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.
