Category: Women in Japanese companies

“White hands, yellow hands” – the early days of IBM Japan

Takeo Shiina became president of IBM Japan in 1974, at the age of 45.  He joined IBM Japan just after studying in the US in 1953.  “In those days, gaishi (foreign owned companies) were seen as bad.  A major newspaper wrote a series called “White hands, yellow hands” basically saying white handed gaishi were “dirty” and that they would disrupt the markets in Japan, make lots of money and take it all back to the US.

“The Ministry of International Trade & Industry also did all they could to support domestic computer manufacturers.  They passed a special law so that the amount of tax that IBM Japan paid every year was recycled into supporting Fujitsu, NEC and Hitachi.”

Shiina took the brave decision to study in the US, after graduating from Keio University because his father had also studied abroad, in Germany, and so he was not afraid of becoming a foreign student.  As for joining IBM, the auditor of his father’s company knew the President of IBM Japan and suggested it to him,  He trained at the IBM plant in Canada and was shocked when he returned to Japan, to find that IBM Japan’s main office was in the middle of a bomb site.  The factory was also just an old Japanese house, with a strong smell of a cesspit toilet as you walked through the door.

Shiina became head of the factory at the age of 32 and started a new site up as well as inadvertently offering the first ever online system to a steel factory.  He assumed that IBM must be doing that sort of thing in Europe and the USA, but actually it turned out there was nothing to copy.

The contract was also tricky, in terms of persuading IBM HQ in the USA to accept it.  Due to a mistranslation of “this is no problem in Japan” as “in Japanese this is no problem” IBM HQ finally accepted it, as noone could read the original Japanese anyway.

Shiina is proud that IBM Japan is now seen as a desirable company to work for, particularly in terms of opportunities for women, and having performance based pay.  His interview with the Nikkei Online, the basis of this precis, is illustrated by his calligraphy which reads “Building a new country – young people, women, regions, foreigners”.

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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.

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。

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Women in Japanese Business

Many of my clients who have Japanese customers have been asking me recently whether there will be a problem if they put a woman in charge of a Japanese client account. Being female myself, I instinctively want to support other women in business and declare that there should not be a problem.

I never felt discriminated against or even any resistance from clients in the nine years I worked in a Japanese company, selling to Japanese customers for many of those years. No doubt it helped that I clearly had the endorsement of my blue chip Japanese company, and that I spoke fluent Japanese. Also, as I described in my previous article, the “person in charge” role I had, known as madoguchi or tantosha, is understood to have a team behind it, including a team leader and general manager, so if there was some need to have a senior, male person involved, this could easily be arranged.

I also thought there were some positive advantages to being female. I sensed the clients enjoyed the novelty of having a young, foreign female to deal with and that they also felt more relaxed and were more open with me than they might have been with a male salesperson. Showing that you are intelligent and competent is of course key, as well as making the most of the perception that (rightly or wrongly), women are more detail oriented and accurate.

It is harder for Japanese women than foreign women to gain management roles, as there is a widespread assumption that that any Japanese woman must be in an administrative role. This is based in harsh reality – Japan has the lowest percentage of companies with a woman in senior positions, according to a worldwide survey published by Grant Thornton this year. Nonetheless, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey and PwC all have or have had Japanese women as partners or in senior positions in their Japan offices and Accenture Japan makes a special point of welcoming women graduates in its recruitment.

Even Japan-headquartered companies are having to change the way they treat women employees. “Tayousei” (diversity) has become a buzzword, and is taken to mean giving equal career opportunities to women. Most major companies stopped graduate recruitment of so-called ‘Office Ladies’ in the 1990s and now outsource most of their administrative staffing needs to temp agencies. Although the number of women in the management track at major companies has not increased dramatically, with an ageing population and a dearth of middle management due to hiring freezes in the 1990s, making the best use of half the population has become a necessity rather than window dressing.

I have heard Japanese men say that the reason they don’t put women in client facing positions is that women “don’t drink”, which is a euphemism, I suppose, for the client entertainment, in hostess bars and so on, which are deemed by some in Japan to be necessary for good business relationships. This may be so, but frankly, if the main reason your customer chooses you as a supplier is because of your in-depth knowledge of girlie bars, you have a problem!

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”

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。

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