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 …
Read MoreIn 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 …
Read MoreI was reading the last chapter of a book (The 1990s and beyond (pdf)) I wrote which was published in 2000 about the history of Mitsubishi Corporation in London, and was reminded that I had come up with a …
Read MoreThe question of whether having more women managers would help Japanese companies to globalise was raised, but not discussed in depth due to time constraints, at a dinner I attended, hosted by a delegation to the UK from Japan Women’s …
Read MoreAs well as the train business in the UK, the other case study that Takashi Kawamura, former President of Hitachi gives as a model of globalization is the data storage business, which was turned into a “solution” business rather than …
Read MoreThe Hitachi group of companies, estimated to be the second biggest company in Japan in terms of employees after Toyota, and 4th in terms of revenue, has turned itself around considerably since 2009, when it chalked up “the largest loss …
Read MoreThe former President of Microsoft Japan, Makoto Naruke, wrote a best seller entitled “90% of Japanese don’t need to speak English” provocatively asserting that learning English was a waste of time and money, no graduate from an international school has …
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Our July 2023 directory of over 1000 Japanese companies in the UK, classified into manufacturing, wholesale, services and financial services is available for purchase as searchable pdf. Each company has a brief …
A significant factor that affects corporate governance in Japanese companies, particularly when it comes to whistle-blowing, is the sempai/kohai (senior/junior) dynamic. These relationships are particularly prevalent in large Japanese companies that retain lifetime employment systems.
Typically, when a Japanese graduate …
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