Mr. Ghosn pulled on a white jumpsuit to tour factory floors, but beyond the photo ops, there were signs that his splashy — some would say autocratic — presence was out of sync with modest Japanese culture. In 2004, Mr. Ghosn grazed a motorbike while driving a Porsche in the Roppongi area of Tokyo, a haven for moneyed foreigners. (The couple on the bike had minor injuries.) The Japanese media groused that Mr. Ghosn wasn’t driving a Nissan.

Then the man whose militant approach to cutting jobs (21,000, if you’re counting) earned him the nickname “Le Cost Killer” spent more than $200 million for Nissan to be a sponsor of the Rio Olympics in 2016, casting himself in the Olympic torch relay. He hopped between homes paid for by Nissan. In 2017, he paid a Lebanese artist and friend $888,000 to create a statue, “Wheels of Innovation,” for the entrance of Nissan’s Yokohama headquarters. (Having a lavish second wedding reception in Versailles the same year, with Marie Antoinette-themed costumes and, yes, lots of cake, did not help.)

“He was a person who was above the clouds,” said Yuichi Ishino, who worked in Nissan’s finance department from 2002 to 2005. “No one dared to say anything that would confront his opinions.”

The stickiest issue was always Mr. Ghosn’s pay.

In Japan, salarymen slave away at the kaisha (or company) with a sense of communal pride almost as important as the salary. Last year, Mr. Ghosn made $16.9 million ($8.4 million from Renault, $6.5 million from Nissan and $2 million from Mitsubishi). That’s nearly 11 times what the chairman of Toyota, the world’s largest carmaker, earns but well below the $21.96 million paid to Mary Barra, the chief executive of General Motors.

In 2008, the same year that Japanese law began requiring companies to disclose directors’ pay in their annual reports, Nissan’s shareholders voted to set an annual cap of about $27 million on compensation for all board directors combined.

After that, Mr. Ghosn made the case to the public that he was underpaid — instructing Nissan to hand out background materials reminding investors and the news media that he made significantly less than his counterparts at other global automakers.

At the company’s most recent annual meeting, in June, Mr. Ghosn stressed to shareholders that the company’s compensation policy was “designed to reward performance and to attract, promote and retain the best management talent in the auto industry.” He added that while Nissan tried to reward senior management “competitively,” the company remained “financially very disciplined.”