No surprises that the 5 Presidents of Japanese companies who topped the Nikkei’s survey of who got the most media coverage in Japan in 2012 include Masayoshi Son of Softbank, Tadashi Yanai of Uniqlo and Hiroshi Mikitani of Rakuten.
Son is described as the “uber gaijin” by fellow “famous gaijin” TV commentator Dave Spector in the Nikkei Business magazine article accompanying the survey, being of Korean origin and educated at Berkeley rather than a Japanese university.
Along with Son, Yanai and Mikitani also have a global outlook and are assertive and vocal about globalizing their companies and having English as the corporate language but a very crude analysis (ie Google) shows that the other two more traditional executives in the top 5 – Masaaki Shirakawa of the Bank of Japan and Akio Toyoda of Toyota beat Yanai and Mikitani in English language coverage. Son’s bid for Sprint is probably raising his profile more outside Japan. In Japan he is particularly well known due to his extensive use of social media.
The three “fastest risers” were Eiko Harada, President of McDonald’s Japan, Haruaki Deguchi of Lifenet ( an upstart online life insurance company) and Shigetaka Komori of Fujifilm.
The two gaijin bosses in the top 100 are Carlos Ghosn of Nissan at #7 and Martin Jetter of IBM Japan at #91. Carlos Ghosn wallops everyone in terms of Google search results. No surprise I guess.
Masayoshi Son – #1 on 40,645 points (Nikkei),#2 411,000 Google web search results, 1480 Google news results
Masaaki Shirakawa – #2 on 11,424 points (Nikkei) #4 408,000 Google results, 343 Google news results
Tadashi Yanai – #3 on 1,624 points (Nikkei) #6 103,000 Google results, 268 Google news results
Akio Toyoda – #4 on 9088 points (Nikkei) #3 857,00 Google results, 861 Google news results
Hiroshi Mikitani – #5 on 7766 points (Nikkei), #5 191,000 Google results, 88 Google news results
Haruaki Deguchi – #6 on 7372 points (Nikkei) #7 9070 Google results, 0 Google news results
Carlos Ghosn – #7 on 6307 points (Nikkei), #1 2,120,000 on Google results, 5650 Google news results
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