Japanese Business Blog - Rudlin Consulting

“Japanese managers have been brainwashed by the West” and should aim to be ‘virtuous companies’ instead

An interview with George Hara, currently Chairman of Alliance Forum and former board member of various Silicon Valley start ups as a venture capitalist kicks off Nikkei Business’s attempt at finding a new standard for evaluating Japanese companies, beyond the shareholder capitalism model.

Instead of “Good/Best company”or “Great Place to Work” and all the other awards you can get, the Nikkei proposes ‘Yoi‘, which can be translated as ‘good’ but is probably better translated as ‘virtuous’. They even deliberately write the headline ‘Yoi kaisha‘ (‘Virtuous company’) in Japanese brush stroke calligraphy.

Hara doesn’t think the term ‘stakeholder capitalism’ quite covers what he and the Nikkei are getting at, even though he says the company should be measured on the benefit to employees, customers, partners and regional society as well as shareholders. He prefers ‘shachu‘ (which my dictionary translates as clique or troupe) or public benefit capitalism – meaning that all the concerned parties have a common objective.

He particularly criticises the way companies in the US – the home of full blooded shareholder capitalism – such as Hewlett Packard or Dupont find that putting shareholder interests first means firing people even when there are record breaking profits, or not being able to invest in long term projects to develop technologies which will benefit society.

Japanese corporate leaders used to be much more inclined to public benefit capitalism, and the cause is not lost yet, says Hara – citing that when he showed the great and the good of the IMF around Tokyo’s underground system recently they were full of praise for how clean, orderly and busy a city supposedly suffering from a 20 year recession was. Japan should be setting its own standard for the rest of the world, he feels.

Following on from this, Nikkei Business have come up with a Yoi company metric, based on profit, changes in employee numbers, corporate tax contribution and share price over the past 10 quarters for 3841 Tokyo stock exchange listed companies and the top 10 are:

Softbank
Fast Retailing* (Uniqlo) (Yanai, the founder and also board member of Softbank is quick to throw this back in the face of those who have termed Fast Retailing a “black company”)
Keyence
Fanuc (the current target of shareholder activist Daniel Loeb)
Yahoo
Aeon Mall
Rakuten
Mani (medical devices)
Japan Tobacco
Takeda Pharma *
Central Japan Railway
KDDI
ABC-MART
Sumitomo Real Estate
USS　(car auctions)
Astellas Pharma*
Toyota*
SMC (automatic control equipment)
Nakanishi (motor spindles, micro grinders)
Trend Micro (security solutions, founded in the USA, HQ in Japan)
Sysmex (healthcare)
Hisamitsu Pharma
Komatsu*
Terumo
Canon*
Honda*
Makita
Nitori Holdings (furniture)
Shimano
J Trust

Other of our Top 30 Japanese companies in Europe* in the top 100

Bridgestone #41
Denso #46
Sumitomo Electric Group #51

In our Top 30 in Europe but not in the Top 100 Yoi companies:

Fujitsu, Ricoh, Sony, Asahi Glass, NSG, Toshiba, Hitachi, Panasonic, NTT Data, NYK, Fujifilm, Olympus, Mitsubishi Chemical Holding, Nomura, Nidec, Sharp, Daiichi Sankyo, Kao, Seiko Epson

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Germans, Japanese and Americans work the way they drive

Ulrike Schaede (Professor of Japanese Business at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego) confirms something that I had wondered about a few years ago when I facilitated management development seminars for Japanese and German managers, in her comparisons of Japanese and German driving styles. As is well known, there are no speed limits on German autobahns. At the same time there is another well known aspect of German culture, that rules are obeyed to the letter – perhaps due to a fear that without rules, mayhem results. Yet fatal car accidents are relatively few in Germany – particularly relative to the US, which has by far the highest number of fatalities on the roads.

Fortunately Germans obey other rules on the roads, such as no undertaking, which keeps the accident rates down, but Schaede confirms that generally speaking, Germans are impatient and aggressive drivers. Rather like Germans you might come across in the service industry she remarks. The Japanese managers in the management development seminar had also observed this when they undertook some field observations in Stuttgart. Why, they asked the German managers, when Germans are normally so orderly and obedient, was there pushing and shouting amongst a group of waiting people, about who should be served first? The Germans considered this for a while and then asked “Was there a sign anywhere explaining how to queue?” Apparently there wasn’t. So chaos ensued.

Japan has the lowest rate of fatalities (and the UK is not far off from this either), and like Germany and the UK, there are plenty of rules and regulations which have to be learnt in order to pass a test to obtain a driving license. In the USA however, it is possible to drive at the age of 16, without much knowledge of the rules and regulations of the road.

She draws parallels with American entrepreneurialism – anyone can start a company in the US if they have an idea. So some succeed but many fail too.

There are 4 other driving styles she believes relate to business approaches:

1. Safety First

Just as fatalities in road accidents are low in Japan because of the “safety first” mindset, so Japanese companies with any reputation to protect will be very reluctant to take any risks which will jeopardise their name. The downside is that, just like Japanese traffic, things move slowly.

2. Reverse parking

I’ve noticed too, that in Japan, almost everyone reverse parks their car, even into the narrowest of gaps. Schaede says this is indicative of a mentality that says put the hard work in first, so things are easier later. Japan is a nation of savers for a rainy day [although this is increasingly less true according to statistics I’ve seen]. Japanese companies also put as much effort as they can upfront, in case hard times are around the corner.

My aunt and uncle, veterans of an army life in Northern Ireland, teased me mercilessly about my dislike of reverse parking – it had become second nature to them, I suspect because of the need to make a quick getaway in a dangerous situation. So it is risk aversion at work again too I would say.

3. Shut that door!

Japanese have an expression “handoa”, meaning half door, or in other words, a door not closed properly. Japanese take great pains to shut doors firmly in cars, so as not to cause irritation to the driver. According to Schaede, one of her Japanese friends was told by an American driver that he would not be allowed to get in the American’s car again if he slammed the door so hard in future. In Germany, slamming a door so hard would be seen as a criticism of the car’s quality. It’s the Japanese need to “be sure” – as Schaede says, there are some untranslatable Japanese terms for this like “chan-to” – children are often told to “chan-to” – in the way that Western parents might say “behave”, “sit up straight” or “pull yourself together”. It also leads to over-specification in business – good enough is not enough.

4. Self service

As Schaede points out, it took a long time for the concept of self service petrol stations to be accepted in Japan. It was as if even the highly educated, skilled Japanese population could not be trusted as individuals to safely fill their own cars up by themselves. Schaede thinks this is like the current wave of Japanese deregulation – everyone has to move together, no one company should make the change by itself, so everyone moves at the pace of the slowest, to avoid one person being sacrificed. I am not sure this is entirely true – if you look at the actions of Hitachi, for instance.

“Japanese employees must become faithful to their profession, not company” – Hitachi’s Kawamura

Maybe he was being spurred on by Chinese consultant and Softbrain founder Song Wenzhou, but Takashi Kawamura, former President and Chairman of Hitachi makes some startlingly radical statements in a dialogue in the Nikkei Business magazine.

Both agree that in 2015 major Japanese companies must grow for Japan to get back on its feet, particularly so they can pull Japan’s small-medium enterprises along in their wake. But although Kawamura maintains the traditional Japanese line that companies exist to add value to society by paying wages, taxes and dividends (in that order), he asserts that Japanese employees must learn to become “faithful to their profession” rather than faithful to their companies as they have been up until now.

This includes company Presidents, who can no longer be “the person who happens to be in the position of President” and use their status and personal influence to get things done, but instead must be judged on their results, and their professionalism as a manager. “Management has become more transparent, and the responsibility to explain has become greater” says Kawamura.

As blogged previously, Hitachi hit the headlines for abolishing seniority based promotion for its Japanese managers recently, with commentators speculating that this would spread to other companies, and may even mean the end of other sacred cows of Japanese corporate life, such as lifetime employment. Kawamura openly says other Japanese companies will have to adopt the same approach and that this will result in greater labour mobility – not just in the Japanese labour market, but also for swapping people across national borders within the company.

However “moving people is tough” and it will take time, with other aspects of Japanese society also having to change, such as education and social mores, Kawamura acknowledges. Hitachi itself is facing the challenge of ensuring it does not devolve back to a ‘village mentality’.

Song remarks that he tried to get a Japanese friend of his who was a General Manager in a major electronics firm to take up a better remunerated position at a start up but his friend refused, saying his daughter was getting married soon, and he wanted to be introduced at the wedding as “General Manager of XXX company” – the status he would lose if he joined a start up was too much to contemplate.

I hope the choice isn’t as stark as Kawamura and Song make out – an adapt or die dilemma between the mutual loyalty of the company and its employees resulting in stagnation, or ruthless professionalism and mobility, resulting in growth. Not everyone can or should want to work for GE.

“Without competition, people will not develop”

Japanese construction materials and sanitary fittings manufacturer LIXIL is an example of a Japanese company that has deliberately tried to introduce a spirit of competitiveness into the company, following its acquisition of American Standard and Grohe. A German now runs a division, and many Japanese now have foreign bosses. LIXIL’s CEO Yoshiaki Fujimori says in a recent Nikkei Business article “There is no real competition inside Japanese companies. The benchmarks for evaluating employees are vague, and people are assessed on whether they are good relationship builders or come from the same background. At the very least, with a foreigner as a leader, baseless evaluation criteria will no longer be accepted.”

Fujimori is himself unusual in that he started out at Nissho Iwai (now Sojitz) and then became the first Japanese to be an EVP at General Electric, before joining LIXIL in 2011. He underwent a typical egalitarian Japanese education, graduating from Tokyo University in 1975, but even at Nissho Iwai he thought he could beat most people in terms of performance. However when he studied for an MBA he found out what real competition was like. He found it painful that other students could express their opinions so easily when he could not say anything. So he devised a study routine of making himself review the day in 1 minute every day, and then listen to himself, 30 times a day. It was even worse at GE, he claims, where you always have to win every battle. “If you lose once, you lose your job.” At LIXIL he has tried to quantify job roles in order to set performance evaluation standards and introduced Executive Leadership Training.

Another executive in the same mould as Fujimori is Yoshiaki Itoh. Born in Thailand, and a graduate of Thunderbird Business School, he has worked at Dell, Lenovo, Adidas Japan and Sony Pictures Entertainment, before becoming CEO of Haier Asia. At Haier he was shocked to find that the Sanyo (their white goods business in Asia was acquired by Haier) ‘super egalitarian’ legacy lived on – there were 14 grade levels, and everyone took an exam every two years in order to be promoted. It was not possible to jump a grade, so to get to a management position would take nearly 20 years, no matter how good you were.

Itoh cut the 14 levels to 5 and made it possible to become a team leader without any reference to age. He also went round South East Asia, and sent 20 of the 40 Japanese expatriates back to Japan. He also intends to make the R&D centre stand on its own two feet. “Japanese companies have not grasped the fact that competitiveness is necessary to win on the global stage” Itoh says. He is intending to further clear out remaining notions of “competition avoidance” and “everyone the same”.

The Mitsubishi thoroughbred who was called an alien

“When I was called ‘the alien’ I was resigned to it, realising that the people around me didn’t understand what I was trying to do. However, recently it seems as if what I was saying then is gradually becoming understood.” Minoru Makihara, former President of Mitsubishi Corporation, recollects the time when he tried to make English the second corporate language in 1992 and was criticised from within and outside the company [disclosure – I had just been posted to Mitsubishi Corporation Japan HQ at the time, and later worked with Mr Makihara to deal with the fall out from these policies]. “It was partly a misunderstanding – I was saying that ‘Bad English’ should be the corporate language. Because if you do not express yourself, no matter how poor the English, then you cannot have a dialogue.”

“English is the international language of business, not just because it is widespread, but because it is most suited to business. English can be vague when necessary, and precise when needed. Nobody thinks Japanese is suitable for business – it’s far too implicit. However, even though English is a necessity, it is not sufficient for listening globally. You need a sense of your own roots, your own “-ism” to understand someone who speaks a different language to you.”

“I have proposed a third ‘Opening up’ for Japan to the government. Japan is lagging behind in globalization. By ‘Opening up’ I don’t just mean the issue of whether there should be more immigration, but that we Japanese are the problem.”

“Ultimately it comes down to education – a liberal arts type education. To work globally, you need be able to gather data and knowledge for yourself, and make your own independent judgement. So to open up Japan again, you need to start from there. Without this, Japan will be isolated in the world.”

Japan would do well to embrace, not shun, its ‘global spanners’

I gave a talk to a group of Japanese MBA students this past week on what it was like to work for a Japanese company outside Japan. I explained about the communication issues, not just the language barrier but how the Japanese style of implicit communication, where so much is left unsaid, did not transmit well overseas. I emphasised how valuable people like Japanese MBAs with overseas experience were as brokers for the different communication styles of the Japan headquarters and overseas operations.

The inevitable discussion then ensued about why young Japanese were not going overseas to study or work. One student commented that despite or maybe because of the fact that she had experience living overseas, and also working in a non-Japanese company, she had found it impossible to get a job in a Japanese company. “They just don’t see how the way I am would fit in with them”.

Afterwards, when we all exchanged business cards, the student told me I could find her on Facebook. This jogged my memory of an article I had just read about how a large proportion of Japanese Facebook users have lived outside of Japan. I sense this is not just because they would have been exposed to Facebook in the West as a commonly accepted way of keeping in touch with friends, but also because the kind of people who have lived for prolonged periods outside their home country tend to be natural networkers, and therefore enthusiastic adopters of social media.

When you have lived outside of your home country, it becomes important to you to keep in touch, not only with your home country friends and relatives, but the ones you make in your new country, and then you try to keep in touch with them as you move around further. I also believe that people who have lived abroad for a long time are more comfortable than most with forming what are known in sociology as “weak ties” – connections to people who are not close friends or relatives, but are acquaintances. Gree and Mixi are popular social networks in Japan, but according to a recent survey, Japanese have 29 friends on average on such sites, compared to a 130 average for all Facebook users.

Global spanners with many weak ties can become bridges between the more close knit groups to which they also belong. In other words, in a Japanese company, a global spanner could have strong ties with either their Japan headquarters colleagues or their colleagues in the overseas team where they are working. Their weak ties, preferably to another global spanner, mean that a pipeline of communication between two inward-looking groups is opened up.

But as I mentioned in a previous article in this series, the problem in Japanese companies is that often the global spanner type is seen as an outsider, and is viewed with suspicion and not allowed to connect into any close knit group. It’s not a problem confined to Japan – ask President Obama – but it does seem to be particularly acute in Japan.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly

Forcing English on workers won’t automatically solve the globalization puzzle

The management guru Peter Drucker once said that Japanese businesspeople have a tendency to get the problem right, even if they sometimes come up with the wrong answer – whereas Westerners usually get the answer right, even if it is sometimes to the wrong question. This was in reference to the amount of time Japanese people spend defining problems, before they move onto solutions, whereas Westerners are quick, maybe too quick, to try to fix whatever they perceive the problem to be.

In the case of corporate globalization, there has been a rash of initiatives by Japanese companies to ensure their Japanese employees are more global, mostly centered around the issue of speaking English. They have set minimum Test of English for International Communication (TOIEC) scores for promotion, or English is imposed as the common corporate language, or all employees at a certain level are sent abroad for English language training. There is no doubt in my mind they have analysed the problem correctly – Japanese multinationals need to globalize their business further if they wish to grow rather than stagnate, and to do so requires the ability to develop and manage businesses outside of Japan. This, ultimately, is a human resources development issue.

I am not sure that the ability to develop and manage businesses outside Japan rests so much on a blanket rule about making everyone speak English, however. Eiko Harada, president of McDonald’s Japan, said in an interview with Nikkei Business Online that “if you think in Japanese, speak in Japanese. If you think in English, speak in English. If you think in Japanese and speak in English or think in English and speak in Japanese you will not be understood”.

What he was pointing out, I believe, was that foreign language ability does not necessarily mean you have the bicultural understanding to communicate effectively. If you do not have bicultural understanding, it also means you are not going to be effective at marketing to overseas customers, nor will you know what information your headquarters needs to make the right decisions.

Yet Japanese companies are failing to hire the very Japanese graduates who have had the experience of living abroad needed for such bicultural understanding. And decreasing numbers of Japanese students are studying abroad, fearful in the current climate that by doing so they will miss out on the extensive process that has to be undergone to get a “naitei” agreement that they will join a major Japanese company on the graduate intake track.

One Japanese company I used to work for tried to overcome this by having a special entry process for those who had studied overseas. I am not sure this was the right approach either, as it meant these hires were seen as “special” and Japanese blue chip companies have a habit of sidelining people who are “specialist” in some way. Steps are being taken to delay the “naitei” deadline to allow more time for all students to study, overseas or otherwise, rather than chase jobs – a move in the right direction. Rather than blanket rules for conformity, flexibility and diversity should be the norm for global companies.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.

How a UK online cycling shop wiggled its way to success

Great Britain led the way in winning cycling gold medals at the London Olympics, adding fuel to an enthusiasm for cycling in the UK which started a few years’ ago. Thanks to concerns about health, the environment and the horrors of commuting, more and more people have been taking up cycling, either as a hobby or a way of getting to work.

In Japan too, particularly after the 2011 earthquake highlighted how reliable this low tech transport can be, cycling has become more popular. Wiggle, a UK based online cycling accessories retailer, has been highly successful thanks to sales both to Japanese and British customers, but listening to a recent presentation by one of Wiggle’s managers made me realise it wasn’t just luck that enabled them to ride these waves of popularity.

In pursuing Japanese customers, Wiggle emphasises that it has Japanese speaking customer service representatives, fast delivery worldwide, and low prices – in that order. Each of these features has been key to cracking the Japanese market.

Apparently when Wiggle first realised that it had a significant number of Japanese customers, it simply used Google Translate to translate existing English text into Japanese on its website. Then when various Japanese customers started contacting them, including offering corrections to the Japanese, it realised it needed to start hiring Japanese speakers. Wiggle now has five native Japanese speakers on its staff, who not only make sure the website text is correct, but respond to Japanese customers by phone and email, and ensure the marketing campaigns reflect Japanese cultural preferences.

Having correct Japanese on websites is increasingly important, because although Japanese consumers are becoming far braver about ordering from overseas websites and paying using mechanisms such as PayPal, many have become victim to fraud, and there have since been warnings that one sign of fraudulent websites is poorly written Japanese.

The fast delivery is of course vital in competing against domestic suppliers and Wiggle were very keen to advise other companies aspiring to sell their products overseas that it is hugely important to get the domestic logistics right before attempting to deliver products overseas. By the time Wiggle started selling to Japan in any volume, they had a highly sophisticated warehousing system set up, located conveniently near international airports. Low prices are to some extent out of Wiggle’s control, as they have benefitted from the strong Yen, but it seems to me, that having got the Japanese speaking customer service and the delivery right, they should have a loyal enough following to see them through any unfavourable exchange rate movements.

One other key to retaining the loyalty of their Japanese customer base will be retaining the loyalty of their Japanese customer service representatives. All too often I have heard of British companies hiring Japanese speakers to deal with “difficult” Japanese customers and clients, and then not giving the Japanese representative the support and empowerment needed to deal with those demanding Japanese customers. Telling Japanese customers that they will just have to put up with delays or quality problems “because that’s normal in the UK” will not go down well, however politely and in perfect Japanese this message is delivered.

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 lack of information from Japan – “it’s like gold dust”

After a recent trip to Japan I came back clutching various documents from some contacts I met at one particular Japanese company. I only recently got round to translating them and forwarding them to the appropriate people in the overseas operations of that company. I asked in advance, before spending too much time translating, if the content was already familiar to the people outside Japan. Apparently it was not and the content was described as “gold dust” by one person.

It’s a perennial complaint in the overseas operations of Japanese companies that they don’t get enough information from Japan, to the point where they begin to wonder if things are being deliberately hidden from them.

I wrote in a previous article in this series about the unquenchable thirst for information amongst Japanese employees. In Japan this thirst is partly met through implicit knowledge sharing, by having an open plan office full of people who spend years working together and who all speak Japanese, so do not need to be formal and explicit in the way they communicate. There are more formal communication methods in most departments, such as weekly and monthly reports as well as the infamous A3 sized planning documents and the “ringi” proposals, which are circulated around numerous people.

But the problem is these are all in Japanese, and no one feels like taking on the onerous task of translating them into English. They all mostly have higher priority day jobs to attend to. Outsourcing them to a translation agency is one option, but it often takes an insider to truly distinguish what is important and what is really meant by internal documents.

I have come to the conclusion that there needs to be a conscious process set up for communicating between Japanese operations and the rest of the world, and it needs to be a recognised part of someone’s job. The person selected for this should not be shunted into some “global” group but be part of the actual business department, otherwise they will not understand the context of the information and which bits are most needed by overseas subsidiaries.

The final piece of the process is identifying the organisational units and people that are counterparts to each other, and therefore need to share information. This is more complicated than it might seem, as most large Japanese companies in my experience are organised in quite different ways to Western equivalents. In Japan there are no sales directors in charge of specific regions or customer segments. There are no marketing directors, in fact there is rarely a standalone marketing department. The organisation is highly vertical, so each business group has to be combed for people who have a global remit or functional role that looks relevant.

This is not easy when few people have written job descriptions. But once the right person and team are found, I am sure their thirst for information from outside Japan and satisfaction derived from being useful to global colleagues will mean the process becomes well embedded.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly and also appears in Shinrai: Japanese Corporate Integrity in a Disintegrating Europe, available as a paperback and e-book on Amazon.

Why Mitsubishi executives rarely represent Japanese business

The heads of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Keidanren (Japan Business Federation)and the Keizai Doyukai (Japan Association of Corporate Executives) are considered to be the three key positions for business and industry in their interactions with government – to influence government policy and “receive ministerial guidance” in return. So business and political commentators always like to speculate and analyse who has been chosen and from which company, and why.

When the appointment of Yoshimitsu Kobayashi, the current president of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings as the new head of the Keizai Doyukai was announced in November of last year, Nikkei Business magazine jumped on it as an opportunity to look at how the corporate culture of the Mitsubishi group (keiretsu) is perceived by the Japanese corporate world.

Apparently Kobayashi’s appointment had the unanimous support of the Keizai Doyukai members and his contribution as a member of the government’s Industrial Competitiveness Council also stood him in good stead. It’s also thought that he will step down as President of Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings in 2015 so will be able to devote himself full time to the association.

Kobayashi stated that he “wants to be involved in economic activism from the basis of contribution to society [corporate social responsibility]” – presumably an echo of the “kaiteki” philosophy he espoused at Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, and also to counter the kinds of accusations that the Nikkei Magazine journalist himself goes on to make, which is that the Mitsubishi group of companies has so far been seen as being mainly concerned with protecting its own members’ interests.

The Nikkei points out that no member of the Mitsubishi group has headed up any of the three organisations for the past 20 years. Yorihiko Kojima, current chaiman of my alma mater Mitsubishi Corporation, the group’s trading company, was mentioned as a possible successor to lead the Keidanren, but in the end Sadayuki Sakakibara of Toray was chosen, as it was felt that it was better to have a manufacturer at the helm. Hideaki Omiya of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries was also in the frame, but rejected because of MHI’s involvement in the defence industry.

All these appointments, it seems to me, can be explained by the way Japanese businesses strive to be seen as socially responsible and ethical and as representative of Japan’s self image as a nation, as much as it is about political connections.

Mitsubishi is usually contrasted with the Mitsui group as being “organisation” focused whereas Mitsui is more about “people”. I’ve asked many Japanese business people what this means in practical terms. Apparently when dealing with Mitsui, internally or externally, who you know and who they know is the key to getting business done, but with Mitsubishi, the individual is less important than getting the organisation to work for you. The Nikkei says it means Mitsubishi group companies are motivated to do things only by how the group will benefit as a whole, which accounts for the caution with which they are treated by other companies outside the group.

So why was Kobayashi chosen? Partly because there were no other candidates, says the Nikkei. Lawson President Takeshi Niinami (who is actually a Mitsubishi Corp alumnus, and Lawson is a Mitsubishi group company, so I think the Nikkei might be overstating the case somewhat re Mitsubishi’s lack of involvement) has been poached by Suntory Holdings so is out of the race for such positions. Also many Presidents are too busy with global competitive pressures to spend the money and time needed to head up the top of a business group.

The Keizai Doyukai is also seen to be losing influence. It was close to the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, but now the ruling LDP has revived, the Keizai Doyukai has lost its raison d’etre. “I was worried during the vetting process, but I slowly began to realise it was something I had to do” says Kobayashi, which Nikkei terms a rather innocent comment – “Kobayashi is being viewed somewhat coldly by those around him.”