Japanese customers

Japanese companies in the UK 20 years on

After a three year gap due to the pandemic, my company has rejoined the Japanese Chamber of Commerce in the UK. My company was the first non-Japanese company, with no Japanese nationals working for it, to be allowed to become a member in 2004. This followed a change in the rules, in reaction to declining membership.

Back then, such non-Japanese companies were classified as “associate” members, and my company was allocated to the “local entrepreneurs” group. This time, we were allowed to join as a full member and we are in the “professional services” group.

Both the professional services group and the local entrepreneurs group have grown over the three years we were absent. Partly this was due to the pandemic, during which the Chamber meetings took place online, including for members of the Chamber to introduce their services through online webinars. This meant that members had the benefit of being able to promote their services and network with potential clients without having to attend Chamber meetings in London in person. Some members do not even have UK bases, because they can offer their services remotely.

Marketing to “Japanese” companies in the UK has to be much more than just being able to communicate in Japanese

The distinction between Japan originated and local companies is also blurring. Many of the traditional Japanese companies in the UK are not members of the chamber – I suspect not only because they are not based in London, but also because their senior executives are not Japanese. This localization continues, even for traditional Japanese companies based in London.

Trying to define membership by expatriate status of key managers has also become difficult. Looking at the latest Ministry of Foreign Affairs data for long term (mostly Japanese corporate expatriates) and permanent resident Japanese nationals in the UK, Germany and France, it is clear that if present trends continue, the number of permanent resident Japanese will outstrip the number of long term visa holding Japanese within the next five years in all three countries.

Local professional services companies who target Japanese companies have benefitted from this trend in that they can hire permanent resident Japanese people as employees, bringing with them Japanese language ability. However, as I have also experienced, the blurring of distinctions between Japanese and British, and increased familiarity with each other, means that marketing to “Japanese” companies in the UK has to be much more than just being able to communicate in Japanese.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in Japanese in the Teikoku Databank News on 14th August 2024

For more content like this, subscribe to the free Rudlin Consulting Newsletter. 最新の在欧日系企業の状況については無料の月刊Rudlin Consulting ニューズレターにご登録ください。

“Why is our Japan sales team so useless?”

I am asked a variant of this question, several times a year, by Western companies with sales subsidiaries in Japan. They may not say “useless” as such, rather complain about the passivity, and lack of interest in trying something new in their Japanese team.

The Western managers feel obliged to visit Japan once or twice a year. They make visits to the same prospects, where they present their thoughts on what is going on in the industry and new offerings from their company. They are listened to politely but no business results from it. Or they explain the marketing strategy and new approaches to the Japan sales team and there is no engagement at all. Instead they receive a list of what seem like trivial customer complaints.

Of course if you talk to the Japan sales team, they have their own frustrations about the lack of understanding on the Western side about how sales and marketing works in Japan.

So here are the 3 issues that face sales and marketing teams of Western companies in Japan and what to do about it:

1 – They’re not as elite as their customers

Unless it’s a very well known company like an American tech company or one of the big consultants, a Western company in Japan is unlikely to be able to attract people who have graduated from Japan’s top universities. This means their employees cannot access an old boys’ network to open doors. And even if they do manage to get in front of a potential blue chip client, they are probably already feeling pretty intimidated, added to which, in Japan, the customer is not just king, but god.

2 – The dead hand of eigyō

Eigyō is the term used to describe the sales function in Japan, but it tends to be more about relationship building with existing customers – which means regular visits to customers for no particular reason, passive and predictable “order taking” and a lot of hospitality. It’s difficult to acquire new customers, as most established companies are in long term supplier relationships. A top salesperson in Japan is traditionally considered to be the person who is out of the office all day, doorstepping and cold calling, no matter how hopeless the situation, leaving their business card and brochures with icy receptionists in the hope that one day, maybe, they’ll be invited in.

So there is nothing very strategic behind targeting and acquiring new customers other than dogged persistence. This means that many marketing concepts that are commonly used in the West are not common knowledge in Japan, such as value proposition, USP or the 5Ps.

3 – Over-servicing

Japanese customers would expect a Western company to be sticklers for sticking to the contract, and delivering only what is paid for. There’s also a nervousness that if things go wrong, a Western supplier will sue, or disappear. Japanese suppliers are meant to stick with their customers through thick and thin, customising when asked, continuing with products and services that are unprofitable because the customer wants them and over-servicing in the hope that the cost can be recouped, some time in the far distant future.

So what can Western companies do about this?

Hire the rebels and treat them as equals

Many Japanese women are attracted to working in foreign companies because they assume they will be treated more fairly, and indeed many have reached senior positions in foreign companies such as Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group and Accenture. Unfortunately Japanese companies have woken up to this and are now trying to lure them back. But Japanese women will be well aware of the barriers they will face to being treated as equals to lifetime employees in such companies. So making sure that your Western company is as inclusive of them as possible in terms of career development, including international postings and training (particularly in marketing), and ensuring their voice is heard at top level meetings, will be key to retaining them and reminding them of what attracted them to a foreign company in the first palce.

And this goes for the older male employees too. They may have been lifetime employees at a big name company and were hired by a Western company for their connections and industry knowledge. They were probably frustrated in their careers at their Japanese company and saw joining a foreign company as a risk, but a chance to start again. You may discover there were some valid reasons why they were not successful in their careers in their Japanese company, but there will still be a value in their knowledge and experience, and their rebellious mindset might offer some creative solutions.

Be innovative

About the only acceptable reason in Japan for taking on a new supplier, especially a foreign one, is that they offered something that existing Japanese suppliers did not – Salesforce.com is an example of this. Being radically cheaper, like Amazon Web Services, can also work, but is not an avenue open to all companies. Japanese companies are very risk averse, so will assume the cheapness comes with a price in terms of quality.

But this still requires putting the effort in – such as the seemingly pointless regular visits to Japan give your sales team a reason to set up a meeting with potential clients, on the promise of a new perspective or innovative offering.

Break the rules

You can also use the ugly foreigner technique. Japan has a long history of letting the foreigner say the thing that everyone knew, but didn’t want to say out loud for fear of upsetting the rest of the group. Foreigners also get a certain number of get out of jail free passes for ignoring local protocols, so long as it was done from open hearted enthusiasm rather than malign intent.

One British Japan market entry expert told me he spotted a prospective customer from the signs on the office building his taxi had stopped outside. He persuaded the terrified Japanese sales person he was in the taxi with to accompany him into the building, and made his pitch in good Japanese to the receptionist, who was sufficiently impressed that she contacted the person in charge, and a few meetings later they had a new customer.

Japanese companies such as Fujitsu are also losing patience with the old eigyō, over-servicing ways. Fujitsu has renamed employees in eigyō “business producers” and are encouraging them to take a more consultancy based approached, banning them from taking systems engineers with them to client meetings. “Business producer” may not be a common term in Western sales but Fujitsu has chosen to render it as “Bijinesu purodyu-sa-” ビジネスプロデューサー in katakana, which is the alphabet reserved for borrowed foreign words. The foreign-ness presumably makes it seem like a necessary break from the past.

“Everyone has responsibility, but nobody can take responsibility” – the roots of nemawashi

One of the most practised concepts in Japanese business is nemawashi, often described as “Japanese style consensus building”. Sometimes explanations go further, getting into the word’s literal meaning- to dig around the roots of a tree in preparation for transplantation. When I talk about nemawashi in my training sessions, I try to create a more vivid image by pointing out that if you want to transplant a mature tree, just yanking the tree out of the ground by the trunk will kill it. The metaphor holds if the goal is to transplant a new idea in a Japanese company. If you were approach whoever you think has the decision making authority (‘the trunk’) and obtain only their approval, it is likely the decision would die in implementation, because you did not get the understanding or agreement of all the other people likely to be affected or interested (the roots).

Europeans do consensus too…

Europeans from consensus oriented national cultures like those of the Netherlands and Sweden, respond to this lesson by saying “well of course, we would always do this kind of consensus building anyway, it’s common sense.” In the Netherlands, consensus-based decision making is known as the polder model. Polders are low lying tracts of reclaimed land protected from the sea by dykes. In the past, all Dutch, regardless of whether they were peasants or noblemen, whether they lived on or near the polders, had to reach a consensus on how to protect them, and everyone had to be involved in carrying out the plan, otherwise all would suffer. Nowadays the word describes the kind of political consensus reached between government, the unions and business to adjust wages or social benefits or environmental protection.

…but it’s differently interpreted

Both Dutch and Japanese would therefore say they have a long history of consensus based decision making, but a study published in the Journal of Management Studies* concludes that “the concept of consensus is interpreted quite differently by Japanese and Dutch managers.” In Japanese companies, nemawashi is carried out through a series of informal, often one-on-one discussions, so that there is already a consensus when the meeting to discuss the “transplantation” is held. The meeting, then, is more about formally recognising the decision. In Dutch companies, the consensus is reached during a meeting, often through quite heated debate. Also, the Japanese managers demand a more complete consensus, whereby all agree, including other departments, whereas Dutch “appreciate the process of trying to reach consensus, but when a difference of opinion persists, the decision is taken by someone”.

This someone would therefore be expected to take responsibility for the decision, if things were to go wrong. In Japan, the view is that a comprehensive consensus is necessary to avoid putting the decision maker and the company at risk, and to preserve harmony and the employee loyalty. Given the time and care taken to get such a comprehensive consensus in Japan, once a decision is made, there is no turning back. To the Dutch, this is symptomatic of Japanese companies, where “everyone has responsibility, but nobody can take responsibility”.

*Comprehensiveness versus Pragmatism: Consensus at the Japanese-Dutch Interface, Niels G. Noorderhaven, Jos Benders and Arjan B. Keizer, Journal of Management Studies, 2007

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”

Not just Toyota – the Brexit rebalancing has already started

Toyota‘s warnings at Davos that it was having to consider how to survive in the UK after Brexit were preceded by a very under-the-radar announcement that it would be making some redundancies at its Burnaston plant. It is a sign of what is to come for Japanese companies in the UK and our research (see below) shows that a rebalancing is already being undertaken by many. Whereas Japanese companies increased their employment across Europe, Middle East & Africa by nearly 10% from 2015 to 2016, UK employment levels remained unchanged.*

Toyota said that a reduction was necessary as the initial burst of production needed for new models introduced in 2015 is now stabilising. Indeed, Toyota’s total workforce in the UK had already fallen by 3.6% in 2015/6 and by 9% across Europe.

Now it is clear that the UK really will leave the Single Market and the Customs Union, where there are long term trends in place already, such as automation or phasing in and out of models, Brexit will provide the impetus to rebalance resources across Europe and beyond, to maintain integration in the Single Market or ease of serving other growth markets if Europe disintegrates further and/or growth slows. Hardline Brexiters, Trump and Putin may welcome the disintegration of regional arrangements, but multinationals are moving in the opposite direction, integrating their operations regionally and globally both in terms of supply chains and people.

Fujitsu already made similar move in announcing 1800 redundancies in the UK in October 2016 – part of 3300 job losses across Europe. It stated it was not related to the Brexit referendum result, but part of a longer term transformation programme – mainly to do with moving more of its IT services support to lower cost bases.

Our latest compilation of the Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe and the UK – now most annual reports for year ending March 2016 have been published – shows that this process had indeed started before the referendum. Fujitsu has reduced its workforce in the region it calls EMEIA (Europe, Middle East, India and Africa) by 3% from 2015/2016 and in the UK (in which it was possibly overweight anyway, thanks to the legacy of having acquired ICL) by far more – 15%.

Fujitsu is still the biggest Japanese employer in the UK, with over 10,000 employees, but if it dips much below 8000 as a result of the latest round of redundancies, then Nissan, currently with 7,657 employees, might well overtake it. Nissan’s UK workforce grew 2.9% in 2015/6 and actually shrank across Europe by 2% in the same period. Calsonic Kansei, one of Nissan’s key suppliers, also grew its workforce by 10% in the UK to 1,729. Presumably this will hold until the new Nissan models will come online in 2019 giving a year or two of high production and sales, until, well, see Toyota above. As previously posted, car manufacturers operate on the basis that a factory needs to serve a market of at least 100 million consumers in order to be sustainable. The EU qualifies, as does Russia – but the UK on its own does not.

Other big increases in the UK workforce were due to acquisitions – Mitsui Sumitomo & Aioi Nissay Dowa group acquiring Lloyds underwriters Amlin and Insure The Box, Softbank acquiring ARM and Dentsu Aegis acquiring various agencies in Europe and the US, absorbing their UK workforce with it. Organic growth highlights were Hitachi (18.8% up) – building on its Hitachi Rail acquisitions – soon to be employing 900 at its Newton Aycliffe plant, Ricoh (up 11% in the UK but only 1% in Europe) and Fast Retailing, expanding their Uniqlo and Comptoir des Cotonniers retail business, with 1100 employees, up from 700 the previous year.

However Hitachi expanded 70% across Europe, presumably due to the acquisition of Ansaldo rail businesses in Italy and NTT Data also expanded across Europe by 20% to 18,000 employees (NTT Data’s UK workforce is surprisingly small compared to Fujitsu, at around 450 as of 2015). Automotive supplier Yazaki grew by almost a quarter, to reach 45,200 – a large part of this being its manufacturing in Eastern Europe and North Africa – similar locations to the largest Japanese employer in Europe, Sumitomo Electric Wiring, whose workforce shrank slightly to 56,273.

What next for the UK and Japanese companies in Europe?

I would give up any hope of expanding automotive manufacturing in the UK. As outlined above, the shift eastwards in Europe, to Turkey and also to north Africa has already taken place. Which would seem to negate the need for suppliers to be in the Single Market, but note that the EU already has free trade deals with Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria and Turkey is in a customs union with the EU. Yazaki (headquartered in Germany) and Sumitomo Electric Wiring (tripartite headquarters across Italy, UK and Germany) used to have manufacturing in the UK but are now largely focused on pre-sales engineering. Calsonic Kansei still has manufacturing in the UK, but has recently invested in plants in Spain and Russia where – not at all coincidentally – Nissan has factories.

The UK still has strength in the design side of the automotive engineering, and I wonder whether the UK government deal with Nissan didn’t have some kind of grant or tax break for supporting this, to cushion the blow to the manufacturing side from any tariffs. Although Nissan’s European headquarters are in Switzerland, there is a large design centre in the UK. Similarly Honda has an R&D operation as well as a Formula 1 engine team based in the UK.

80% of the UK economy is services, and we are a net exporter of services. Delivery of services requires you to be close to the customer. So what the UK needs to ensure is that the customers with the biggest budgets – the regional headquarters of multinationals, Japanese or otherwise – stay in the UK. Our professional services – not just finance but R&D, design, IT, consulting, accounting, legal, marketing – all thrive because they are supporting these regional headquarters. Lower taxes and deregulation might keep some headquarters happy, but ultimately they have to worry about their proximity to customers too. By leaving the European Union, the UK will be perceived as less close to EU customers (and also the regulatory environment). We have to hope that the positive, proactive “global” UK that Theresa May outlined in her recent speech really does come together, and deals are quickly negotiated with African and Middle Eastern countries, so that the UK can position itself as the EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) regional headquarters of choice.

The UK is currently the regional base for over half of the top 30 Japanese companies in Europe or EMEA. Keeping it that way will also, as the Japanese government itself pointed out, need a free movement of people in the region and a liberal immigration policy. If this becomes an issue, which it already has of course, the other trend I have highlighted elsewhere, of an increasingly virtual structure, where regional management and functions are scattered around a region, will intensify and will be increasingly difficult to service from one location, particularly if that location is not part of the Single Market or immigration has become a sticking point in free trade agreements.

If this happens, then UK services companies are going to have to open more offices across the EMEA region and relocate their personnel accordingly – as various banks have already announced.

(*Percentages calculated only for those companies where annual report figures for the EMEA or Europe region and the UK were available.)

Reports, profiles and other research on the Top 30 largest Japanese companies in Europe, Middle East and Africa are available from Rudlin Consulting – please contact pernillerudlinrudlinconsultingcom for further details.

Free pdf of Top 30 largest Japanese employers in UK

FREE DOWNLOAD

Send download link to:

How to negotiate with the Japanese – don’t

A friend from business school days phoned me last week to ask for my advice on negotiating with Japanese business people. He was about to fly out to Japan to meet a potential joint venture partner. “I suspect my usual negotiating style might cause offence”, he said. “And apparently I may already have committed a faux pas, because when we met with them in the UK, I tossed my business cards around the table”.

After explaining how to exchange business cards with slightly more finesse, I asked him for full details of the company and people he was going to meet. One lesson we learned during our negotiation course at business school, which is applicable whatever the culture you are dealing with, was “prepare, prepare, prepare”. This means not only knowing as much as you can about the people and company you are meeting, but also being an expert in every single detail of your company and its products or services.

I warned him that other approaches we learnt at business school may not work so well if his counterparts are traditional Japanese business people rather than MBA wielding ‘young guns’. Traditional Japanese business people want to be reassured that you are someone they can trust in the long term. If they spot that you are using tricks and tactics in your negotiation, they may worry that you are insincere and that in the future, if something goes wrong in the deal, you will be adversarial rather than cooperative. For example, it is better to open with a reasonable offer price, rather than a deliberately outrageous position from which you expect to be beaten down by half.

Other negotiating tactics, such as having a BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) may be useful, and indeed you may be asked who else you are talking with or supplying to. Too much focus on a written negotiated agreement may be a mistake however, as it will not be the endpoint with a Japanese partner, rather the start of a relationship, subject to change and unofficial amendments in the future. Also, your Japanese counterparts may need to have further internal discussions, so do not expect to come out of a meeting with the final deal.

The amount of time this takes, and the seemingly unending questions may result in the Western side beginning to wonder if they are trusted, and if the deal will ever happen. Westerners prefer to make step by step concessions, expecting give and take, particularly when it comes to divulging sensitive information. Japanese negotiators want to know and even see everything before they make any commitments. This is due to risk aversion – they know that none of the executives on their side will want to agree to anything unless every single possible risk and issue has been uncovered and dealt with. But of course this can be a deal breaker for the Western side, who do not want to show all their intellectual property or ‘dirty laundry’ until they can be reasonably sure of good faith on the other side, that the deal will go ahead.

Indeed much of the concrete detail may be settled outside the negotiating room. When I was working in building material sales in Japan, our Zimbabwean suppliers used to visit once a year to negotiate prices and shipping schedules. The first time I participated in the negotiation meeting I was surprised to find that we spent the first day exchanging data and views on industry trends. During a coffee break I asked one of the Zimbabweans when we would get down to the ‘real’ negotiation and talk about prices.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “tonight your boss and my boss will go out for a Korean barbecue and some beers, and they’ll settle the prices then. It happens every year.” Sure enough, the next day, as if by magic, a piece of paper with agreed prices appeared.

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”

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”

The hidden value of meetings

No manager, Japanese or otherwise, has ever said to me that they wish they had more meetings to go to. It may be, though, that Japanese business people are better at finding value in a seemingly pointless meeting than many Western business people. Admittedly, in some cases the value is simply in catching up on lost sleep.

In Japan, meetings are viewed as a necessary part of relationship building, and it’s implicitly accepted that the official reason for a meeting may not be the real objective at all. It does lead to mismatched expectations for international meetings, however.

One common meeting format is the aisatsu– (greetings) or kyaku- (customer) mawari (going around). Senior executives from Japan headquarters will request local operations to fix up meetings with their counterparts at key customer or partner companies. Unfortunately, if expectations are not managed, the Western counterparts end up wondering what on earth the meeting was for.

The Western side might have been anticipating that the Japanese company was on an acquisition hunt, or about to propose some kind of joint venture. But to the Japanese executive, it was simply about relationship building and information exchange, and if some kind of mutually advantageous new business proposition arises from it, in the years to come, so much the better.

Another meeting that is common internationally is the “getting to know you” meeting, where all players in a new project get together in the same room, and introduce themselves to each other, often in a quite personal, informal way.

This happened recently to a group of British engineering contractors – the Japanese lead contractor invited them all to a meeting to kick off the project and of course they all came armed with Gantt charts and schedules only to find themselves talking about which football team they supported. In the Japanese contractors’ mind, this was the moment for everyone to get to know and trust each other.

Japanese business people are quietly proactive in finding added value to meetings that they have been asked to attend. They realise that it is in the interstices that new ideas and deeper relationships form.

I recently arranged a meeting for a virtual team to come together for the first time in the Tokyo headquarters. The headquarters arranged the usual factory tour and visit to the corporate history museum followed by a series of presentations on what each function and region was doing.

The Western participants initially complained to me that they found the sessions dull and patronising, but then started to talk about how valuable it was nonetheless to see their colleagues face to face for the first time, and that quite a lot of planning had taken place on the train journey to the factory, and problems solved over a beer or two in the evening.

“Oh really” I responded, trying not to look like that was precisely the point of my instigating the event in the first place, “it’s good to hear you managed to get something out of it, nonetheless.”

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”

When dealing with customers, a little omoiyari goes a long way

I explained in a previous article on customer service that British service sector staff are often hostile or resentful in their attitude to customers partly because of a lack of pride in their work and their company. This has arisen from their sense that they are being exploited by their employer, that their company only benefits shareholders, not society, and that “serving” people is somehow demeaning.

This could be counteracted to some extent by making sure employees do feel more positive about their employers, as seen with British companies which do have excellent customer service, such as the retailer John Lewis, whose employees are partners and owners of the company. Introducing Japanese concepts such as “gembashugi” (empowerment for the frontline staff) and “monozukuri” (a pride in craftsmanship, not just in manufacturing, but service skills too) could also help.

But as I was travelling and shopping both in Japan and the UK over the Christmas and New Year, I began to wonder whether British service standards could ever reach Japanese levels, because of a fundamental cultural difference that may just be too hard to reconcile. Japanese society is permeated by a strong concern for how what you say or do affects others, to a far greater extent than in the UK.

I realise that for many Japanese it is almost too much pressure, what one British writer on Japan has called “CCTV eyes”, where you can end up becoming paranoid about how other people might see or think about you. The positive side to it is “omoiyari”, what in English we would call “forethought” or “consideration”. It’s an ability to pre-empt what the other person might need, or how the other person might be feeling, and to do something about it, without being asked.

One British manager told me a funny story after I explained to him about omoiyari. He had been asked to pick up a Japanese colleague from Heathrow airport and take him to one of their company factories. The British manager was very busy, so he tried to drive as quickly as he could to the factory. En route, however, he was bemused by the way his Japanese colleague kept asking him about what his favourite soft drink was, and whether he thought Diet Seven Up was better than Diet Sprite. Only after hearing me describe “omoiyari” did the manager realise that his Japanese colleague was hinting that he was thirsty.

“What should I do next time if I want to show omoiyari?” the manager wondered. “Ask him if he would like to stop off to get some drinks?”

The problem with that, I responded, is that if the Japanese colleague is also practising omoiyari, he may notice that you are busy, and deny that he is thirsty, because he does not want to delay you.

The best thing would be to buy some drinks in advance and offer them to him in the car. This kind of behaviour is the ultimate in customer service.

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

The monozukuri of customer service

I mentioned in my previous article that there seems to be a monozukuri (literally “making things”) of customer service in Japan. This may seem an odd way of putting it, as monozukuri is often used to mean that manufacturing, and not the service sector, is given the most importance in society. In this case I am using “monozukuri” to mean “craftsmanship” – a pride in using ones hands to create something of high quality.

I remember when I was a little girl living in Sendai, coming home from school one day to find that the builders who were repairing our strange old ijinkan (purpose built for foreigners) house, had made tiny origami cranes out of some of my stamp collection. I was quite cross that my stamps had been ruined but my parents were delighted that these rough handed men could create something so delicate and fiddly.

I had learnt origami at kindergarten in Japan although I was never very good at it, lacking the patience to be as precise in the folding as is necessary to get the best result. Nonetheless it has given me a great appreciation of the skill of the assistants wrapping my purchases in Japanese department stores – especially at this time of year, as I make such a terrible mess of wrapping Christmas presents!

I also learnt Japanese dance as a child. Along with origami and the many other arts widely taught in Japan such as tea ceremony and kendo, there was emphasis not only on the way the body moves but how objects are handled – learning to fold a kimono or open a fan – which I am sure influences the way customer service is so gracefully and skilfully delivered in Japan.

Equivalent skills are not widely taught in British schools, so not only is it rare in the UK for gift wrapping to be offered but when it is, it is done badly. Usually you have to ask, and sometimes there is a charge. The only shop I have been to recently where gift wrapping was free, and beautifully done, was Floris, a family owned traditional perfumers in Jermyn Street, London. The assistant was not one of the family, as far as I know, but seemed to have pride serving me well, and was very knowledgeable about the products on offer.

This pride in being knowledgeable about the products is true of another retail chain which is consistently praised for its good service – Majestic, the wine merchants. Majestic consciously emphasises customer service as being a key value of its brand, and supports this through plenty of training for its staff. It probably helps that the customers Majestic attracts are wine enthusiasts, and therefore more likely to appreciate the knowledge and service that Majestic offers.

Monozukuri needs to be two-way to work. Both the provider and the customer need to appreciate the craftsmanship and knowledge involved. British customers are not as well educated as Japanese customers in this appreciation and therefore British service providers do not feel much pride in what they do.

This article first appeared in the December 28th 2009 edition of The Nikkei Weekly

Why some Japanese people prefer British customer service!

I described in my previous article how when a customer in the UK is facing a service sector employee, he or she is usually facing 150 years of social class resentment, a loss of pride in manual labour and no sense that the company that person is working for has any care for employee well being or duty to the customer or society as a whole. Consequently, it is hard to inspire employees with a strong, positive customer service culture in the UK.

There are some exceptions to this. The most well known exception is the John Lewis Partnership, which includes the John Lewis department stores and Waitrose supermarket chain. As the name implies, the company is a partnership, which means that all 69,000 employees are also owners of the company, and are known as “Partners” rather than “employees” or “staff”. The founder, John Spedan Lewis’ vision was of employee co-ownership with “the happiness of Partners as the ultimate purpose”. Partners share in the profit of the company through bonuses – in 2007 this was 18% of total salary, for every person regardless of their position in the company. Five out of thirteen board directors are elected by the staff.

I am sure this company structure explains their ability to maintain high customer service standards and I would like to think it also explains why the company has weathered the current recession pretty well. The Partners do not feel demeaned by serving people, they believe in what the company is doing and feel they are equal in social status to the customers.

It is this inferiority complex that people in UK service sector jobs have that poisons the customer service they provide. If the customer is able to show that they do not hold themselves superior to the person providing the service, then it is possible to get friendly, if not always competent, service in the UK.

I noticed that when I discussed customer service in the UK with a group of Japanese residents recently, it was the youngest residents, who had been waiters or shop assistants in Japan and in the UK, who felt the most positive about British customer service culture, as they felt they were treated better by British customers than they had been in Japan when they had done similar jobs.

In Japan, historical Confucian influences mean that there is more acceptance of unequal power relationships and different status in society, without there being any implication that the person with the lower status is somehow a worse human being, worthy of contempt. It can mean that the person with the lower status is not treated in a very friendly or equal way, however, and is expected to be deferential and respectful.

Along with deference and respect , Confucianism also emphasises performing the correct rituals and observing etiquette, and this has a visibly positive impact on the conduct of customer service. This emphasis on etiquette links up with a “monozukuri” of customer service in Japan which seems to be lacking in the UK, as I will examine in the next article.

This article originally appeared in Japanese in the Eikoku News Digest

Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2025-03-06.

Category: Japanese customers

Japanese companies in the UK 20 years on

Marketing to “Japanese” companies in the UK has to be much more than just being able to communicate in Japanese

“Why is our Japan sales team so useless?”

1 – They’re not as elite as their customers

2 – The dead hand of eigyō

3 – Over-servicing

Hire the rebels and treat them as equals

Be innovative

Break the rules

“Everyone has responsibility, but nobody can take responsibility” – the roots of nemawashi

Europeans do consensus too…

…but it’s differently interpreted

Not just Toyota – the Brexit rebalancing has already started

Free pdf of Top 30 largest Japanese employers in UK

How to negotiate with the Japanese – don’t

Getting to know the Japanese customer

The hidden value of meetings

When dealing with customers, a little omoiyari goes a long way

The monozukuri of customer service

Why some Japanese people prefer British customer service!

Web Development: counsell.com