Globalization

Estonia & European identity

I have been wanting to visit Estonia for a while. Although it is a tiny country, with only 1.3 million population, I knew from the research that had been done on my family history in the Baltic region that Estonia’s story would help me understand more about the development of Europe and whether there could be such a thing as a European identity or common culture.

So when I had an opportunity to visit the Estonian capital, Tallinn, for a conference recently, I made sure I had plenty of time for sightseeing. I know Japanese people often think of Europe as having a “stone culture” – buildings built to last, as opposed to buildings made of wood which can be pulled down as needed, and Estonia certainly fits that category, with plenty of beautiful churches and medieval houses built from the local limestone to visit.
However there were other aspects of Estonia which did not fit my usual concept of a European country. For example, Christianity came very late to Estonia, in the 13^th century, a thousand years after it arrived in Western Europe. It was a pagan country until it was conquered by the Northern Crusades, led by the Christian Kings of Denmark and Sweden and the Germany Livonian and Teutonic military orders (which is where my mother’s family had their roots). To this day Estonia is one of Europe’s least religious countries.

The late arrival of Christianity was partly because Estonia was never occupied by the Romans – unlike most other Western and Southern European countries. Estonia was, however, occupied by other countries for the past 700 years; Sweden, then Russia, then a brief moment of independency in the 1920 and 1930s, then Germany and then most recently by Communist Russia, when it was part of the Soviet Union.

The Russians tried to industrialise what was basically an agricultural and trading economy, setting up factories and mines, bringing in many Russians to work in them. Initially Estonia was seen as a prosperous place to emigrate to but the industrialization was not successful, and the Estonian economy suffered, particularly as its usual trade routes to the West had been cut off.

It was when I wandered around the old merchant houses of Tallinn that I felt I was in a recognisably European environment. The merchants of Tallinn were part of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of merchants and towns that stretched across many countries of Northern Europe, from the UK to Russia from the 13^th to the 17^th centuries.

Even now, with the rise of anti-European movements in the UK and the Netherlands, most people would want to stay in some kind of trade federation. The region’s history of trading and shipping, travelling and migrating around Europe and a love of doing deals with each other is still very strong. It’s an identity nobody in Europe wants to lose.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in Japanese in the 7th November 2013 edition of Teikoku Databank News and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

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Balkanizing Europe – in a good way

On the way to the stunning Krka waterfalls in Croatia, from where we staying on the Adriatic coast for our holidays last summer, our tour guide suddenly said “we are now in the Balkan part of Croatia”. The term Balkan has many resonances for Europeans who know their history. Not only is it 20 years since the war in the Balkan peninsular, but it is 100 years since WWI, which was thought to partly have been the result of “Balkanization”, whereby the countries, formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire or the Austro-Hungarian empire, fragmented into warring states. Clearly our guide wanted us to appreciate that Croatia was not just Balkan, but also Mediterranean, and therefore part of modern Europe.

The warring Balkan states were in part reunified under the Soviet Union after WWII and most Western Europeans of my generation remember the Adriatic coast as being part of Yugoslavia, and a cheap but pleasant place to go on holiday. Yugoslavia was meant to be one of the more benign and successful Soviet satellite countries, so it was a shock to Western Europeans when it collapsed into a bloody civil war.

Croatia became the most recent member to join the European Union, in 2013. Other Balkan countries such as Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro are official candidate countries, with Bosnia and Herzegovina being considered a “potential candidate”.

With the European Union in danger of falling apart itself, thanks to the Eurozone crisis and the UK referendum on exiting, the Balkan candidate countries must wonder what exactly the benefit of joining the EU might be. For them, the original aim of the European Union, to prevent outbreaks of further wars through economic cooperation, still has meaning, of course, given their recent history.

The benefits of economic cooperation are less obvious. It is clear from Croatia’s recent accession that joining the EU later on means missing out on the big regional business investments by multinationals. Balkan state populations and economies are relatively small, so there is not much incentive to invest substantially in opening a subsidiary in such countries – the markets could probably be easily covered through a local agent, or from a regional base in Germany or Poland.

Croatia still has a shipbuilding industry, representing 10% of its exports but clearly it has had to concede that a major economic driver is going to be tourism, as it was in the past. I saw plenty of Japanese tour groups there, and I expect, like us, they were impressed by the beauty and history of Croatia’s old towns, the delicious seafood and how clean and well looked after the streets and buildings were.

Above all what really struck me was the hardworking, efficient, polite, honest, well educated, excellent English ability and cheerful nature of all the Croatians we met. Although the Croatian market may not be attractive to foreign investment, the Croatian workforce certainly is.

I only hope that Europe can work towards a future where Balkanization has a new meaning – that people from the Balkans contribute to and benefit from the European single market – and not the old definition of a disintegration into hostile, ethnically cleansed states, yet again leading to the kind of war that the European Union was meant to prevent from ever happening again.

This article first appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News and is also in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.

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East meets East #3 Pork, guns and the Galapagos

My fantasy local start-up idea is a tonkatsu (Japanese deep fried breaded pork) restaurant, using outdoor bred Norfolk pork and Colman’s mustard (manufactured in Norwich) with a side order of locally grown shredded cabbage. *

Although tonkatsu is now viewed as a typical Japanese dish, in Japan it was originally a yoshoku “Western Style” dish, introduced into Japan in the 19^th century, when Japan began to open itself to foreign influence and trade again. Japan had cut itself off for the best part of three hundred years, with no foreigner able to enter or any Japanese leave the country under pain of death.

This law was put in place by the Tokugawa shoguns in the 17thc, to end the colonial and religious influence of Spain and Portugal and also to help the Shogun to gain more control over the foreign trading of other feudal lords, preventing them from building up military strength.

Trade did not cease entirely during this time – it was just heavily controlled – with Dutch and Chinese merchants being allowed to live on an artificial island off the coast of Nagasaki. Western scientific ideas also trickled into Japan, but largely undercover.

Consequently, when the Americans finally forced Japan open in the 19^th century, the Japanese found themselves far behind in military strength, still using matchlock guns from the 16^th century. Japan had also missed out on the industrial revolution, but quickly caught up, sending many of its brightest and best to Europe and the US to study technological developments, and bringing foreign experts back to work in Japan.

Post war Japan offers a more modern day insight into what happens if a trading nation like, oh, let’s say the UK, chooses to shut its borders to migration (98% of the Japanese population are of Japanese nationality) but tries to export as much as possible to the rest of the world. Initially, Japan won through with cheap, increasingly well-made products. As the pound is already falling with the threat of Brexit, presumably there will initially be some positive impact in terms of British exports becoming cheaper. Imports will however be correspondingly more expensive.

If houses prices weaken and the FTSE falls post Brexit, because of foreign investment pulling out of UK assets, then we might be faced with an asset price crash similar to when Japan’s economic bubble burst in 1990. In the years after, a large number of basic manufacturing jobs in Japan went offshore, to Asia. After a decade or so of deflation and low growth, some higher end manufacturing moved back, but factories are far more heavily automated, and robot driven than before.

Even though the UK is increasingly exporting more services than manufactured products, the same offshoring and automation threats will apply. In fact, we are already seeing this happening – recently HSBC announced that 840 IT back office jobs will be moved out of London to Poland and China and RBS have also announced similar reorganisations.

Other jobs which cannot be offshored (for example, warehousing, food harvesting and processing) – which were being done by immigrants – are also threatened by automation. My old employer Fujitsu has been pioneering an agriculture “cloud” which uses supercomputing and Big Data to allow elderly farmers to capture and automate their knowledge on when to sow, fertilise or harvest.

Where automation is impossible, Japan has also let occasional groups of immigrants in to do what are known as the 3 K jobs – Kitanai (dirty), Kitsui (hard) and Kiken (dangerous), such as in construction and nursing.

It’s possible British employers will also improve wages and conditions to attract indigenous British employees to our 3K jobs. However, as we are quite close to full employment already, this will in turn push prices up (and as noted, prices of imports are likely to rise too), so overall, people will not feel better off.

Japan used to be very expensive, but the 20-year stagnation has resulted in deflation, with 40% of its workforce in badly paid, insecure jobs and the other 60% with the secure jobs have seen their take home pay fall in real terms, despite deflation.

Innovation should be the way out, but actually Japan has a nickname for innovations that only sell well in Japan, because they were designed by Japanese for Japanese – the Galapagos syndrome – after the isolated islands where flora and fauna developed to fit local conditions, but die in the world outside.

*if anyone wants to take up this idea, I’d be delighted to act as advisor, for equity and a lifetime supply of meal vouchers (however, if the UK leaves the EU, starting in the Netherlands or Denmark might be preferable)

Mitsubishi Motors & Nissan – Is Ghosn prepared to try to nail jelly to the wall?

When it comes to the Mitsubishi group of companies (keiretsu), I did almost literally write the book (A History of Mitsubishi Corporation in London: 1915 to Present Day), although my focus was more on the way the pre-war Mitsubishi Goshi evolved into Mitsubishi Corporation, the trading company, and more specifically, its London office.

It’s generally perceived in Japan that the Mitsubishi keiretsu has been the most cohesive and robust of all the keiretsu (Mitsui, Sumitomo, Fuyo being the other main ones) but as you might imagine, the current Mitsubishi Motors fuel economy data manipulation scandal has put this to the test.

According to Nikkei Business magazine (April 22^nd edition, not available online), the cracks are appearing. Whereas in the previous Mitsubishi Motors crises (recalls for various defects in the 2000s) Mitsubishi Heavy, Mitsubishi Corporation and Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ all stepped in and financial support came from Tokio Marine, Mitsubishi Electric and Mitsubishi Materials as well, this time seems different.

Even now, having been hit by the commodity price slump, the automotive sector remains an important profit generator for Mitsubishi Corporation as it is involved in the sale and financing of vehicles in Asia and Europe as well as engine manufacture. Mitsubishi Corporation also seconds quite a few employees to Mitsubishi Motors, including the current Chairman and CEO Osamu Masuko.

Other Mitsubishi companies do not have such ties. Even though Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings supplies products to the automotive sector, its main customers are Toyota and Nissan. Mitsubishi Paper also said “we are busy with our own affairs”.

It’s not just about whether the companies have business together, points out the Nikkei. It’s also an issue of corporate governance. The Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group has been reducing cross shareholdings, where appropriate. Mitsubishi Corporation is also checking shareholdings regularly for rationale and yield and disposing of them as necessary. Presumably it is hard to justify “Protecting the Three Diamonds” as the sole reason for support, to external directors and shareholders.

The Nikkei sees this as a chance for the Mitsubishi group to embark on a delayed restructure [the article was written before Nissan stepped in to acquire a 34% share]. In previous restructurings, there was a discussion about selling off the largely domestic ‘mini-car’ business, so this might be finally realised.

A more recent article in the Nikkei Asian Review points out that a key question is whether Nissan’s CEO Carlos Ghosn’s aggressive brand of reform will suit the corporate culture at Mitsubishi Motors “where change is not exactly a buzzword”. The question I have is what the corporate culture of Mitsubishi Motors actually is, other than a reluctance to change. The lack of a clear definition of values and vision may indeed be one of the causes of the repeated scandals. There are the Mitsubishi Three Principles, but not all Mitsubishi companies showcase them, and they lack the strong philosophy and toolkit of something like the Toyota Way.

Along with my official book on Mitsubishi in London I wrote a further unpublishable chapter, called “The Vague Company”. It talked about the benefits and difficulties of having a vague, unspoken corporate culture. Employees can enjoy the sense of being treated like adults, to work out for themselves what the right “way” is, but it makes global expansion – particularly post-merger integration – highly frustrating, when new, hybrid cultures need to develop. As one frustrated American employee at another Mitsubishi group company said to me the other day “I can’t get a handle on what the Mitsubishi Way is”. It is, as we say in British English, like trying to nail jelly to a wall. I suspect Ghosn may quickly tire of this and use his hammer in more brutally effective ways.

For more on Mitsubishi Motors’ future, I recommend this blog post by my old friend and former head of corporate communications at Mitsubishi Motors in the Daimler Chrysler days, Jochen Legewie: http://www.cnc-communications.com/blog/the-future-of-mitsubishi-motors/

For more on Mitsubishi corporate culture, I have gathered some resources on Pinterest here

Why is there no Japanese word for ‘risk’?

Listening, or rather looking at the presentation of Kazumasa Yoshida, the CEO of Emergency Assistance Japan, I was yet again struck by the fact that there is no direct translation in Japanese for the English word “risk”. Yoshida even had a slide to define “risk”, with “risk” written as “リスク/risku” in katakana, which is the Japanese alphabet used for borrowed, foreign words. His definition of risk was the potential for a crisis to occur, which if then becomes reality, is a threat, and then when there is harm, is a crisis.

Crisis is “kiki/危機” in Japanese, and “kiki” is sometimes used instead of “risku”. This causes problems when trying to distinguish between risk management and crisis management in Japanese. Risk management then becomes two borrowed foreign words “リスク・マネジメント/risku manejimento” and crisis management is the entirely Japanese “kiki kanri/危機管理”.

I asked Yoshida why there was no word for risk in Japanese. He said it was indeed puzzling, when you considered how prone to natural disasters Japan was. His view was that it was something in the Japanese mind-set, that cannot deal with a crisis in advance, only if it happens in front of their eyes. This, he added, is why Japan has not coped so well in terms of preventing natural disasters from turning into wider crises, as with the Fukushima earthquake.

This kind of explanation can shade into the Myth of Japanese Uniqueness/Nihonjinron school of thought, which I am not so keen on. My preferred explanation is a mix of more universal psychological, geographical and religious influences. Most humans are bad at assessing and dealing with risk, vastly overestimating the probability of facing situations they cannot personally control (airplane crashes, terrorist attacks) and vastly underestimating the risk posed to them by situations they think they can control, such as crossing the road, or skiing. So it’s the very fact that Japan has had a history of massive and regular natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunami, that causes a numbness to set in. The Japanese expression “carp on a chopping board” springs to mind. Apparently carp, when faced with a chopping board, know the end is nigh, so stop fighting it and face the inevitable.

This kind of acceptance of fate, and seeing struggle as a waste of effort, is very much a Buddhist teaching. And yet, looking out of the window of a bullet train in Japan, you can see the enormous but often useless efforts being put into preventing a disaster from occurring or having an impact in Japan – the concreting of the bottoms of mountains and the sides of rivers to prevent landslides and flooding and the huge concrete boulders and walls that cover the coastline. But the markers left by previous generations who survived tsunami, warning that houses should not be built beyond that point, were ignored.

Japanese companies are riddled with processes for double and triple checking, imposed after a mistake has happened. When a mistake does happen, it is usually covered up rather than dealt with. A participant in one of my seminars told me how a misdirected client confidential fax, which ended up on the private fax machine of an elderly Japanese lady (fax machines are still quite common in private homes in Japan) resulted in the old lady ticking off a senior director, who then immediately imposed a “fax buddy” system on the entire company – Japan and overseas. Any employee sending a fax must be accompanied and monitored by another employee.

This story found its way into an article in the Nikkei Asia Review, by Michael Stott, a Financial Times journalist who heard it at one of our Japan Intercultural Consulting seminars in Japan. As his article observes, “the painstaking decision making processes, the elaborate corporate hierarchies, the extreme fear of failure and the entrenched conservatism have not changed much” for Japanese companies over the past couple of decades.

Yoshida had a clear recommendation for what Japanese companies should do, namely, appoint an executive to be responsible for “risk”. They should not be someone who has been moved horizontally away from business line management because they are deemed to be no longer effective (which would be a classic Japanese corporate resolution). They need to have the ear of the President and be able command business units on what they should do. It should therefore be an important and recognised role – either for a specialist, or be made as a precondition that any President should have occupied the role. And they should be someone who, as he put it, “doesn’t run away.”

Yoshida said the question he usually gets asked is how he ended up founding the company – which, as the name suggests, provides assistance to Japanese overseas who find themselves in life threatening situations. It would seem in itself to be a risky venture, given that Japanese notoriously won’t pay for something which is simply a service. As a consultant to Japanese companies, I do indeed recognise this problem. He said when he was working for Yamaichi Securities in Paris, he came across a similar French company and thought Japan could do with such a service and then what with one thing and another…

He did not need to specify – the name Yamaichi Securities alone tells the story for Japanese business people. It was one of the most famous casualties of the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the uncovering of illegal trading which in turn was covering up losses made on client accounts. The company’s last president made a famously tearful public apology on television. Unfortunately, lessons in managing risk do not seem to have been learned twenty years’ on, with a seeming procession of Japanese Presidents bowing their heads in shame at unanticipated risks and covered up mistakes which escalate into full blown crises. Judging by the other reactions to Yoshida’s presentation, the audience at least will be lobbying their companies to appoint a senior risk executive as a matter of urgency.

Bending over backwards to be inclusive

I was discussing with a client recently the way accepted terminology keeps changing in the UK business world. Apparently “flexible working” is now being renamed “agile working”. “Agile” working is meant to have a wider definition than flexible working – the idea being that the focus should be on performance and outcomes, allowing maximum flexibility on the who, what, when and where of executing the work. “Flexible” usually (as it does in Japan) means flexibility on the hours worked and tends to be used when workplaces are trying to be family friendly towards women. “Agile” working implies it is a way of working for every employee.

The client’s own job title was another indicator of change – “head of diversity and inclusion”. Diversity has become a more commonly used word in Japan now, mainly to mean gender diversity, but increasingly companies are looking at other kinds of diversity such as nationality or sexuality. The reason that “inclusion” has been added to “diversity” in the UK is to ensure that companies don’t just focus on targets for diversity, but also how the corporate culture should change to ensure that people with different backgrounds to the mainstream do not feel excluded from decision making or promotion or the everyday conversations and meetings that are going on around them.

I knew why these categories existed – because at the time, 99.9% of females were in administrative track jobs, and 100% of men were in management track jobs – so this was a simple way of indicating the ratio of administrative versus line management/sales people in the workforce. The Japan-employed and overseas employment figures aligned with the Japan parent company-only and consolidated accounting methods.

But it nonetheless made me feel like being female or “overseas” was a lower status. This has all changed now of course, as the distinction between administrative and management track lifetime employees in Japan has disappeared in many companies. With holding companies now being allowed in Japan, and changes in accounting methods, the parent vs consolidated accounting distinction for employees is also less meaningful than it used to be.

I still have Japanese clients consulting me about what to call their various categories of employees however. Some choose “rotating staff” to describe Japanese expatriates – but again this implies that anyone hired outside Japan has no chance of being posted elsewhere. One British employee complained to me about an email from Japan HQ which used the term “subordinate”. Even in British class ridden society, we prefer to call all employees “colleagues” or “team members”.

(This article first appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News in February 2016 and also appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.)

Japanese employees’ justified fear of being expatriated

Over 1 million Japanese people are living abroad, according to Diamond magazine, and the number of countries business people are being sent to is increasing each year. The era when only those who could speak foreign languages were sent abroad is over. However the number of people who want to work abroad is shrinking. When you ask why people are so negative about expatriation, the most common reason is “worries about my career when I return”.

Diamond gives the example of Mr D, born in Tokyo, who works for an automotive parts manufacturer and had never been abroad – his furthest business trip was to Osaka. He worked in the domestic manufacturing division Only his peers who had been good at languages or studied abroad were sent overseas so he never thought the day would come when he would be asked to transfer. But his company became partly owned by a foreign company and as a consequence some of their executives joined the management team. The President declared that he would like 30% of all employees to have had some kind of overseas experience, and that this was essential for the survival of the company. Mr D is waiting for his orders to go abroad. So far, none of his peers have refused the offer.

According to a global survey by UK recruitment company Hydrogen, the most popular destination for expatriation is the US, then the UK, Australia, Singapore and Canada. However by far the most rapid increase in expatriation is to Asia. Particularly for manufacturers, countries where there are factories are the most likely, so in Mr D’s case, his destination is likely to be Indonesia or Thailand.

But even if it was Europe or the US, would Mr D’s anxiety disappear? To Mr D, it makes no difference – all regions are “foreign”. Why did Mr D join a company where there was a high chance of being expatriated? It turns out it was the only company out of 200 that he applied to that made him a job offer in the post Lehman Shock recruitment Ice Age, so Mr D lied about being willing to go abroad.

Another reason for not wanting to go abroad is that most companies will refuse to set a time limit on how long the expatriation will be. This is due to the fact that they do not know how long it will take before the expatriate becomes effective in their job in the overseas subsidiary. Usually this is around 3-5 years. But sometimes expatriates end up overseas for more than 10 years, and the expatriation has become a “one way ticket”.

Mr D worries that even if his stint abroad is only 3 years, it will still be a “blank” in his career development. Particularly as there is major restructuring going on in the domestic operation and new products will be developed and old product lines disposed of while he is away. Staff who were working on products that were thought to be the heart and soul of the company found themselves being sidelined to “window gazing seats“.

Mr D fears not only that he won’t be able to return to his own division but that by being abroad for 3 years he will miss out on the new technologies being developed in Japan.

Rather than forcing Japan HQ staff to become more “global minded” by sending a large number of them abroad – an expensive and high risk strategy I would argue – why not bring more overseas employees and managers to Japan for short term secondments so they can absorb enough HQ knowledge that they can transfer to the local factories themselves when they return? If more non-Japanese employees work in Japan then the HQ will get used to being more globally minded. It would then only make sense to send Japanese HQ staff abroad who are clearly marked out for senior global management roles, so that their expatriation is seen as a career development step rather than a blank.

“Japanese companies are too scared to touch their overseas acquisitions” – Nidec’s Nagamori

Shigenobu Nagamori, the billionaire founder of the world’s biggest manufacturer of micro-motors for hard disks and optical drives, Nidec, has acquired more than 40 companies in Japan and overseas. He comments in a Nikkei Business article that “you cannot just leave foreign acquisitions alone to get on with things by themselves. You need thorough mutual understanding and to even replace management if necessary.”

“Although you no longer hear about Japanese companies sending lots of managers over to their overseas subsidiaries who end up issuing all sorts of misguided directions, you now hear of companies who say ‘we think the same way as the counterpart management’ and so decide to buy the company and then just leave the management as is.”

“This is an illusion. Actually they are being left alone because the Japanese company doesn’t really understand what they are doing. It ends up with compromising on the necessary management reforms and profit targets.”

“I have regrets myself. We acquired 10 or so companies in Europe and North America from about 2010. We were warned by various companies who had M&A experience and financial institutions that we couldn’t restructure foreign companies the way we would Japanese acquisitions and that it was best to ‘leave it up to the foreigners’ otherwise they will quit”

“I thought that was true at the time. I also took on board the advice that Japanese managers needed to be people with Harvard degrees and a network amongst foreign executives.”

“However one company did not make any improvement no matter how often I set profit targets. I thought there must be something wrong with the company management as such a company should as a matter of course achieve profit margins over 15% but I was told that it was the limit for their industry.”

“In Japan you would try to persuade the management to adopt our “kaizen” knowhow (knowledge of how to improve) but we hit a wall with this in the West. So in 2012 we changed the management of the acquired company. But you can’t do it like pulling a trigger. I make a point of visiting each company at least once a year and have dinner not just with the executives but also the managers and discuss things with them. I also encourage them to send emails directly to me and I respond to them. I am trying to understand all the ideas people have for improving profitability.”

“It’s important that people in the company understand my thinking and I understand whether they are capable of understanding. If they are then it doesn’t matter if the CEO is changed. ”

“It’s the same in Japan. Communication is important. If you just cut back costs and improve profit, the company will not survive in the long term. Where is there waste, how can we make the most profitable products – the basics are the same in Japan or elsewhere. If this is understood, then overseas companies can be reformed too.”

“I think Japanese companies are too scared to touch their overseas subsidiaries. They overthink the differences. I used to be like that, but there is no need. The basics of management are the same everywhere.”

Will there be a return on sending Japanese interns abroad?

Sending Japanese students abroad as interns has become very popular in the past year or so, according to Nikkei Business. The Uniqlo brand owner Fast Retailing sends around 73 students a year to Singapore, London and Melbourne. Sompo Japan Nipponkoa despatched 10 interns to Singapore earlier this year and Softbank has sent 5 interns to work for its Sprint subsidiary in Kansas.

It is seen as one solution to the shortage of graduates who have overseas experience or the interest in working abroad. Most “global minded” graduates head for prestigious and well paid trading company jobs. Returns on the hefty investment in such internships are not guaranteed however. Whether enough interns actually then join the companies who sponsored them, or whether a short internship is any substitute for prolonged periods of study abroad is not yet clear. My view is that Japanese companies should invest similarly in internships for non-Japanese recruits or at least offer short secondments to Japan as part of their graduate induction programmes, if they are really serious about making their Japan HQs more globally minded.

Inclusive words

Sometimes I find myself thinking that all this emphasis on terminology is irritating and a distraction, but then I remember what it felt like to be a foreign employee in a Japanese company headquarters. I have no complaints about the way I was personally treated, but I regularly used to point out, when asked for my input into English language documents like the annual report – that it seemed alienating to people outside of Japan if employees were broken down into male/female, or Japan-employed and overseas-employed. I knew why these categories existed – because at the time, 99.9% of females were in administrative track jobs, and 100% of men were in management track jobs – so this was a simple way of indicating the ratio of administrative versus line management/sales in the workforce. The Japan-employed and overseas employment figures aligned with the tantai (unitary – Japan entity only) and renketsu (consolidated) accounting methods.

But it nonetheless made me feel like being female or “overseas” was a lower status. This has all changed now of course, as the distinction between administrative and management track seishain (lifetime employees) has disappeared in many companies. With holding companies now being allowed, and changes in accounting methods, the tantai and renketsu distinction for employees is also less meaningful than it used to be.

Category: Globalization