Japanese Business Blog - Rudlin Consulting

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.

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The 4 types of Japanese expat manager

Susumu Okamura, a veteran of Daiichi Life, DIAM in the US, UBS Global Asset Management and a Columbia MBA alumnus, believes experience of secondment to another company is a must for survival in the global economy. Thanks, however, to ‘Naoki Hanzawa’ (a TV series in Japan about a heroic salaryman banker), being seconded to another company has a thoroughly bad image in Japan. However in global companies, where spin off companies are multiplying, being seconded has become part of management development.

Foreign business people are particularly enthusiastic about being sent to manage acquisitions or struggling subsidiaries. They see it as a valuable chance to put their ideas into action and do things their own way, says Okamura.

Okamura views joining your first company as a second birth, with being seconded to another company as a third rebirth, but unfortunately many Japanese managers do not see it that way. Okamura sees four types of secondees:

The depressive – who has dropped off the elite track of the headquarters, so becomes disillusioned and loses his spark. However they are often given an important role in the subsidiary company, so they are the worst kind of boss for the employees of the subsidiary.
The look backer – who wants to make headquarters regret pushing him out by producing great financial results. Tries harder than the depressive, but his aggressive, inflexible management style can warp the subsidiary
The phlegmatist – has the same laid back style wherever he goes. Works steadily, doesn’t try to change anything.
Mindset changer – is thrilled at the chance to start a new chapter in a new organisation, pursuing new dreams

As Okamura says, in traditional Japanese companies, secondment damages your chances of becoming a top executive in the headquarters. “But I want to ask instead, is it really fun to stay in the headquarters? What are you learning which is of value in the marketplace? Do you think that value will still hold in 10 years’ time?”

“We are in the middle of a diversity boom. However, unfortunately in many cases, the foreigners, women, mid-career hires and the disabled that are hired all end up being ‘dyed the same colour’. It’s not obvious why diversity was such a reason for hiring people. But being seconded is different – there is an unshakeable diversity to having to become part of a different corporate culture.”

You need to know Japan to be a globally effective Japanese manager

Foreign companies in Japan are known as gaishikei (foreign capital managed) and Japanese who choose to work in them are often suspected of being “lone wolves” who are motivated by money. However recently some Japanese managers who have worked in gaishi joined Japanese companies later in their careers, such as Hikaru Adachi, recently interviewed in Diamond magazine. He was born in Austin, Texas, went to Hitotsubashi University and then worked for P&G, Booz Allen, Roland Berger etc before joining Japanese clothing company World and starting up a group called Gaishikei Leaders.

He says he decided to work for a Japanese company because he is so concerned that Japan is being marginalized on the world stage, and to counter this, economic leadership is needed, for which global minded managers are required.

He joined a gaishi initially in order to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Although he found performance reviews tricky as he would tend to be naturally humble about what he did or did not achieve, compared to the boasting from other employees about their successes, he felt that his honesty eventually won through, and people came to trust him.

Gaishi managers have experience that purely Japanese managers lack:

Experience of having worked with foreign employees who speak a diverse group of languages, particularly English – knowing how to write emails, documents, run meetings. This cannot be achieved by only working with Japanese speakers, who are used to the non-verbal, telepathic way of Japanese corporate communication.
To have a standpoint that is not pivoting on Japan. For example, corporate cultures or customs which work fine when it is just Japanese working together, but in a global market or working with non-Japanese, they are hard to understand, or cause major problems.
Systems which are based from the outset on being global, such as HR, evaluations, finance and information systems. It’s not sufficient just to adjust Japan HQ systems for global use.

Japanese who have worked abroad with Japanese companies may be able to get enough experience in the first category, but for the second and third aspects, gaishikei managers will have the edge. Particularly on 3. he points out that with Japan’s particularly Japanese systems and structures, it is difficultto get experience in hiring and developing high quality non-Japanese staff.

He stresses he is not saying Japanese companies are inferior to gaishi, rather that Japanese managers lack the necessary self awareness about Japan’s history, culture, politics and economics to be able to represent it effectively in the global world.

Japanese firms might gain from looking to outsiders for insights

At the beginning of our training sessions with Japanese expatriate managers, I describe to them the positives and challenges Europeans say they face when working in Japanese companies. If I have already done similar sessions with Europeans in that company, then I also highlight those aspects which are specific to the company or were give a particular emphasis.

You can probably guess what the common positives and challenges are. The European employees usually say they find their Japanese colleagues are polite/friendly/calm, take a long-term view and have a high degree of commitment to their jobs and the company. The challenges that they find are communication problems centering on indirect/direct communication styles and attitudes to conflict, and also the long-winded, nontransparent decision making processes.

It is often said that Japanese people are more than usually curious about how they are perceived by other cultures. Certainly my list of common positives and negatives arouses great interest among Japanese participants. However, when I try to turn it into a debate about the company’s culture – asking questions like, “Do you think your company is more or less nemawashi (consensus based decision making) oriented than other Japanese companies in your industry?” – there is hesitation, a few tentative comments, and then thoughtful silence. It is almost as if such questions had never been considered before.

As lifetime employment has been so prevalent in these large companies, and still is for the majority of employees, the opportunity to compare the company you chose to join at the age of 22 with another company only arises once – during the graduate recruitment process. Because this a career-long commitment, both the graduates and the companies put a great deal of effort into the process of finding out whether there is a good fit between the candidate and the company culture.

But the actual nuts and bolts of working in a company – how decisions are made, attitudes to process, risk, hierarchy and so on – are not made so explicit, because the candidates have never worked in a company before and have no way of identifying these characteristics. If you are going to stay at the company for the rest of your career, then you just accept that “this is the way things are done around here.”

Now that more Japanese people are changing employers, and mergers between companies are increasing, it is surely time to be more aware of these differences, so that adjustments can be made by employees and companies.

Some insights will of course come from the job hoppers themselves, but it might also be time for Japanese companies to lose their allergy to using outside consultants. As a consultant myself, I would say this, but consultants who have worked with a range of companies probably have the best overall view of how Japanese companies differ from each other.

As the British writer Rudyard Kipling famously put it, regarding English insularity, “And what should they know of England, who only England know?”

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the The Nikkei Weekly

Monozukuri still has merit, but smarter marketing a must

I’m a big fan of Japanese monozukuri (“the art of making things ie manufacturing) and said so in a letter published in the Financial Times recently. It attracts criticism for causing Japan’s economy to be too reliant on exports, and there are worries about how an aging population can supply enough workers to man the shopfloor. But I really think Japan should “stick to its guns” in this regard.

Here in the UK we are suffering the effects of having moved too far away from manufacturing. We’ve ended up with a society where everyone thinks they should be highly paid knowledge workers or celebrities. We have failed to give enough status and dignity to making things.

A diverse society like the UK needs a full range of jobs to stay healthy. I am not saying this out of a patronising assumption that manufacturing jobs are necessary for the unskilled and uneducated in society and that such people are somehow not fit for anything else. There seems to be a fundamental human need to see tangible results from our labours.

Besides, a career in manufacturing requires far more than dexterous fingers these days – thanks to Japanese techniques such as just-in-time delivery, visualisation, root cause analysis, multi-skilling and so on, anyone wanting to succeed in manufacturing has to be computer literate, have an understanding of logistics and be capable of rigorous problem solving.

It is noticeable in this recession that many manufacturers have struck deals with their workers on pay cuts or working time reductions. rather than resorting to mass redundancies. There is a high cost to training a fresh set of employees when the economy picks up, so it makes more sense to retain the current workforce.

In fact it is knowledge work that has proved to be more vulnerable than expected. I know of many bankers, accountants and lawyers who have been made redundant, thanks to our British economy based on trading of over-hyped assets such as houses and fancy financial instruments. Ironically, many of them are now turning to “manual” work; cookery, gardening, farming, starting a vineyard and so on.

One problem I have noticed with monozukuri, however, is the assumption that making lovely things is somehow enough. At a seminar I facilitated recently, several senior salespeople, in electronics, sanitary ware and banking, all noted that their Japanese companies did not seem to have any understanding of the basics of marketing, particularly in the current highly competitive climate. “My bank doesn’t even have a pitch book!” the banker told me. I pretended to know what he meant, and later found out that this is a fundamental marketing tool for any Western investment bank – containing all the profiles and experience of the proposed team.

In the past, Japanese companies could rely upon relationships and their reputation for quality to sell their products and services. Now they need to think long and hard about differentiation and value added. Why do we make this product and not that one? What makes our product or service better or different? Should we be making this product at all? When they have answered these questions, their sales people can sell more convincingly, and the Japanese economy can pick up again.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly.

Oxford Boat Club vs Japan’s “Black” companies

Maiko Tajima, formerly of KPMG, now working for the World Food Programme, explains in Diamond Online why the rest of the world does not understand Japan’s so-called “black” companies. As she points out, if a native English speaker heard “black company” they would probably think “black enterprise” was meant, ie a company run by someone of what in the UK would now be called “black or minority ethnic” origin. Apparently there’s also a series of novels written by an American author called The Black Company.

Anyway, the closest translation would probably be “sweatshop” but most in the West would think of this as referring to factories, or workshops, in the US or Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, and more recently in developing countries, and find it hard to believe Tajima when she explains that such conditions are occurring in a developed country such as Japan, in the 21st century. A recent survey of its employees by Sukiya, a late night restaurant labelled a “Black Company” revealed comment such as “regardless of night or day, put all your life into your work, and if you survive, then you get to give the orders next time” and “work until your nose bleeds and you faint. Then you won’t be able to say anything is impossible any more”.

She explains how this occurs by contrasting her experiences as a member of the boat club in Oxford and also of a fencing club in a Japanese university. In the Japanese university club, the concept of “sempai” (seniors) was strongly adhered to – she calls it a “caste system”. You could not eat before your coach and your seniors started eating. Practice was to see how much you could endure. If they felt you lacked “konjo” (guts, willpower), it was the collective responsibility of the rest of the club too, so you all had to sprint around the sports hall. Tajima did get results in her matches, but she is not sure to this day if the “guts” she had at that time has really helped her in her life since.

As a member of an Oxford University Boat Club, there were of course the early morning, 5:30am starts on the river, that had to be endured over several months, but the reason behind this was “doing what we had to, to win” – starting with the desired outcome and working backwards.

The team was multicultural – American, British, Indian, Chinese and Taijma herself, and teamwork was heavily emphasised, but only in terms of getting the team to be a winner – there were no bonds outside the boat club. You were also allowed to make suggestions as to what should be done. “It was not what you could or could not endure, just what was the most rational course of action in order to win.”

As she points out, in European countries such as the Netherlands, there is the right to leave work 2 hours early, if the previous day you worked two hours overtime, and plenty of maternity and paternity leave. The focus is on trying to have a “good life” both in work and home life, as part of government policy.

She thinks that the roots of the 21st century Japanese “black companies” lie in the kinds of behaviours described by Ikujiro Nonaka in his book “The Essence of Failure” – an organisational study of the Japanese armed forces in the Second World War – emphasising human relationships over rationality, and to strive for spiritual virtue, no matter what had to be endured.

“Japan is different, but other countries are different, too” – Takeda’s Weber

Japan’s annual shareholders’ meeting season at the end of June went relatively smoothly for most companies, as their results had improved, in part due to the impact of a cheaper yen. Takeda was one of the exceptions, however, with the new President, Christophe Weber, facing protests from a 100 or so shareholders, more than half of whom were ex-Takeda employees.

Their 7 point letter claimed that the acquisition of Nycomed and Millennium Pharmaceuticals were failures, that the way Takeda was globalizing and the low morale of scientists in Japan called into question management effectiveness, that the way Weber was appointed as Hasegawa’s successor was questionable, that the focus on the executive management committee, largely peopled by “foreigners” was causing the board meetings to become a mere formality, that it was not clear why high dividends should be paid out when the financials were worsening, and finally that responsibility was not clear for the fine of $6bn in the US for concealing the risks for Actos, a diabetes drug.

Diamond Online analyses why Takeda is being criticised “from within”. Takeda was at a high point in 2006, but in decline since then, as four of its blockbuster drugs came off patent in the US. The search for new hit drugs led down the path of M&A. Takeda was the dominant Osaka pharmaceutical company, squaring up against Sankyo the Tokyo-based pharmaceutical giant. Behind the scenes, however, there were merger talks between the two. In the end Sankyo chose to team up with Daiichi.

So Takeda embarked on overseas acquisitions – Denmark’s Novo Nordisk and then Millennium in the USA in 2008, and finaly Nycomed in 2011. These acquisitions required substantial post merger restructuring, however there was noone capable of this in Takeda. The management layer below Hasegawa was “thin” ( a problem common to many Japanese companies, who cut back hiring of that cohort during the first oil shock). Hasegawa appeared isolated, and reliant on foreign executives and Japanese executives who had worked in foreign companies (in other words, not including the indigenous Japanese within Takeda)

Weber’s recent interview in the Japan Times, in which he emphasises that Takeda will remain “Japanese” is an attempt to reassure the Takeda founding family and domestic Japanese management, but whether an interview in English in Japan Times (an English language daily) is sufficient is doubtful. A charm offensive on the Nikkei group of publications might be advisable.

Japan’s soft power

In a week’s time, Rudlin Consulting will move to Norwich, UK. One of the reasons behind this choice of location is to be near the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Culture. I am keen to explore further how corporate cultures can be expressed “non-verbally”, through Japanese arts and culture, and also hope there is scope to collaborate with the Institute.

So of course I went to the lecture that Mami Mizutori, formerly of the Japanese Embassy in the UK, and now director of the Institute, gave to the Jiji Top Seminar (a monthly lunch for Japanese business people in the UK) last week. The title was “Do you invest in the power of culture?” She focused on the importance of soft power to Japan. Whether or not you believed that only Japanese can really speak Japanese and therefore only Japanese can really understand Japanese culture, (and I am guessing she does not subscribe to this point of view) she pointed out how a non-Japanese perspective on Japanese culture can help Japanese themselves to appreciate Japan’s culture.

Would an exhibition of Shunga (erotic art) ever have been put on in Japan, she wondered, the way the British Museum did last year? Probably the Japanese establishment would have deemed it to be pornography, not art, and therefore too controversial to touch. She also told the story of Joe Price, who started collecting Ito Jakuchu, a late Edo period (18thc) artist who had been neglected, but then became popular, culminating in a blockbuster exhibition in 2006 in Tokyo, the backbone of which was Price’s collection.

As this article described, Price was then able to use his collection to help cultural institutions in the 2011 earthquake region.

Mami also lamented that there is (no longer) a tradition of individuals sponsoring the arts the way there is in the US, and to a certain extent, the UK.

She wondered whether this was because post war Japan is a much more egalitarian place, and sponsoring the arts would be seen as flashy.

Pre-war many wealthy individuals did build up art collections (the Mitsubishi founding family Iwasaki’s Seikado collection or Idemitsu for example) and post war there is some sponsorship, such as Suntory’s famous concert hall. So the question I did not ask, was whether she was hoping that Japanese companies could fill the gap more than they do now.

As was pointed out by Akiya Takahashi, the director of Mitsubishi’s Ichigokan Museum in a recent interview (in Japanese) in the Nikkei Online, many major exhibitions in Japan are sponsored by newspapers and often take place in department stores. The staff therefore tend to be newspaper marketing employees, and there is a consequent lack of professional museum and gallery people, who can network with their peers in other countries. Also, what museum and gallery staff there are tend to return to universities to become academics. He is trying to change this by developing professionals at Ichigokan, encouraging them to travel abroad.

Furthermore, the newspaper sponsorship/temporary exhibition culture means that Japanese museums often do not have a permanent collection of any great strength. Again, Takahashi has been encouraging Mitsubishi to buy up some private collections for its museum. So my old employer Mitsubishi Corp is certainly doing its bit to help Japan’s soft power (and in the UK too – sponsoring the Japan room at the British Museum). I am very much hoping to see other Japanese companies “putting their money where their mouth is” as they say, and I suspect that was the subtle message of Mami’s talk too.

What to do with the window gazing tribe

I visited Japan for the first time in a year and a half at the end of last year. I try to go to Japan once a year, each time looking out for subtle changes in a country I have been visiting or living in for the past forty years.

This time I felt some of the “genki” (a useful Japanese word meaning energy and health) had come back, compared to visits in 2011 and 2012 when there seemed to be a general atmosphere of depression.

However I also felt Tokyo had slowed down. There were visibly more elderly people, but also the younger people moved more slowly, partly as they were gazing into their smartphones as they walked.

Japan’s “yasashisa” (gentleness) and rich cultural life make it a great place to grow old. Of course I realise that it is the current generation of retirees who have it the best – a decent pension and healthier, longer lives in which to enjoy it.

My generation, both in Japan and many European countries, face the prospect of not being able to retire until we are 70. So we have at least another 20 years of working life ahead of us. In Europe it is now illegal for employers to discriminate on the grounds of age, and the default retirement age of 65 has been phased out in the UK.

Europeans reaching their fifties will not be able to afford to retire early as previously. But if they cling on to their jobs they are made to feel like they are blocking the way for younger people and are vulnerable to redundancy programmes.

It is hard to get a job in another company once you are over fifty – and there is also a question of motivation. The prospect of another 20 years doing the same thing – particularly if it is a “gemba” (shopfloor) type, active, high pressure job, is not appealing. The second half of a working life should be more about reflecting on acquired knowledge and skills and handing them on to the next generation.

I’m not sure the initiatives taken in Japan since the 1990s to deal with this – such as kata tataki (literally “shoulder tapping” where employees in their late 40s are forcefully offered very early retirement) and madogiwazoku (the window tribe – people who have been given a seat by the window and no real job to do) really worked. It was not only disheartening for those directly impacted, but also for the younger generation, who have reacted by becoming more risk averse. They want lifetime employment, but don’t see the point of being ambitious or taking risks such as working abroad.

A better way might be to help people in the second half of their working life find ways of capturing their accumulated knowledge and skills and transmitting them to the younger generation in Japan – through teaching rather than as a manager.

Locally hired employees and managers in overseas acquisitions would also welcome having an appointed mentor to help them feel more connected to Japan headquarters and understand the corporate culture and processes. If Japan could refresh its traditions of sempai/kohai (mentoring of juniors by seniors) and apprenticeship for the 21st century, I believe it could be a pioneer in developing a humane but productive ageing society.

This article by Pernille Rudlin originally appeared in the Teikoku Databank News in Japanese on February 12th 2014 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.

Marketing Japan to attract foreign investment – a fourth arrow?

Prime Minister Abe made a short, punchy speech at the “Invest in Japan” event I attended yesterday in London. Perhaps not quite as passionate as his longer speech at the Guildhall last year, but his key message was clear, that Foreign Direct Investment was an important pillar of his growth strategy and that he was aiming, with Abenomics, to make Japan a more market friendly, more exciting destination for foreign companies.

The current fashion is to say that Abenomics is losing steam, because of the lack of progress with what Abe has termed the third arrow – deregulation and structural reform. My view on this is that the Japanese government can deregulate and pass new, more liberal laws all it likes, but without significant support and action from major Japanese companies, not much will happen.

So foreign investment might be a way to stimulate action and change, if foreign competition is able to enter the Japanese market more aggressively. There is something of a chicken and egg situation, however, in that foreign investors often say they need to see deregulation and structural reform implemented before they will invest in Japan.

There is also a concern, voiced by ex ambassador Sir David Wright at the event, that foreign companies are still seen as “foreign” and may not get equal access to the benefits of any reforms or incentives. The mayor of Kobe was quick to pick up on this point – “foreign companies in Kobe will be seen as Kobe companies” he said, which is no doubt a legacy of Kobe’s long standing history as an international port. Certainly we felt very at ease when we lived in Kobe, as long ago as the 1970s, despite not being members of the rather snobby expat Kobe Club.

So Abe gave concrete examples of where there had been deregulation, in the energy sector and pharmaceutical sectors and also a strengthening of corporate governance, based on British standards. The rest of the morning was given over to presentations by the mayors of Fukuoka and Kobe, and the governors of Mie and Hiroshima prefectures, who were keen to emphasise another area of reform – the new national strategic special zones, where regulations will have a lighter touch, to enable innovation.

It seems Japan’s mayors and governors have more autonomy than in the UK, so many of them were able to showcase particular initiatives and tax breaks they had introduced to encourage investment into their regions. I had been dreading these presentations, expecting a succession of grey men explaining word for word, dreary, text box heavy powerpoint slides in incomprehensible or badly interpreted English, but to the audience’s great delight, the 4 regional leaders wowed us all with their youthful energy, dynamism and sometimes excellent, but always bravely and strongly delivered English, which seemed to come from the heart rather than a script written by someone else.

These men (there was supposed to be one woman too, the mayor of Yokohama, but she was unwell) could be Abe’s fourth arrow – if they can make a convincing case for a Japan as an Asian hub, beyond the bureacracy and vested interests of Tokyo – but I think a bit more strategic thinking behind the marketing is needed. Some sectors in the UK are already aware of Japan’s potential – I was delighted to see Paul Alger of the UK Fashion and Textile Association steer Hawick Knitwear towards Japan as a basis for entry into China, in the recent BBC programme The New Troubleshooter.

The Fukuoka mayor got some way there, with his eyecatching map showing that Fukuoka was equidistant to Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo. Not to mention the fact that KLM has just started flights from Amsterdam to Fukuoka – a point that caught my attention, as we are about to move to Norwich, and I am looking forward to using Norwich International (sic) Airport to get to Japan, as it has several KLM flights to Amsterdam a day.

There was rather too much emphasis on the nice lifestyle to be had in Japan’s cities (and it made me very nostalgic for the lovely times I had living in Hiroshima and Kobe) and not quite enough hard headed business appeal, particularly along the lines of the point that Steve Crane, of Business Link Japan, made in the final presentation of the day, that it is important to move near your ecosystem and supply chain, when considering location.

The leaders did note the various industries or specialist zones that they were focusing on regionally, but it’s possible that they took it too much for granted that we would understand how industrial clustering works in Japan. Actually, as most of the audience were the usual Japan gang, this kind of marketing would have been wasted on us anyway.

Which brings me to my biggest constructive criticism – the government bodies that organised this seminar, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Embassy of Japan in the UK, the Japan Local Government Centre and JETRO, really need to network more with the various regions, cities and companies in the UK, so that more representatives of UK companies come to these seminars. JETRO is apparently about to hire some industry sector specialists in Europe as consultants – I presume to help with that. The JLGC head told me that twinning Japanese cities with regional governments in the UK has proved difficult, as no British politician or bureaucrat in this current climate of austerity wants to be seen to be jetting off to Japan on a sushi and sake junket.

As Sir David Warren, former ambassador to Japan, succinctly put it, “it needs to be proved that Japan can be more than a profitable niche”.