Does Mark Lerner, president of Morgen, Evan & Co. Inc., know something that no one else does on Wall Street? Maybe, maybe not. In any case, it's quite sure that Lerner's firm is among the very few expanding operations in Japan today as Goldman, Sachs, Prudential and Kidder, Peabody lay off staff in Tokyo. In October, Lerner opened a representative office in Tokyo and named roger Estrada as managing director. Estrada, who speaks Japanese, comes from the Washington, D.C. firm of Management Surveys, Inc., where he advised clients on strategic planning and management policies. He's also worked for Litton Industries in Saudi Arabia and Rockwell Industries in Los Angeles as an international contracts expert.

"A lot of the activity in Japanese M&A today is $10 million deals that probably would not be of interest to most investment bankers," says Lerner. "But for us, because we are small and don't have as much overhead, small deals can make a great deal of sense for us."

Indeed. In November, Morgen, Evan & Co. was retained to find qualified buyers for the Birmingham Barons, the minor league baseball team purchased by Suntory Ltd., a Japanese liquor and soft drink company, for $3.6 million four years ago. In addition, Lerner says he's been hired by a large Japanese firm to invest $10 million in a state-of-the-art computer peripheral company in the U.S., and retained by Santa Fe Tobacco in the U.S. to ink a distributor agreement with a Japanese firm.