TOKYO, Sept. 4 — Takafumi Horie, the brash, 33-year-old Internet entrepreneur whose rise and fall has captivated Japan the last two years, pleaded not guilty to charges of violating securities law at the opening of his trial here on Monday.
Mr. Horie’s appearance in the Tokyo District Court attracted the same kind of intense interest that the O. J. Simpson trial drew in the United States.
About 2,000 people lined up outside the court, many showing up in the predawn hours, in the hope of getting one of the 61 courtroom seats made available to the public.
Those who claimed the seats saw Mr. Horie — known for flouting Japan’s conservative business practices by wearing T-shirts in public — stand up in court, dressed in a black suit, white shirt and blue tie, and strongly proclaim his innocence.
“I have not carried out, or instructed, such crimes as were mentioned,” he said. “The indictment was written with malice.”
“It’s regrettable that I’ve been indicted,” he added.
Corporate trials are relatively rare occurrences in Japan. But because Mr. Horie has already been condemned by some in the court of public opinion — his character brought into question during endless leaks of information from the authorities — the trial that began on Monday has the tinge of a celebrity circus.
Prosecutors have charged Mr. Horie and his colleagues with manipulating the financial figures of his company, Livedoor, in 2004, to conceal losses and inflate the company’s stock price. In addition, the prosecutors said that the company’s executives set up “dummy” corporations and spread false information about a Livedoor subsidiary’s takeover of another company.
Other executives at Livedoor have pleaded guilty to various charges, but Mr. Horie has steadfastly maintained his innocence.
Mr. Horie is not expected to testify until November in the trial, which is not expected to end until February. If he is found guilty, Mr. Horie faces up to five years in prison.
With little news to focus on Monday, the media in Tokyo reported that Mr. Horie went to the gym at 7 a.m. and then ate breakfast, which he usually skips. Mr. Horie’s lunch consisted of rice with sea urchin and salmon roe.
Mr. Horie’s arrest last January caused a panic on the Tokyo stock market and an extraordinary halt of trading after a sell-off of Livedoor shares set off a market plunge. After that, his popularity plunged, too, as the same establishment that had held him up as an icon of the new Japan condemned him as representing everything that was wrong with it.
Mr. Horie made many enemies during his quick rise, and his defenders said there was much score-settling in the glee surrounding his fall. A few months later, another symbol of the individualism and entrepreneurship of the new Japan, the corporate raider Yoshiaki Murakami, was also arrested on charges of violating securities law.
Defenders of Mr. Murakami and Mr. Horie said that the men were accused of abuses that were not necessarily new to the Japanese business establishment, but that they went from heroes to villains because of Japan’s conflicted and still unresolved attitudes toward the freewheeling American-style of capitalism that is creeping into Japan.
Mr. Horie’s every gesture became laden with a message. In court Monday, he pleaded not guilty, but he wore a tie — a sartorial decision that was perhaps just as significant. “Wearing a tie,” the public broadcaster, NHK, began the evening news, “he claimed his innocence.”
The narrative of Mr. Horie’s rise has become known to almost all Japanese, the way, say, Bill Gates’s has become known through the United States. An impatient Mr. Horie dropped out the University of Tokyo, the country’s most prestigious university, to start his own company.
In a country that has struggled to nurture entrepreneurs, Mr. Horie’s company was recording annual revenue of $100 million by the time he was 30 years old.
But two years ago, he earned national attention by trying to buy a baseball team and challenging the traditional network of team owners. Then last year, Mr. Horie mounted another challenge of the status quo by trying a hostile takeover of a radio network.
He failed in both attempts, but his bravado and his flashy lifestyle — he dated models and drove a Ferrari — made him a celebrity.
Reviled by the establishment, he became an inspiration to some youth. Even Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi tried to exploit Mr. Horie’s popularity by urging him to run for a seat in the lower house of Parliament in elections last September. Heavyweights in the governing Liberal Democratic Party campaigned with Mr. Horie, extolling him as a symbol of the new Japan, but quickly dropped him after his arrest.
