Nui Onoue (尾上縫 Onoue Nui, born 1930) is the former owner of the Japanese restaurant „Egawa“ in Osaka, Japan. At the end of the 1980s, Onoue for a short time handled astronomical sums of investment capital, becoming one of the people symbolizing the Japanese bubble economy. In the last stages of the bubble the financing of her stock purchases turned sour and she was arrested, tried and convicted of fraud involving financial institutions.
Onoue's restaurant flourished when she earned a reputation of accurately predicting stock development and horse racing for her customers. Especially in the advent of the bubble her predictions became uncanny, and many customers from security financing and banks visited her restaurant as she became known as a fortune teller rather than a restaurant owner.
Before long, she personally took large loans from banks and started trading stocks. During the bubble's climax in 1988, she had received loans from financial institutions of 227 billion yen, held close to 40 billion yen in timed deposits, had made a profit of 4.8 billion yen from stocks, purchased 28.8 billion yen worth of warikō discounted bonds, and paid 5.5 billion yen in interest rates.
But when the gloom of the bubble became visible, her investments suddenly worsened and she acquired astronomical debts. She now started the fraudulent behaviour that she had been involved in previously more seriously. Her main scam consisted of having acquainted bank managers of Tōyō Shinyo Kinko bank branches issue certificates for fictional deposit accounts, taking these to other financial institutions where she used the certificates to free and receive stock and bonds previously given as securities.[1][2] Until her arrest, she fraudulently acquired 342 billion yen from 12 financial institutions including nonbanking banks.
Before long this forgery of securities was discovered, which led to her arrest for fraud on August 13, 1991. The money she borrowed from financial institutions amounted to a total of 2 trillion 773.6 billion yen,[3] with return payments reaching a total of 2 trillion 306 billion yen. The bankruptcy proceedings commenced during detention set her total debt at 430 billion yen, the highest ever accumulated by an individual in Japan.
In court, Onoue's lawyer's stressing that she held no responsibility as she had absolutely no knowledge of stocks and was being manipulated by her surroundings was not heard and she was sentenced to 12 years in prison.[4]
The two banks that handled huge amounts of the financing both do not exist anymore. The Industrial Bank of Japan was consumed in a merger with Fuji Bank that created Mizuho Corporate Bank, and the financially failed Tōyō Shinyo Kinko bank partially merged with a number of prefectural credit unions.
In the end of 1970, according to former high school principal Hiraoka Shizuto, Onoue became a monk at Mount Kōya's Kongōbuji Hōon'in temple and adapted the name of Junkō. Being closely acquainted with the Hiraoka family, she participated on an enlightenment tour to a Buddhist temple in India (Gyume temple), organized by the family. At that time, Onoue donated 20 million yen to the Gyume temple, but the Hiraoka family stresses that they made the donation. On the same tour, Onoue and Hiraoka together met the Dalai Lama. After that, Hiraoka invited the Dalai Lama to the Nenbutsu sect's Temple of Immeasurable Happiness.