When Eiji Hosoya, the new chairman of Resona, first saw the swooping R of the bank's logo, it reminded him of the badge of the old Japanese National Railways, the train operator he helped privatise in the mid-1980s.
Indeed, it was Mr Hosoya's record of transforming a lumbering state organisation into a successful private company that made him an obvious candidate for Resona, Japan's fifth-largest bank.
Like JNR, Resona is now under government control following a US$17bn bail-out in May. Like JNR, it is in a financial mess, drowning under Y2,900bn (US$24.2bn) of bad loans.
There, Mr Hosoya says, the similarity ends. His first inkling that this job was different came with the reaction of friends.
Instead of the usual omedeto, expressions of congratulations, that normally accompany a prestigious appointment, he was greeted with a hail of taihen desu ne - commiserations at being given such an awful job.
