Japanese business in Europe

Getting to know the Japanese customer

The party trick of a president of a Japanese engineering company I knew was to recite off by heart all the birthdays, universities and family details of his key clients. To him this was a critical part of the long term business relationships he had built up with his clients – something his father, who founded the company – had also done.

This may not be so unusual even for a Western salesman, particularly these days with LinkedIn and Facebook providing so much detail on individuals. I sense, however, that Western companies who supply to Japanese companies are nowhere near equal to Japanese suppliers in their intimate understanding of the Japanese client company as a living entity – its history and its personalities.

Japanese suppliers have an ‘unfair’ advantage in that there is so much published (in Japanese) about Japanese business. Not only are there all the daily and weekly publications of the Nikkei group, to which this newspaper belongs, but, if I can be allowed to mention it, other rival business magazines and daily specialist newspapers. The attention of younger generations may be shifting to digital media, but Japan still has one of the highest readerships of newspapers and magazines in the world.

Japanese blue chips are still so much part of people’s daily lives as lifetime employers, providers of benefits such as accommodation and even spouses – as well as defining one’s status in society – that very few Japanese companies need to worry about what their levels of “brand awareness” are amongst the Japanese populace.

Outside Japan it is entirely different of course. All too often the name is familiar, but when asked exactly what the company provides, the average non-Japanese consumer hesitates. Many Japanese companies are aware that they have a name recognition problem overseas, but are not sure what to do about it and it is often not in their nature, or the nature of their executives to trumpet themselves loudly, especially not in English.

As a result, if you want to supply to a Japanese company inside or outside Japan, you need to understand that the Japanese company does not see the need to explain itself or does not know how to explain itself. It somehow expects you to know. The fact that you are reading this newspaper is a start, but you may also wish to make it a daily habit to search the English version of Nikkei.com as well for customer names and competitor names.

As Japanese companies have been through upheavals since the economic bubble burst in 1990 and the Asian banking crisis in 1997, some understanding of who merged with whom and where the power consequently lies (again, second nature to most Japanese suppliers) needs to be grasped.

It would also be a mistake to imagine that all Japanese companies are alike in their overseas operations. If they expanded overseas by acquisition, they may behave just like a local customer, and the purchasing manager may well be non-Japanese. However, at some point, the Japanese corporate culture will kick in, and identifying those moments when the Japanese way of doing things has taken hold will be key to avoiding unnecessary frustration and misunderstanding.

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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Processes and rules – the emphasis on ‘kata’

Japan is usually presented as a highly process-oriented society. One example of this is the emphasis given to kata, form or way of doing something in Japanese martial arts, over the actual result. Martial arts training consists of repeating the same action over and over again until a desired body position and movement is achieved and has become second nature to the practitioner.

I have bitter memories of the weekly kanji tests I used to fail when I went to Japanese elementary school. I thought the characters I wrote looked the way they were supposed to, but the teacher would mark them as incorrect; somehow she knew I had drawn the strokes in the wrong order. There is one, and only one, right way of doing things in many areas of Japanese society.

Maybe this is why a Japanese acquaintance said that when he alights at Heathrow Airport, he breathes a sigh of relief that he is now in a country where he can relax. He was replying to a comment I had made that when I reach Narita International Airport, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I am now in a country where everything works.

Many British working for Japanese companies, while recognizing the attention to detail and highly disciplined work ethic of their Japanese colleagues, also complain that Japanese are often less respecting of British rules and processes. When I ask for more details of the situations in which British rules or processes are bypassed, it usually turns out that a customer or someone else inside the company has asked for an exception to be made. Deadlines that were supposedly set in stone suddenly become flexible.

As the customer is not just king in Japan but “god,” it is easy to understand why rules are easily broken for customers, but the exceptions made for colleagues are less excusable in the eyes of many British people. The British sense of fairness kicks in, and any attempt to ignore rules governing the treatment of people is seen as unfair or evidence of favoritism.

British people regularly flaunt work-related rules or crash processes, however – whether it be in customer service or on the factory floor – if they think the result is the same, or, less admirably, if it makes life easier and they can get away with it. They do not unquestioningly obey rules and processes the way Japanese workers are taught to.

One British manager with Japanese subordinates told me how delighted he was with his Japanese team. “You tell them, just once, about a process that needs to be done each day and they will do it, exactly how you told them, without fail,” he said. “There’s no need to check up on them all the time. In fact, I even forgot to tell them not to do it any more when it was no longer necessary and, of course, discovered they were still doing it months later.”

With his British team members, he not only has to regularly check that processes are being implemented but must ensure that the way he checks, and any ensuing discipline or reward dished out, is seen as transparent and fair.

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

There is no excuse for not having an umbrella in Japan

Japanese people who have recently arrived in the UK often wonder why British people do not use their umbrellas when it rains. I think this is partly to do with the different type of rain we have in the UK. Our weather forecasts are usually for “light showers” or “sunny intervals” or “occasional rain”. We do not have the “40% probability of rain” forecasts that you get in Japan. When it rains, it is usually not very heavy or very prolonged, unlike Japan in the rainy season. So British people can’t be bothered to carry or put up their umbrellas. The chances are it won’t rain at precisely the moment we are outside, and even if it does, it won’t be very heavy, so we will soon dry off, whereas in Japan, if it is summer, it is so humid, you can end up being damp all day if you get wet just once.

This British “can’t be bothered”, phlegmatic mentality does not work so well in Japan. There is no excuse other than that you are stupid or disorganised if you do not have an umbrella when the weather forecast says there is an 80% chance of rain.

Similarly, there is no excuse other than lack of self discipline if you are late for work or a meeting with a customer. Trains in Japan run on time. In the UK, our train systems are unreliable, and traffic congestion is a perennial problem, thanks to road works which take place during the day rather than at night as in Tokyo.

The further south you go in Europe, the less worried people are about punctuality and deadlines; what is known in Spain as the “mañana” (tomorrow, later, in the future) attitude. British people, who are of course northern European, want to be punctual but rarely are. We have almost given up trying because inevitably something will prevent us from being on time. We feel upset by being late, so we end up explaining in some detail what went wrong, to which the correct response, in the British mind, is sympathy. However, as I explained in a previous article in this series, such explanations can sound like iiwake (pointless excuses) in Japan.

A clinical trials manager at a Japanese pharmaceuticals company in the UK told me how a drugs trial she was conducting ended up being invalid, because a large number of the participants failed to complete all the tests. They simply did not turn up, because their car had broken down, they were hung-over, the trains weren’t running and so on. Her Japanese colleagues were not sympathetic. In Japan, participants would turn up. They felt she must have managed the trial badly, and indeed, I think she should have signed up even more participants than she did, as it could have been anticipated that a large percentage would drop out. It is best to be over-cautious, not optimistic, in setting deadlines when working with Japanese people, especially if part of your supply chain is in Europe.

Category: Japanese business in Europe

Getting to know the Japanese customer

Processes and rules – the emphasis on ‘kata’

There is no excuse for not having an umbrella in Japan

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