Pernille Rudlin - Rudlin Consulting

About Pernille Rudlin

Pernille Rudlin was brought up partly in Japan and partly in the UK. She is fluent in Japanese, and lived in Japan for 9 years.

She spent nearly a decade at Mitsubishi Corporation working in their London operations and Tokyo headquarters in sales and marketing and corporate planning and also including a stint in their International Human Resource Development Office.

More recently she had a global senior role as Director of External Relations, International Business, at Fujitsu, the leading Japanese information and communication technology company and the biggest Japanese employer in the UK, focusing on ensuring the company’s corporate messages in Japan reach the world outside.

Pernille Rudlin holds a B.A. with honours from Oxford University in Modern History and Economics and an M.B.A. from INSEAD and she is the author of several books and articles on cross cultural communications and business.

Since starting Japan Intercultural Consulting’s operations in Europe in 2004, Pernille has conducted seminars for Japanese and European companies in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland, UAE, the UK and the USA, on Japanese cultural topics, post merger integration and on working with different European cultures.

Pernille is a non-executive director of Japan House London, an Associate of the Centre for Japanese Studies at the University of East Anglia and she is also a trustee of the Japan Society of the UK.

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Here are my most recent posts

Europe could really use a dose of Japanese-style customer service

I have to admit that I always suffer from reverse culture shock when I return to the UK after business trips to Japan. Arriving at Heathrow Airport I find my shoulders hunching up, ready to face the fact the inevitable headaches and the fact that at best I may get some cheery but incompetent service – and at worst, downright hostility – from the people delivering my “transportation experience”.

I know from the training seminars I do for Japanese expatriates who are working in Europe that they too put “bad customer service” near the top of the list of things they find most challenging about living here. In Japan you become used to a consistently high level of competence in customer service, delivered politely and gently, with immediate and unreserved apology should things go wrong. Most British people, even if they have never visited Japan, will agree that customer service standards are poor in the UK. Other Europeans, on hearing our criticisms, will usually add, “Try my country – it’s even worse!” European service is uneven in quality, often delivered with a bad attitude and when things go wrong, you get excuses rather than a straightforward apology.

The question Japanese expatriates ask – and the question I often ask myself, is – “why?” Why is customer service so bad in Europe, and if most people agree it is not satisfactory, why isn’t anything done about it?

I have been doing some research on the differences in Japanese and British corporate cultures recently, and I’ve realised that the key features I have identified can also be used to explain the different customer service outcomes. For example the corporate mission of British and Japanese companies and their historical roots has led to more “stakeholder” companies in Japan compared to more “shareholder” type of companies in the UK. This in turn has had an impact on the employees’ sense of belonging to a corporate group and collective responsibility.

Some of the more traditional – some might say “outdated” – aspects of Japanese companies also impact customer service. These would include seniority based promotion, with its roots in Confucian acceptance of unequal power in society and the obligations that go with different ranks, alongside respect for elders and higher ranked people. And although status is unequal, Japanese companies do not have a huge differential between the pay of the senior executives compared to the junior ranks, unlike British service companies where the junior person is notoriously badly paid and chief executives earn millions of pounds.

Finally, even in service sector companies in Japan there is the gembashugi factor or a focus on the actual place where the work is done. Senior managers should have worked their way up the organisation and be prepared to go out onto the shopfloor. There is even a kind of monozukuri or craftsmanship – pride in the physical aspects of delivering service well.

Perhaps, if the key elements in Japanese service excellence can be identified and made explicit, customer service can be Japan’s next big export industry?

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly. This and other articles are available as an e-book “Omoiyari: 6 Steps to Getting it Right with Japanese Customers”

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Why Japanese minimalism does not apply to Japanese management

Following on from her article on why Germans work less hours than Japanese employees, Professor Ulrike Schaede takes a look in a second article at the need for a German “golden middle path” in Japanese management style. She describes how Germans who know that the Bauhaus minimalist architectural style was influenced by Japanese minimalism are surprised by how Japanese presentations are so overcomplicated, or there are so many Japanese people on a team, who don’t seem to have clear roles and responsibilities, and how many meetings seem to be needed to make a decision.

In terms of the right balance on team numbers she cites Amazon’s 2 pizza rule – that team members should be no greater than 5 or 6, the number that can be fed adequately by 2 (American size) pizzas. Individual responsibilities should be made clear, in order to improve a sense of ownership and motivation. It has certainly been our experience at Japan Intercultural Consulting in facilitating cross cultural sessions for teams which are multi-site (eg the Netherlands, Japan and USA) that the Europeans in particular know that teams are not going to function effectively if roles are not clearly defined. The American “just do it” attitude and the Japanese “all pull together” approach do not work across borders.

As for too many meetings, she jokes that Japanese salarymen eat too much spinach – horenso in Japanese. We often talk about horenso in our Japan Intercultural Consulting training sessions – it’s a mnemonic for HOkoku-RENraku-SOdan – reporting, updating and discussing, meaning “keep everyone in the loop”. It’s true that it can lead to a lot of meetings – but in my opinion is also a basis for thinking about the kind of processes that might be needed to keep risk averse Japanese colleagues and customers happy. Often the hokoku/report is not done via a meeting but as a one pager of bullet points about what happened once a week, for example.

But as Schaede points out, Japanese want to feel that everyone has been involved in a decision – she recommends that it is made more explicit which discussions everyone needs to be involved in and which decisions could be settled in smaller meetings. A detailed agenda is also helpful, to keep meetings short and to the point.

She also makes a plea, as a university professor, for ‘less is more’ in terms of lecture load. Japanese students are notorious for not studying very hard once they get to university, but as she points out, they are expected to attend many more seminars and lectures than their Western counterparts. As a result, lecturers have a lot of their time taken up with preparing lectures, when in fact they could be spending that time on individual student needs, thereby perhaps encouraging more self study.

Schede has also noticed something that many foreigners new to Japan find it hard to get used to – “overcommunication” – the way there are constant announcements tor remind you not to leave things on trains or that the end of the escalator is coming, or that a lift is going up. She claims not to mind this herself, saying it is a legacy of Japan’s wonderful customer service, to make customers feel looked after.

Her final contrast on “less is more” is between the minimalist business cards of Japan’s traditional elite – often showing the name only, and an increasing trend amongst the newer elite in Japan of having multiple cards, with different websites, email addresses and job titles.

So how many meetings, slides, lectures, team members and reports are enough, if cutting completely is going too far? Professor Schaede says she often says to her students that their work could easily be cut by 10% and up to 20% if they try, and that this would sharpen their point, without losing much.

Neuroplasticity – rewire your brain to learn Japanese?

Europeans often ask me if it is worth trying to learn Japanese. I usually say yes, but that it is important to have realistic expectations. One lesson a week, if you are not living in Japan, is not going to lead to anything like fluency. However it will be intellectually interesting, because Japanese is a beautiful language, is quite unlike any Greek or Latin based language and learning it may teach you a bit about Japanese culture.

I was very lucky to have lived in Japan at the ideal point to become fluent in another language – in early childhood. Once you hit your teenage years, learning another language becomes increasingly difficult, because your brain has become hard wired with your mother tongue. I have known some people become fluent in Japanese in adulthood, but this was usually because they took the total immersion route – living in Japan for a year or so and minimising contact with other English speaking foreigners.

Recent research has shown that in fact our brains can be “rewired”. This idea is known as “neuroplasticity” and can be observed in people who recover from brain injury – unconsciously or through training, they rewire their neural circuits in order to reacquire the functions lost by the damage. Rewiring their brain is what the adults who became fluent in Japanese were doing by totally immersing themselves in the Japanese language.

Neuroplasticity also has major implications for our national cultural identities. It used to be thought that your cultural values were immutably set in early childhood. In my training sessions I point out to people that this is not racism – I am not saying people are born with a particular set of values.

However it does seem that our brains are sculpted during childhood so that we do end up with different brains from culture to culture. Scientists have found that East Asian brains respond differently from the brains of Westerners to visual stimuli and that native English speakers and native Chinese speakers use different parts of the brain to do the same simple arithmetic.

Far from reinforcing racism, neuroplasticity implies that our brains can be reshaped, regardless of where we were brought up as children. So prolonged exposure to another culture may actually reshape the way a brain learns, thinks, decides and decodes. It may also explain the phenomenon I described in a previous article, that British or Japanese people who have lived abroad for a long time feel like foreigners when they return to their countries of birth, even if they spent their entire childhood in their mother country.

The society you are living in does have the power to reshape the way you think. So if you are not British by nationality, but have lived in the UK for a while, and find that you tut to yourself when people jump queues, or say sorry when someone else has bumped into you or find yourself giving long, complicated explanations for why you are late, it may be that you have lived long enough in the UK to have rewired your brain!

Japanese leaders need more confidence in a Japanese style globalization

Many of our Japanese client companies are embarking on global initiatives, in marketing or human resources, and consciously involving overseas employees in them. It’s great to see positive, forward thinking even in these difficult times, but comments I have been getting from the Europeans involved in these initiatives have been puzzling me.

Normally, discussions in our European training sessions about decision making in Japanese companies revolve around nemawashi (literally, going around the roots of a tree) a consensus based, largely bottom up, decision making system common in Japanese companies. This decision making process may be an entirely bottom up initiative, or triggered by a vague top down directive.

Consensus based decision making is not uniquely Japanese of course. In Europe, plenty of national and corporate cultures prefer some kind of consensus based approach, instead of top down imposition. However, when the Europeans involved in the global initiatives have tried to get a consensus based dialogue going with Japan, they instead been met with passivity from their Japanese counterparts.

One British director told me that he had suggested to his Japanese team that they come up with a proposal for a new workflow. Because they looked puzzled, he scribbled on a whiteboard very roughly what he had in mind. To his concern, the final proposal simply replicated his rough sketch. “When I put ideas to teams in Europe that I have led, I expect them to push back. After all, they often know far better than I do what can or can’t be done”.

Another British manager proposed a series of discussion sessions with Japanese marketing staff, to give feedback into a new brand strategy, only to be met with a request that the European team “just tell us what to put in the advertising”.

This could of course be due to a reluctance to have open confrontation, particularly in English. But I also sense an attitude that because the initiatives are “global” and come dressed in English “marketing” and “strategy” terminology unfamiliar to Japanese people, the Japanese employees feel it is not their area of expertise, so they should just let the “Western” side of the team take the lead.

Yet this is precisely what these European managers are trying to avoid. They want to take an approach to creating strategy which is culturally sensitive. After all, “global” these days does not mean just the West, but China, India and elsewhere. The European managers were rather hoping their Japanese colleagues would have a better cultural understanding of how to incorporate the Asian operations into the initiatives than they did.

How then could the Japanese employees engage in a dialogue in a way that does not make them feel uncomfortable? I would suggest the “coaching” style, which comes naturally to many Japanese people I have worked with. This means that instead of openly stating a disagreement, the listener asks questions which help the presenter to see the problems in their proposal themselves, rather than be told what is wrong.

Overall though, Japanese managers should have more confidence in themselves as leaders of a Japanese style globalization, which may, let us hope, work rather better than Western style globalization has so far.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly and also appears in “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

British pragmatism, Scottish independence and Brexit

By the time you read this, Scotland may have chosen to become independent from the rest of Britain. In that case, as we say in English, “the heart has ruled the head.” The opinion polls a week before the vote show it is very close, with many undecideds – those whose heads say “no” to independence, but whose hearts are excited by “yes” to becoming a separate nation again, in charge of its own destiny, after 300 years of union with the UK.

Businesses, Scottish and English, have finally started speaking out, mostly for the “No Thanks” side of the campaign, but “no” is not very appealing word and the reasons for “no” can sound like scaremongering. The future is uncertain for an independent Scotland. Not only will difficult negotiations start on whether and how Scotland will be able to keep the sterling pound as its currency, but also negotiations will have to begin with the European Union as to whether and how soon Scotland can become a member nation.

The UK is also less than a year away from a General Election in May 2015, which the Conservative Party is fighting on a promise of a referendum of the UK’s membership of the EU. The UK Independence Party, which supports leaving the EU, has done very well in recent local and European elections, so it is a real possibility that if the Conservatives form the next government, the British people will vote to leave the European Union.

It must seem odd to Japanese business people that British citizens would willingly vote for actions which might undermine the political and economic stability that has made the UK such an attractive destination for foreign investment. But it is that very history of stability that seems to give Scottish and other British people the confidence that somehow everything will be all right. We pride ourselves on being pragmatic, and that we will somehow “muddle through”. Businesses are making contingency plans for Scottish independence and no doubt for any Brexit too.

Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, is the second financial city in the UK after London, but even the Royal Bank of Scotland says it is considering moving its headquarters to England if Scotland becomes independent. The other major sector in Scotland, the oil industry, has been unnerved by threats of nationalization should the Nationalists gain power. All sectors are worried that corporate taxes may have to rise to fund the Nationalists’ progressive policies or else that Scotland’s creditworthiness will be affected.

Unsurprisingly, Japanese companies (and other non-UK companies) have not spoken out on the issue, as this would be counterproductive, but as many Japanese banks, construction and engineering firms have invested in social infrastructure projects in Scotland and the rest of the UK, the hope must be that even if Scottish hearts win the vote for independence, the famously “canny”, rational Scottish heads will prevail afterwards and British pragmatism will also avoid too much upheaval in the coming years of renegotiations with the EU.

This article was originally published in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 1 October 2014 and also appears Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

Has Hitachi opened Pandora’s Box with the ending of seniority based pay?

Hitachi’s announcement on 26th September 2014 that it would be abolishing seniority based pay and promotion for management positions in Japan has caused quite a stir in Japanese business circles.

One HR consultant likened it to opening Pandora’s Box, as it may spread to non-managerial ranks, other industries and may even herald the end of lifetime employment. Both Nikkei Business and Diamond magazines have linked the announcement to Hitachi’s Global HR Management strategy and the database that Hitachi have been developing for the past two years of 250,000 employees, inside and outside Japan. 50,000 management positions in Japan and overseas are now measured by the same standards. These tools and an evaluation system means that with the abolition of seniority based pay, changes can be made to globalize compensation.

The abolition will affect 11,000 management positions in Japan – those people who are at the kacho (team leader) level and above. From October this year, no distinction will be made between function and grade status pay, and there will instead be one “role and results” pay scheme. Under the old scheme, around 70% of pay was determined by the employee’s length of service in the company.

Hitachi want to ensure that they can hire and retain high performers, regardless of nationality, including as mid-career hires. This is deemed necessary if they are going to reach their target of 50% of sales overseas by 2015, compared to the 41% level reached in 2012. The new pay scheme will therefore eventually apply to all management positions in the Hitachi group, not just in Japan headquarters.

According to the Nikkei, this change to the HR system has its roots in the difficulties Takashi Kawamura, chairman of Hitachi until 31 March 2014, experienced since 2009 when as President he started to weed out businesses he felt did not fit the “social innovation” portfolio. “Westerners place emphasis on their skills and expertise, so even if the company changes, they will follow the business that they have been working in. But Japanese people want to stay with the company, even if the business they are working on is devolved elsewhere… As Japan globalises, the relationship between the company and its employees, and employees’ thinking will also change.”

As Diamond magazine points out, this is a drastic transformation from the “family style” traditional Japanese company image that Hitachi used to have. It was known that Hitachi did not pay particularly high salaries, but that its benefits were very generous, and that it would provide a secure and stable environment for employees. It was always very serious about its HR strategies, and seen as a front runner for innovations in Japanese HR systems. So the abolition of seniority based pay is potentially “epoch making”, with implications far beyond Hitachi itself. It is rumoured that Sony and Panasonic are also looking at changing their pay schemes in a similar way.

The abolition of seniority based pay will impact other sacred cows of the traditional Japanese HR system. For example, there will no longer be “Beh-ah” (short for Base Up) negotiations, whereby the same basic pay rise is applied across the workforce, so no more “spring offensive” – the ritual negotiations between the company union and management for the annual pay increase. As a consequence, the raison d’être of the company union itself may be under threat. Lifetime employment will become even more thinly upheld, as people are more able to move from company to company without worrying about losing seniority based entitlements and it will be easier then for companies to get rid of people.

Hajime Yamazaki, guest researcher at the Rakuten Research Institute for the Economy (who has himself changed employers 12 times since joining Mitsubishi Corp in 1981) makes three recommendations to Japanese employees:

Review your lifeplan
Not just in terms of when you retire, but think about potential instability of income when you are still working. It might be best to increase the amount you save.
Take more risks in your job.
If your compensation is going to be based on results, then you have to take a “no risk, no reward” view of your work.
Regularly think about changing employers
Yamazaki is not saying Japanese employees should all start quitting their jobs, but that you should constantly be reviewing your skills and experiences to see if they would help you get a job in another company.

“For a business person with ability and motivation, the end of seniority based pay means there will be many opportunities in the road ahead,” says Yamazaki.

Four differences between Japanese and German approaches to work, communication and customer service

There are well-known similarities between Japan and Germany – they are both manufacturers of exports which are in demand across the world, they have excellent engineering skills and leadership in manufacturing and craftsmanship. Furthermore, both are serious about their work, precise in time keeping and execution of their work, and are reliable and trustworthy.

Many German and Japanese companies are similar – Toyota and Volkswagen, BMW and Honda, Thyssen Krupp and JFE Steel, BASF and Mitsubishi Chemical, Siemens and Hitachi, Leica and Nikon, etc. Both countries recovered after WWII through their hardworking attitudes.

So says Ulrike Schaede, Professor of Japanese Business at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. However she also sees four fundamental differences, particularly with regard to the average white collar worker.

1. Life priorities

Most Germans (so long as they are not consultants or lawyers or top executives) will leave work somewhere between 5 and 6pm at night, so they can return home to eat dinner with their families or meet friends. However it is almost unheard of for a Japanese salaryman to leave at such a time on a regular basis. Even without counting “service” overtime (unpaid) that most Japanese put in, the average working year is 350 hours longer in Japan than in Germany.

This is because Germans believe that they have a contract which pays them for 40 hours of work a week with their employer and therefore if an employer wants more hours, then they should pay more. If a Germany employee can’t finish all their work on time, then they will either try to work more efficiently, even skipping lunch, or they will blame the employer for giving them too much work to do.

Work life balance in Japan has come to mean how to have better day care facilities so women can work, but in Germany it means a good balance between work and private life for all employees.

2. Process and result

Both Japanese and Germans believe there is a correct way of doing things. Consumers read instructions for the products they have bought and workers obey the rules. But the big difference is that Germans also value the result and getting to the result in the most efficient way. So they are fine if someone finds a quicker way to do something. If too long is taken on a business process, they start to become impatient. in fact they become downright rude. However for the Japanese, the process is just as important as the result. It should always be done the same way by everyone, then no one will feel left out. For a new way to be accepted, everyone has to agree. There is no room for individual initiative.

3. Say what you think

Germans on average are much more direct than most other nationalities. In fact they like to share opinions with others. Japanese people feel “debate”has negative connotations. Schaede says she has found it very hard to have discussions about politics world affairs or business with Japanese people, which to Germans means it is hard to make friends.

4. Customer service

German customer service is the exact opposite of Japanese customer service. Whereas a Japanese server might say ” I am sorry to have kept you waiting”, in Germany the customer expects to have to wait to be served. In fact if you turn up too close to closing time in a shop, you might be refused service. The belief is that shop assistants have rights too – to go home on time. There is no concept that the customer is more important than the employee.

As Schaede says – and as a cross cultural consultant, who am I to disagree – there are two learnings from this. One is the importance of understanding cross cultural differences at a profound level if you are going to do business across borders. The second is that when you have a multicultural team each will have different priorities and different processes to reach a result. These are deep rooted and it will be difficult to bring everyone round to one point of view.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries – feminise and foreign-ise to stop being fossilised

The cover story for the Nikkei Business magazine (JPNS) for October 20th 2014 is somewhat doom and gloom,claiming that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ reforms were too slow, and it’s now in the last chance saloon. The four part special includes an interview with the president, Shunichi Miyanaga, who has been leading the reforms and also a handy checklist so you can make sure your Japanese company hasn’t also become fossilised like MHI. One of the items on the list is whether “You have lots of Japanese expatriate staff, and the local hires view them as the secret police”

The online counterpart to Nikkei Business also has an interview with Christina Ahmadjian, an American who has lived in Japan for 17 years and is now a professor at Hitotsubashi University, who was appointed as an external, or “outside” as they say in Japan,director of MHI in 2012. She’s also on the board of Eisai, the Japanese pharmaceuticals company. Needless to say, she speaks fluent Japanese – and was also an “accidental Office Lady” in her past, at Mitsubishi Electric.

She termed MHI “super-Japanese” for its slow decision making and initially did not want to take up the role. Her friends cautioned her, saying there are plenty of other Japanese companies who are more advanced in their reforms that she should consider. However the then President and chairman took her presentation to the board very seriously, which led her to decide to “try it for a year, and quit if it didn’t work out”.

She continues this un-Japanese attitude by regularly asking in board meetings “who is accountable” and asks for specific commitments from anyone who uses the typical Japanese vague term “kento shimasu” (we will study this further). She also insists that strategic rather than technology related subjects are discussed in the board meetings.

President Miyanaga has also changed the board meetings, through reorganising the company into four domains, and decreasing the representatives accordingly to the board, which has allowed for smoother discussions. Ahmadjian says she is surprised by the speed at which Miyanaga has moved, and also how careful he is to share all information with her, including on any M&A activities. Previously, Japanese companies had been reluctant to involve external directors as they were concerned that confidential matters would be leaked.

Nonetheless, MHI is still slow compared to the foreign competition, she says. MHI is beginning to appoint non-Japanese to senior positions overseas but there is a lack of candidates internally. It’s not always the case that it is easier to get rid of people in foreign companies, she argues – in Europe the unions can be very strong and she suggests that some Japanese companies are using legal barriers as an excuse not to restructure, and are in fact “zombie” companies.

“I am a watch dog, making sure MHI do not slack off on their reforms” she concludes.

Marketing in Japan the Kit Kat way

At my last workplace it became a custom in our global marketing team for anyone visiting Japan to bring back the latest Kit Kat flavour – green tea, cherry blossom and even edamame (soy bean) flavour. As a mainly British team, we found it bizarre to see what seemed to us an iconic British brand become so utterly Japanese.

Of course the Kit Kat brand is actually owned by a Swiss company, Nestle. The President of Nestle Japan, Kozo Takaoka, turns out to be the person who instigated the campaign, turning Kit Kat into a premium brand, to the surprise of the Swiss headquarters. The editor of Nikkei Business Kenji Tamura asked Takaoka in a recent interview if this meant European marketing was not as advanced as Japanese believed.

Takaoka’s response is that Nestle HQ itself is beginning to wonder if marketing has become bloated. The marketing costs for Nescafe, for example, cover 100 countries and 100 flavours of Nescafe. Advertising is still effective in developing countries, but no longer in matured markets. TV advertising and celebrity endorsement worked in Japan during the period of rapid economic growth, but this method is no longer persuasive, Takaoka believes.

“Marketing is the management of the company” says Takaoka, because to manage a company you have to innovate to produce new value and work out how to get that to the customer. “Up until now this kind of marketing was lacking in Japan. We have continued with the developing country model. We don’t seem to be able to escape from that model – that we just need to make products and then advertise them” – words that will resonate with my former marketing team colleagues I suspect.

Lessons from the Netherlands for Womenomics in Japan

The Netherlands has the largest proportion of part time workers who are women amongst the 34 OECD countries – 61.1% compared to 36.2% in Japan, which is ranked 7th. The employment rate for women is 69.6% (6th out of 34) in the Netherlands, compared to 63.2% (#15) in Japan.

One major difference between the two countries which helps account for this is that in the Netherlands, women can change from full time to part time work with the same employer without losing any of their benefits as permanent full time members of staff.

The Nikkei Business magazine describes days in the lives of several Dutch women, who have high profile, senior jobs, but work 4 days a week and pick their children up from school on their bicycles. It points out that if Abenomics is really to achieve its goal of 30% of managerial positions to be occupied by women by 2020, the whole of Japan is going to have to be much more flexible in its working arrangements, otherwise “it’s just building castles in the sky”.

The Dutch work the fewest hours in the OECD, but average salaries are higher than Japan, showing that they are highly productive. Dutch cannot understand the Japanese concept of “service overtime” (doing unpaid overtime to show loyalty to the company).

There is also very little in the way of Japanese style seniority based pay. The same pay for the same work has deep roots in Dutch society.

Part time employment boomed in the 1950s in the Netherlands to enable young childless women to work in a time of labour shortage. In the 1970s, with deindustrialization, part time work became more common in the service sector. However women were meant to stay at home to look after the children. The turning point came in the early 1980s. After the oil shock, the Netherlands lost industrial competitiveness, and there was negative GDP growth, but wages did not fall, known as the Dutch Disease. The Wassenaar Agreement of 1982 between employers’ organisations and the unions exchanged wage restraint for increasing part time work and shorter hours and thereby reducing unemployment and inflation. This also had the consequence of enabling women to take up employment.

There was a gap in benefits for part time and full time employees, just as in Japan now, but from the 1990s the concept of equal pay for equal work was promoted. Furthermore, the Working Hours Adjustment Law of 2000 means that employees have the right to adjust what working hours they will do in agreement with their bosses, eliminating “service overtime”.

The Dutch government has also invested heavily in childcare provision, but as the Nikkei Business magazine says, the biggest difference with Japan is the role that men play. It is much more acceptable in Dutch society for men to choose their working pattern based on childcare needs. The norm is for 2 working parents to do 1.5 of a full time job. And of course working from home is much more accepted than in Japan. “Without an environment where men can participate in childcare, childcare services and a revision of working hours, there is no way Japanese women will be working more than they currently do. It has taken the Dutch 30 years to change their labour market, and this raises questions for Japan” concludes Nikkei Business.

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