You know why Yokoi was in a car with a Nintendo employee? Because they were friends. Yokoi had a lot of friends at Nintendo, including past and current Nintendo golden boy Shigeru Miyamoto. He remained close with them after leaving the company. Also, he wasn't fired, he quit. When Hiroshi Yamauchi stepped down as Nintendo president and Iwata took over, Yokoi would have been brought back into the fold, if not at Iwata's own initiative, then at Miyamoto's behest.

More importantly, the Virtual Boy, while disappointingly unsuccessful, was of no real consequence to Nintendo. The Game Boy was still the dominating force in handhelds and the SNES was still quite profitable when the VB flopped. Since the NES days, there has not been a single moment when the company was in any sort of financial trouble. The Nintendo board was always been fiscally conservative, and the company has a huge rainy day fund. The idea that Nintendo had Yokoi killed over the Virtual Boy's failure is ridiculous. The failure had no longterm effects on the company, and few short term effects. By 1997, certainly, Nintendo no longer cared about the Virtual Boy's failure. As for the Wonderswan, I doubt Nintendo was worried about it. Competitors had released technologically superior handhelds before (Game Gear, Lynx) but none of them had ever managed to capture the success of the Game Boy and GBC. They had no reason to believe that Gunpei's vast knowledge of Nintendo hardware would give him any sort of competitive edge in designed a new handheld. Also, aren't technical specs generally published in the hardware manual?