Glico: the kidnapped president stayed 40 years and handed the candy firm to his son

Katsuhisa Ezaki, grandson of Glico founder Riichi Ezaki, became president of the Osaka confectioner in June 1982 at 40. Less than two years later, on the night of March 18, 1984, two masked gunmen broke into his mother's house next door, took her key, tied up his wife and daughter and abducted Ezaki from his bath. The ransom note demanded 1 billion yen in cash — about $4.5 million, then the largest domestic cash ransom in Japan — plus 100 kilograms of gold. His 1,600-employee firm, founded in 1922, had booked just over $68 million in sales the year before.

Ezaki escaped the Ibaraki warehouse himself after three days and was found near the Osaka freight terminal. The terror did not stop: over the next 18 months a group calling itself the Monster with 21 Faces claimed Glico candies were laced with potassium cyanide, forced nationwide recalls, burned a company facility and moved on to Morinaga and other foodmakers in a wave of arson, extortion and mass-poisoning attempts.

Ezaki neither yielded nor sold. He rebuilt trust around safety and kept the global push he had started, growing the company on chocolate confectionery and overseas expansion. No culprit was ever caught — the statute of limitations on his own abduction expired in March 1994, and the last linked cases ran out by 2000. In February 2000 Ezaki told reporters only that he hoped the culprits would never repeat such a crime.

He stayed president for exactly 40 years. On February 11, 2022 — the company's 100th-anniversary date — Glico announced that his eldest son Etsuro, a Suntory-trained marketer who joined in 2004 and ran the overseas subsidiary, would take over as president on March 24, 2022, with a growth strategy built on health products and international markets.

Glico survived an unsolved extortion war, kept family control, and in 2022 completed its first top-job handover in 40 years with a health-and-overseas growth plan.

The kidnappers took the sitting president, not a retiree — keeping the survivor in charge turned a hostage crisis into a test of stewardship, not a forced exit.

Refusing to let an unsolved extortion campaign dictate strategy preserved the one asset a confectioner cannot rebuild quickly: shopper trust in the brand's safety.

A 40-year tenure gave Glico rare continuity but forced the fourth generation to grow from inside — Etsuro spent 18 years, including running the overseas unit, before taking over.

Timing the handover to the centenary made a leadership change read as renewal with a plan — health and overseas growth — instead of an old man finally letting go.

A succession plan proves itself in a crisis: the heir who stays, rebuilds and keeps his nerve buys the credibility to run — and eventually hand over — the family firm on his own terms.

Etsuro Ezaki took office on March 24, 2022, the first change of president at Glico in four decades. His father stayed on as chairman with representative authority. The new president has since pushed the declared health-and-overseas agenda, including a 2026 personalized gut-health service built with a US partner. The Glico-Morinaga crimes remain officially unsolved; every statute of limitations has expired.