still had eight years of life left in it.