Miyauchi aims to use those branches as storefronts in a coming era of financial supermarkets.
Credit for Orix's aggressiveness goes to Miyauchi Yoshihiko, 63, the company's president and chief executive officer.
Miyauchi was named president in 1980, and the company changed its name to Orix in 1989.
Since then, around 200 companies have begun reform: about half have sincere intentions, thinks Mr Miyauchi.
In 1986, Mr Miyauchi bought Akane Securities, a tiny stockbroker with two branches in Tokyo and Osaka.
Miyauchi was born to a well-to-do family in the lumber business in Kobe.
"Japanese life insurance is sold by giant companies that pay salesladies unbelievably high commissions, " says Yoshihiko Miyauchi, president of Orix.
Miyauchi, whose soft-spoken manner and round spectacles make him look more like a literature professor than a financial revolutionary, is undeterred.
"Bankers are exerting a lot of pressure to block deregulation, " says Miyauchi.
Miyauchi says he isn't worried because he intends to continue diversifying Orix so it isn't a head-to-head competitor with the U.S. giant.
Miyauchi likes to talk of things like shareholders' rights and customer satisfaction, concepts that normally concern Western managers much more than Japanese ones.
Mr Miyauchi could make money for Orix if he were ready to buy the bank, break it up and sell bits of it on.
They dispatched Miyauchi, the University of Washington-educated son of a Japanese lumber merchant, to learn the ropes at U.S. Leasing International (now part of Ford's financial arm).
Miyauchi told a Japanese daily recently that he thought the economy had bottomed out a year ago and he wasn't expecting such big additional bad-loan provisions this year.
Mr Miyauchi's views on wider reform prompt similar criticism.
At age 28, the company sent him to San Francisco to learn the leasing business, and shortly afterwards it and a consortium of banks and trading companies established Orient Leasing Co. with Miyauchi as one of 13 founders.
"Our business in Europe is relatively weak nearly zero so through this acquisition, we can expect new business development in addition to our current network in Asia, the Middle East and Japan, " Yoshihiko Miyauchi, Orix's chairman and chief executive, said at a news conference.
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