Japanese Business Blog - Rudlin Consulting

Hiring Japanese speakers

A while ago I thought that my business had expanded sufficiently that I needed to hire someone to support me. However, after three months of recruiting and interviewing, I admit I failed to recruit anyone.

In reflecting on why I have not been able to hire someone, and what I need to do next, I have realised that I am in danger of falling into the same traps that I have often seen Japanese companies in Europe slide into.

The first trap is being attracted to Japanese speakers without considering their skills and your business’s needs more carefully. It’s easy to find Japanese speakers in the UK – there are between 30,000 to 50,000 Japanese people living in the UK now – many are students or expatriates but there are also residents who have settled here, often married to British people.

In addition to this, there are around 6000 members of the Japan Exchange and Teaching programme UK alumni association. These are British or other English speaking nationals who have worked in Japan for 1 to 3 years or more, usually in a school or in local government. Most of them fall in love with Japan as a result, and want to pursue careers where they can continue to have contact with Japan and use their Japanese language ability.

The second trap is to hire Japanese people (usually women) and JET alumni into general office administration roles, somewhat vaguely defined, to cover everything from receptionist to HR to translation work. This often leads to frustration on both sides. Japanese women begin to suspect that they are being treated like second class Office Ladies, and when they complain to their British husbands about the overtime or the menial tasks they are asked to do, their husbands often urge them to raise a grievance dispute with their employer.

JET alumni begin to worry that there is no career progression or professional development. Many of them come to me, asking what they should do, and I always advise – find a profession you feel suited to first, like law or accountancy, and then find a way to connect back to Japan.

In both cases, some of the disappointment can be avoided by having a clear job description and a proper contract, and for the Japanese company to be realistic and open about what kind of expectations both parties should have as to how the job can develop. If possible, they should provide or support training where needed, and remember to revise the job description accordingly, as the employee progresses.

So, to take my own medicine, I need to be more clear and focused on the support skills I need, which is primarily invoicing, chasing payments, paying suppliers and some management accounting (forecasting cash flows etc). This does not require a Japanese speaker, fun though it would be to have a like minded person to work with.

This article was originally written in Japanese for Teikoku Databank News, 1st December 2013 edition. It 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.

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。

5 reasons Japanese overseas ventures fail

Around 40% of overseas ventures by Japanese companies result in withdrawal, according to Masato Hikita, director of Headwaters IT consulting company, writing for Diamond business magazine. His clients usually suffer from at least one of the following, he reckons:

No one person with decision making authority

Overseas companies are shocked to hear that Japanese executives don’t actually have executive power. When Japanese companies venture abroad, they usually send the kacho (section chief) out on a scouting expedition, and he talks to people on the ground there who agree that they should collaborate on a project. The local company gets moving quickly, but at this point the Japanese company suddenly grinds to a halt. When asked why, the Japanese company responds that now the bucho (head of department) must visit. And then after that, that the director must visit. At which point the local company wonders why on earth they have to answer the same questions so many times, and decides to start negotiations with someone else.

2. Bringing domestic rivalries overseas

Rather than two Japanese companies fighting to monopolise a market and both end up losing, Hikita recommends that smaller Japanese companies collaborate, particularly in the early phases of raising brand awareness in a new market – for example a joint exhibition stand at a trade fair.

3. Being fooled by a local Japanese “pro”

Just because a Japanese person has lived in another country for 10 years, does not make them an expert in setting up business there. Hikita recommends talking to JETRO or going to local gatherings of Japanese businesspeople to get recommendations.

4. No ‘line in the sand’

According to a Japanese government survey, 90% of Japanese SMEs have not set a bottom line for when they will decide to withdraw from an overseas venture. As Hikita rightly says, from my experience, Japanese companies are happy to make plans for growing a business, but don’t do any planning for what should happen if a business fails. Many say because they have never done something like this before, they don’t know how to judge whether something is a failure. Hikita recommends that nonetheless, through talking to partners and other businesses, some attempt should be made at setting limits, and constantly reviewing status.

5. Overconfidence in the brand

Apparently Japanese companies will assert that the local partner should bear all the costs of marketing, because “we are allowing them to use our brand”. As I’ve mentioned before, a common problem for Japanese companies who are used to everyone in Japan knowing who they are and what they do, without having to make the effort to explain themselves. They are so confident in their brand, they believe they will succeed in the “red ocean” of American and European markets, without realising the true investment required to compete.

Does globalization mean the end of seniority based pay and lifetime employment for Japanese companies?

An HR director at a British multinational recently acquired by a Japanese company told me she was baffled by the response from Japan to her department’s enquiry regarding the company car grade allocation for a group of Japanese expatriate managers being transferred to work in the UK. All they sent back was a list of the managers’ names and their ages, she said.

Of course this is perfectly understandable once you know about the seniority based pay and benefits system in Japanese companies. In European companies, salaries and benefits are based on the job role – how high up the managerial ladder you are and the content of the job – with very little attention paid to age or length of service.

Most of the Japanese subsidiaries I work with in Europe have salary and welfare schemes that are locally appropriate. However there are several aspects of the Japanese HR system which impact employees in Europe, beyond company car grades for expat managers

One aspect is the culture of lifetime employment and the sense of a duty of care for employees. Many Europeans have noticed that Japanese companies are very reluctant to fire even the most poorly performing employee, whether they are European or Japanese. While Europeans are sympathetic to this compassionate stance, they point out it does make performance management for the rest of the team difficult. If poor performers are still on the team, it is demotivating for the other team members.

The other aspect, which is said to be behind Hitachi’s recent announcement that it will end seniority based pay for managers, is that the uniqueness of the Japanese HR system hinders job mobility across borders. Most non-Japanese multinationals try to have an internal vacancy system, where employees in all countries are able to apply for job openings across the world. This necessitates detailed job descriptions, and a certain level of unified grading, so employees can assess which jobs are likely to be open to them.

Europeans find it very confusing that Japanese expatriates are assigned to their offices without any seeming regard for whether they have the right qualifications, skills or experience for the role.

My hope for Japanese companies is that they will send more of their overseas employees to Japan HQ. I suspect the Hitachi announcement, coming as it does after two years of having built up an international database of their employees, is that they too are hoping a more unified system will allow employees to transfer all around the world and not just from Japan, and that this will be based on competency rather than just personal development needs and whose turn it is.

But I have to say I also hope that Japanese companies, if they follow Hitachi’s suit, do not lose their compassion and loyalty towards their employees as they globalize. Despite all the frustrations it brings, Europeans still prefer the long term security of working for a Japanese company.

(This article was originally written in Japanese for Teikoku Databank News and appears in Pernille Rudlin’s new book “Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe” – available as a paperback and Kindle ebook on Amazon.)

Who takes the most paid holidays – Europe and Japan

The announcement in 2015 by the Japanese government that they want to revise the Labour Standards Law to require companies to ensure that workers take their paid leave allowance has attracted a fair amount of attention in European media. Japanese employees are entitled to an average of around 18.5 days a year but typically only take around 9 days.

Japanese employees are admired for the dedication to work shown by the long hours they put in, but many European managers, particularly Germans, worry that overtime is also a sign of poor management, or could lead to health and safety problems if workers do not take time off to “refresh” themselves.

Europeans are much keener than Japanese or Americans to take their full allocation of vacation days. EU legislation mandates that all 28 member countries must by law grant all employees least 4 weeks’ holiday. The implementation of this legislation varies greatly from country to country however.

The French and the Nordic countries are famous in Europe for taking the most holidays. One survey showed that the French take all 30 of the days they are statutorily entitled to (this includes Saturdays). They can add up to a further 22 days of holiday as compensation if they work more than 35 hours a week.

Nordic countries have 25-30 days entitlement, and there is an almost universal summer holiday from early June through to the middle of August when most families disappear to the coast or to an island for the whole of the summer.

In Germany, there is a variation from state to state beyond the statutory minimum of 24 days for workers, because each federal state sets additional public holidays and determines the school vacation periods.

We British like to think of ourselves as the most hardworking of the European nations. Although 28 calendar days are statutorily guaranteed, this can include public holidays. The norm for most companies is to offer 25 days, in addition to the 8 or 9 public holidays. There is a trend now for British companies to offer a menu of employee benefits, which includes the ability to buy and sell days of holiday allowances. Unused holidays can also be carried over to the next year, but there is usually a cap on the number of days.

British school summer holidays are much shorter than in Nordic countries and residential children’s camps are not as commonly used in Europe as in the US, so parents do expect to be able to take at least two weeks’ break in the summer time to holiday with their children.

Consequently, if you are running a pan-European company or team, you have to put mechanisms in place for employees in many different countries to book their holidays well in advance, so that there is sufficient staff cover even during peak holiday times. Furthermore, there are concerns now that even when on holiday, conscientious employees are checking their smartphones for work email. Daimler hit the news headlines recently for implementing a system which auto deletes emails during vacation times, to make sure employees relax properly.

(This article was originally written in Japanese for 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.)

Hitachi – we’re not heavy, dull or ugly outside Japan

Hitachi is seen as inward looking, conservative and lacking in commercial sense by business people in Japan, but outside Japan it is seen as a motivating place to work, exciting and cool by employees of Hitachi’s overseas subsidiaries such as Hitachi Rail Europe and Hitachi Data Systems, according to Nikkei Business magazine.

Could this help change Hitachi domestically? Currently Hitachi has over 1000 employees with PhDs working for them in Japan, generating many patents, but this technical strength does not seem to be translating into sales. The improvement in profits is largely due to withdrawing from unprofitable businesses such as mobile phones and LCD screens and also the contributions from social innovation business overseas. It is not due to any ground breaking innovation in products or services. It is also seen as being self centred, and not often forming alliances with other companies.

In the rail business however, Hitachi has taken the biggest share of rolling stock orders through to 2019 in the UK. Hitachi first opened an office in the UK for its rail business in 1999, with just one expatriate staffing it. It is now seen as the most powerful train supplier in Europe, according to an executive from Virgin Trains. It has had to completely overhaul its designs however, to cope with the UK’s old fragile railway bridges. Procurement specs for everything from engines, radiators and pumps were reviewed and the body used as much aluminium as possible to lighten the weight. “We were able to use all the expertise we had developed in Japan” says Koji Wagatsuma of Hitachi Rail Europe. “Hitachi’s strength is not just IT, but that we know the operational side of various industries really well”, says Shinya Mitsudomi, CSO of Hitachi Rail Europe.

The other secret of Hitachi Rail’s success is “true delegation”, says the Nikkei. Instead of relying on history and performance within the company, Hitachi has given responsibility to those who know the market best. There is a big difference between the UK and Japanese rail markets, in that the risks taken by the supplier in bids are much greater. It is necessary to guarantee how many people would be needed to run the system per year, and what the lifecycle cost will be.

Alistair Dormer, the CEO, has clearly been a driving force in Hitachi Rail’s success. He likes to hold regular town hall meetings, where he consistently promotes the company’s mission and vision. Ted Yamada, head of HR at Hitachi Rail Europe says “to hire the best people, it’s not just about the remuneration, but to make sure they can get a feel of the kind of company they are working for.” Not only the CEO but also the chairman of Hitachi in Japan, Hiroaki Nakanishi, is a good story teller. As I repeatedly point out in my training sessions, because most Japanese companies are the “family” type, storytelling and parent figures are far more important in giving direction than targets or strategies or policies or structures.

A further feature that Nikkei Business picks up on, is that Hitachi is beginning to pull together virtual company structures, most notably for Hitachi Data Systems. We were moving towards that when I was at Fujitsu – I think IT companies are probably best suited to this kind of organisation – where services have to be provided globally so it makes sense to have teams and hierarchies which span several regions. It does mean a lot of travel to work well – one Hitachi Data Systems director says he has 56 Japan entry stamps on his American passport. Conversely, Japanese engineers travel regularly to the UK and the US.

The feature finishes with an interview with Hiroaki Nakanishi, who comes up with a few punchy quotes. Asked about the impact of Hitachi putting non-Japanese at the top of various regions, he says it has an instant effect on the mindset of the Japanese employees, who now realise that they have to persuade a foreigner of their ideas, so all the “Japanese only” methods they have used in the past will not work. Consequently, decision making and execution have speeded up. Everything in the value chain from marketing to sales, development to production and after sales service have to be overseas. So it’s not possible for Japanese to be seconded abroad and manage everything. Most of the executives are local, non-Japanese. “Before now, Japanese companies would build a factory overseas, but just transfer manufacturing knowhow, and then when it was completed, the head of manufacturing in Japan would fly over and play lots of golf. That’s just no longer feasible.” Since Jack Domme took over at HDS, objectives have been set for individual employees and decision making has become more transparent. HDS is now well regarded by others as a company which would be an enjoyable challenge to work for. “Starting small and growing big is just fooling yourself – there are no dreams or hope in that. People with ambitions will not join such a company” says Nakanishi. “We are still a Japanese company, and so there will be some parts which are difficult for non-Japanese to understand, so not being Japanese might be a bit of a handicap” but maybe no more than Siemens is a German company, or GE is American, Nakanishi adds.

The Bubble Gang – what became of my cohort in Japan

In the UK I would be regarded as part of Generation X but in Japan I am in the Bubble Gang, of people aged 45-49 who joined a major Japanese company straight out of university between 1988 and 1992 – at the very end of Japan’s economic “Bubble Era”. I graduated in 1988 but did not join Mitsubishi Corporation until 1990, spending two years at a US PR company first. And actually, because I transferred to Mitsubishi’s Tokyo headquarters in 1992, my company ID number started with 92, and I was therefore regarded as being a member of the 1992 graduate intake, despite my protests.

After a period selling building materials in Japan, I transferred to the HR department, where we tried to set up an international HR system which was intended to make the year of joining less relevant and therefore Japanese traditional seniority based promotion less rigid. This was meant to ensure non-Japanese, mid-career hires had more chance of being promoted appropriately, but twenty years on, elements of the old system still persist in Mitsubishi and elsewhere. I was given the title of manager at the time, but didn’t really manage anything in the Western sense of the word – having no team or budget under my control.

If I had stuck with the company into my late 30s I may well have become a ‘proper’ manager, attaining the kacho (team leader or section chief) grade under the Japanese system, and who knows, ten or so years later maybe even made it to bucho (General Manager – head of a department) as some of my friends from that time have recently done.

Contemplating that future at the age of 33, when so many of my MBA class were already running businesses, put a chill in my soul and I decided to leave Mitsubishi after 9 enjoyable years.

It’s not often you get a chance to see how your career might have panned out if a different choice had been made, but thanks to a special feature in the Nikkei Business magazine on the Bubble Gang, I now have more insight, and it has reassured me that I probably took the right path.

The article sets out the following phases:

Entrance ceremony day 1988-1992

So many new graduates joined – up to a 1000 in some cases – that the company has to hire the Budokan for the entrance ceremony

2-3 years on – Japan’s “Loadsamoney”

A separate envelope full of cash is handed out at bonus time, making a 24 hour working day bearable. Hanakin (Flower Friday – the equivalent of POETS day in the UK) drinking to the small hours, including Y50,000 bottles of champagne and waving Y10,000 notes to flag down taxis

5 years on – the Bubble bursts

It’s a slow burst, from the initial bubble burst in 1990, when asset prices started to plummet, through to 1997, with the Asian financial crisis, and the collapse of Hokkaido Bank, the Long Term Credit Bank of Japan and Yamaichi Securities. Friends start to lose their jobs. The wife wants to go back to her family.

10 years on – no team, but performance based pay introduced

Companies like Fujitsu and Mitsui introduce performance based and potential based pay systems. You start to worry about what level of bonus others in your cohort are getting. Due to a hiring freeze, you don’t have any juniors working for you, so end up having to do admin work yourself.

15 years on – the company recovers, but your pay doesn’t

Thanks to a cheaper yen, exports boom and the company results improve, but your pay level does not. Some of the other high fliers in your cohort make it to kacho, but you don’t. Your daughter, whom you struggled to get into a private high school, seems to have lost her mojo too.

20 years on – the Lehman Shock

Every industry suddenly goes into recession. Elpida Memory enters bankruptcy and Panasonic and Sony are in tatters. You start to envy the old guys with their golden goodbyes and full pensions.

25 years on – what do I do now?

Sharp seems to be on its last legs, Toshiba is hit by an accounting scandal. Is my company OK? Drinking with old friends, there are more grey hairs and wheezing than before. Even your highflier friend has applied for early retirement. Younger colleagues are looking at you, still only a kacho, coldly. Should I stay or start my own business or change companies?

The feature then looks at the fate of one man at Sharp. He is called to a seminar by a department called “People Making”, which appears to him to be a firing squad. They show him a chart of the pay offs available to people of his age under the voluntary retirement scheme. He then has a meeting with his General Manager, who tells him to stay. His colleague of the same age is not so lucky, and is told that as there isn’t a job for him, he should contact the employment agencies who are both under contract to Sharp to assist with re-employment, elsewhere.

It seems to be a repeat of the mid 1990s, when HR departments used similar tactics to get rid of the bulge of post war baby boomers, who joined companies in the late 1970s. Apparently the Bubble Gang are the biggest cohort in most companies, comprising 1/6 of the total employees, but only 1/3 have made it to kacho or bucho level.

In response to this, over 60% of companies surveyed by the Nikkei have reviewed their seniority based pay system or introduced voluntary early retirement schemes. Conversely, 59% of the Bubble Gang, the highest percentage of all the cohorts, feel their company has betrayed them – either because they were not promoted as expected or their pay level is not as they hoped. However the vast majority want to continue working for their company, at least for the time being. No surprise really, because you have to wonder how easy it is going to be for someone who has worked for the same company for 25 years to find a job elsewhere.

Branding without egotism

Another survey on the top 100 global brands has just come out, and yet again Japanese brands are not punching their weight, considering the size of their revenues and the Japanese economy. How you measure brand value is of course a contentious point. It’s often an attempt to quantify how much it would cost to buy the brand, based on some kind of residual figure from the value of the company – having subtracted all the other assets – as well as qualitative research on customer evaluations.

Some of the Japanese corporate names missing from the list would come nearer the top if only Japanese customers were surveyed. But even then, I’m guessing the monetary value that could be attached to the brand would still not be as high as for some Western companies, due to the fact that Japanese companies don’t focus so much on profitability, or even “branding”.

Discussions about brand with Japanese executives seem to indicate that they see a “brand” as mostly about advertising and visible forms of identity such as logo and image.

To compete on a global basis, Japanese companies need to understand better what Western customers expect from a strong brand. But there is a danger as well in becoming too focused on brand, to the extent that it becomes a form of egotism, and prevents collaboration.

It’s been over 15 years since NTT DoCoMo Inc launched its i-mode service, putting Japan far ahead of any other nation, even the US, in terms of customers using sophisticated mobile phones to purchase applications and content on the internet. The rest of the world wondered ho to replicate Japan’s success, and many speculated this could never be reproduced outside of Japan because of some kind of special cultural characteristics of Japanese consumers and society. Now, looking at the global success of the iPhone and other mobile technologies, there is no doubt that consumers across the world will buy applications and content for their phones, given the opportunity.

My view is that took the rest of the world so long to catch up because non-Japanese network providers and mobile phone handset manufacturers were so busy protecting the profitability of their brands, that they were unable to replicate the mutually beneficial supply chain ecosystem that DoCoMo built up in Japan.

When I went to Japan in 2002, assisting a British mobile phone application developer, DoCoMo refused to take the credit for a particular image recognition application that it was offering, saying they were only a network provider, and we should talk to the application developers. The application developers said they just provided applications for whatever features handset manufacturers were incorporating. The handset manufacturers said they were simply humble suppliers to the network operators.

Now, with the advent of cloud computing, and an increasingly networked society, Japanese companies are wondering how to compete against the likes of U.S. online titans like Amazon and Google. Strengthening their global brands will help, but they should not lose sight of the fact that a key element of many Japanese companies’ brands is their ability to collaborate, without egotism.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly

Diversity on boards in UK and Japan

The UK business media has paid more attention than usual to Japanese business topics, thanks to the new corporate governance regulations that have been introduced in Japan on June 1^st. Corporate governance is still a hot topic in the UK, 23 years on from the Cadbury Report which made similar recommendations to those being adopted in Japan, and has been influential on EU and US regulations since.

External directors are now a standard feature of British boards, but there is still concern that there is a lack of diversity in the membership of the boards of British companies. What we call in the UK an “Old Boys’ Network” still operates in the appointment of board members. It is a natural human instinct to prefer to hire people who are similar to you and many appointments are made through personal connections rather than publicly advertised.

The most recent update on another corporate governance review, the Davies Report of 2011, which recommended an increase representation of women on FTSE 100 (Financial Times Stock Exchange) boards to at least 25% by 2015, was issued in March of this year. Good progress has been made on having more women non-executive, external directors, but the percentage of executive directors who are women is still very low (4.6% for the FTSE 250).

In addition to the “Old Boys’ Network”, boards want to appoint people with a strong track record in a particular industry or who have financial expertise. Women tend to have more varied, generalist careers or are professionals in areas such as HR or marketing. There is still a lack of women rising up through the ranks in traditionally male industries such as IT, banking or engineering.

Of course the whole point of having more diverse boards, with different expertise and backgrounds, is to encourage debate in board meetings and more transparency of information, which is supposed to lead to better governance, innovation and management of risk. Having to explain issues to people who are not expert in your company or industry can help uncover unthinking assumptions and bring fresh perspectives.

Japanese companies in the UK banking and insurance sectors have come under heavy scrutiny from the UK Prudential Regulation Authority recently. The PRA has the right to interview and approve the appointment of directors to financial sector companies, and also to see the “board pack” (documents for the board meetings) and minutes of the meetings.

Newly appointed Japanese directors have found it very difficult to answer the standard PRA question “why did you choose to take up this role?” when in fact they were simply told to become a director by Japan headquarters. Most board meetings in the UK just rubber stamped decisions made through nemawashi outside the meeting, so the board pack and the minutes were minimal, and in Japanese.

As board diversity increases in Japan, hopefully Japanese companies will become more used to providing a greater quantity of information and more transparency about decision making, which will help the boards of their overseas subsidiaries function better too.

This article was originally published in Japanese on 8th July 2015 in the 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.

Shazai and the art of being a corporate shame magnet

I let out a quiet cheer recently when Mitsubishi Materials, a sister company to my old employer Mitsubishi Corporation, started down the road of apologising for using slave labour in WWII. I used to be on the receiving end of campaigns for apologies and compensation from British Prisoners of War (PoWs) when I was in corporate communications at Mitsubishi Corporation and had many debates with my Japanese colleagues on what the right response might be.

Mitsubishi Corporation is a completely different company now in terms of ownership and structure to the Mitsubishi conglomerate during the war. The founding Iwasaki family was, however, not only pro-British, but also Iwasaki Koyata, the President during the war, was liberal and progressive in inclination, and rather bravely (given that other business leaders were assassinated for not being supportive of the militarist coup) spoke out against the war. The view amongst many Mitsubishi people after the war was – it was the government that forced these actions on Mitsubishi then, and it was the government that rightly said sorry and paid compensation to the PoWs afterwards. If there was a need to punish Mitsubishi as well, then the fact that the Iwasaki family and most of the senior managers were removed from their posts and the conglomerate was broken up under the Allied Occupation is surely sufficient.

Why apologise when it is not your fault – and wouldn’t such an apology be meaningless, almost insulting anyway? Actually there is a word in Japanese for apologising when it is not your own personal fault, but some kind of collective acknowledgement of responsibility is needed – hansei. It means reflection on what went wrong, an expression of regret for it having happened – “it shouldn’t have happened” and, most importantly, a commitment to take action to make sure it doesn’t happen again. You can see why successive Japanese prime ministers who weren’t personally involved in the wartime government might have thought this word adequate, as it appears to reiterate Japan’s commitment to remain a pacifist nation.

However equivalent words with the same linguistic roots exist in Chinese and Korean languages and consequently, Chinese and Korean activists do not accept hansei as being strong enough. The problem is it doesn’t contain enough shame. Owabi is a stronger word for “apology”, and contains a character which involves the symbol for “household”. This was the word used by previous Prime Ministers Tomiichi Murayama and Junichiro Koizumi, in addition to “hansei”, when apologising for Japan’s actions during WWII. By saying owabi, you are being remorseful and acknowledging the shame brought upon your group – whether it be your family, company or country.

Whether current Prime Minister Shintaro Abe will or won’t use “owabi” in his speech marking 70 years since the end of WWII has added poignancy, because not only will he be recognising the shame brought upon Japan (which could argue with some justification that at least it didn’t vote for its fascistic government in the 1930s, unlike Germany) but there is a family angle too. Abe is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, a Class A War Crimes suspect who was never tried for his part in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the use of Chinese forced labour, and went on to become Prime Minister himself in the 1950s.

In societies with elements of Shintoism or Buddhism or Confucianism underpinning it, as in Japan, Korea and China, apologizing on behalf of your predecessors or ancestors is hard to do. Not so much out of a sense of unfairness, but because you are visiting shame upon their memory, when they are no longer alive themselves to deal with it, and so the shame will simply be visited upon you and your peers and family. It feels like an unproductive humiliation, to be forced to attack your forebears, whom you were taught to respect.

The more usual pattern in Japan is for the father or elder to apologise for the sins and errors committed by the junior family members. This was seen most recently when Akio Toyoda apologised following the arrest of Julie Hamp, his personal appointment as Toyota’s global corporate communications chief, for illegally importing opiates into Japan. He even referred to her as one of his own children and then apologised for causing consternation to everyone, rather than any breaking of the law. The words used were yet another way of saying sorry – taihen moushiwake gozaimasen – “there is no reasonable explanation/excuse”. With this he became the shame magnet, taking the hit for Toyota not having somehow prevented her from making a mistake.

Universalist Westerners found this apology perplexing. Their view is that she was an idiot for not realising what the law was, or a criminal for deliberately breaking it. She should therefore be punished, and then maybe can rebuild her career after redemption. Universalists believe the rules are the rules and apply to all, without exception, in contrast to particularists, who take each case on its own merits, depending on the relationships of the people involved.

The Judaeo-Christian view as represented in the Old Testament is somewhat confused – both stating that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the third and even the fourth generation, but at the same time making it clear that the person who sinned is the soul that must take responsibility and be punished. Modern Western ethics, while seeing it as unfair that future generations should be punished for past generations’ wrongdoings, also insist that current generations acknowledge the crimes of the past in order not to repeat them.

In this sense, there is a common thread between East and West. Shame and admission of past guilt are both mechanisms for making sure that the sin is not committed or recommitted – because it is not just you, but your sons and daughters who will suffer the consequences.

By choosing to apologise in English, in the USA, Mitsubishi Materials avoided an oriental linguistic and ethical minefield, for the time being. The question of whether or not Mitsubishi Materials should accept shame will undoubtedly come up when, as they have promised, they apologise to Chinese and Korean forced labour survivors. I sense they were able to start with the apology in English as a warm up to this, with coaxing from Yukio Okamoto, a retired diplomat and renowned smooth operator who is now an external director at Mitsubishi Materials. He does not have to worry about the shame brought on his predecessors, as he is not an insider, and he also probably made sure the word “remorse” was used in English. I would imagine he also understood well the Western mentality that it is not about a Buddhist sense of collective shame so much as a Christian individualistic need to confess sins, publicly take the punishment and thereby gain redemption, allowing all to move on. Or as popular psychology would have it, giving the victims a sense of closure, which will make everyone feel better as a result.

Post confession, there is a sense of relief and a way to move on and move forward – and that is why I cheered when I read the coverage of Mitsubishi Materials’ apology – everyone behaved with dignity and sincerity and there was a sense of positivity. The Japanese participants seemed to have overcome the fear that with shame, there is no redemption, it endures, and it affects the whole group.

The worry is that if the shame magnet-father figure is not strong enough, the wider society will keep pressing until a bigger magnet is found. This is currently being played out with Toshiba’s accounting scandal. Despite the top executives resigning, bowing down for a record breaking 15 seconds of shazai (another word for apology, which contains the character for sin or guilt) and using the word owabi, the pressure keeps on. Hardly a day goes by without someone in the media questioning whether the root causes have really been exposed and whether enough has been done to redress them.

When the Nikkei announced its acquisition of the Financial Times, many Westerners commented that the Nikkei gave Olympus too easy a ride for its financial misconduct, unlike the Financial Times’ investigative approach. Compared to Toshiba, Olympus is not as iconic a company in Japan, therefore there was less sense of a wider reaching shame. Toshiba, however, was one of the Denden Kousha ‘family’ (suppliers to NTT when it was part of the ministry of telecommunications) and continues to be very tangled up in government industrial policy – most recently in joint ventures with another shame magnet, TEPCO of Fukushima infamy, acquiring a majority share of US nuclear power company Westinghouse in order to promote Japanese nuclear power capabilities overseas. Hisao Tanaka, the President who led the apologies and resignations, is seen as the fall guy. Even though his predecessors also resigned, the worry is that the shame is not just on Toshiba, but the Japanese political-industrial nexus as a whole. As Mitsubishi Materials has shown, the industrial side of Japan is beginning to find their shoulders are broad enough to take the hit and move on, whether the political side is too, Abe is about to demonstrate.

Do companies have a social obligation to train employees?

I was surprised when the Japanese expatriate manager at a Japanese logistics firm told me recently that he thought British logistics was more advanced than logistics in Japan. When I returned to the UK after working in Japan for four years at the end of the 1990s, I remember thinking that there was a real business opportunity for a delivery service in the UK similar to Japan’s takkyubin. This thought came to me as I watched an enormous container lorry reverse very cautiously up the 19^th century narrow alleyway to my London apartment, when all they were delivering was a small armchair. Surely in Japan this would have been delivered in a much smaller van, and within a much shorter time frame, so I would not have had to wait in all day for delivery.

Thanks to the rise of internet shopping (the British are the biggest web shoppers in Europe, apparently) and also the liberalisation of postal services, takkyubin type services like MyHermes have now appeared in the UK. You can book a time slot for next day pick up from your house, online, and the prices are cheaper than taking it to the post office, for heavier items.

I assume that similar services are available from takkyubin companies in Japan, so I suppose what the Japanese logistics manager was referring to was the higher volume end of logistics in the UK – transporting large quantities of car parts across Europe, for example.

Although it is possible to get qualifications and even university degrees in logistics in the UK, all the British employees of the Japanese firm at which the Japanese manager worked were in agreement that expertise in logistics was only really developed through practical experience, over time, rather than learning the latest theories in the classroom. In that sense, they were much more in alignment with Japanese apprenticeship style “on the job” training approaches.

As the Japanese manager himself pointed out, the firm’s employees were very indigenous British. Normally when I do training sessions for Japanese companies in the UK who are in the financial or commercial sectors, more than half the employees are not British.

Maybe for those types of companies, attitude and ability to learn are more important than local market expertise, skills and experience. But for logistics and other traditional, highly skilled industries such as engineering, it is tempting to choose someone who already has the local understanding and the expertise and skills born of experience, rather than train someone up.

Such people are scarce in the UK and the rest of Europe however, and instead we have a stubborn youth unemployment problem, of young people who would rather do physical work, or work outside an office, but have not had the training or experience and cannot find stable jobs.

No wonder then that Hitachi Rail has teamed up with other companies to set up a new University Technical College in the north of England. Apparently they were worried they might have to poach employees from nearby Nissan, otherwise.

This article was originally written in Japanese for Teikoku 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.