Sacked Square Enix CEO Youichi Wada’s decision to relocate the company based on the advice of a feng shui (or “fuusui” as it is known in Japan) master is being blamed for the company’s precipitous declined.

One Square Enix employee has this to say about the matter:

Our company moved from Shinjuku to east Shinjuku. No clear reason was given for the transfer, and people were joking that Wada made the choice for reasons of feng shui. But the truth is it may have had the opposite effect, and the rumour is that the new location has very bad feng shui. It’s not just our corporate performance which suffered – young creative staff have died suddenly and others have been afflicted with cancer. Some have been saying we would have been better off giving them a Shinto exorcism. And perhaps it would have been better had Wada decided our new location according to feng shui alone.

Whilst directly attributing the company’s failure to poor geomancy would likely be an absurd conclusion, attributing it to a CEO so utterly inept as to base business decisions on what a fortune teller told him might well be a plausible explanation.

In fact, no less than top Square Enix composer Nobuo Uematsu has said in a 2008 interview that Wada himself told him a “Taiwanese fortune teller called Pao” advised him where to move the company HQ, and that as he could not abide their new location he left the company.