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rakuten

Home / Posts Tagged "rakuten"

Tag: rakuten

“The discrimination was so bad, I thought about killing myself” – Softbank’s Masahiro Son

That headline for sonthe interview in the Nikkei Business online magazine with Softbank caught my eye partly because for the first time we are about to provide some cross cultural training on Korea for a client in the UK, and it turns out it caught the eye of other Nikkei readers too, as it came top of the ratings for most viewed article for last month.

The question that triggered his remark was asking why he chose to use his Korean surname, Son, instead of the Japanese name, Yasumoto,  that the rest of his family used.  Son said he chose to adopt the surname when he was 16 and moved to the USA.  As a child in Japan, despite going by his Japanese surname, he teased for being a “Chosenjin” (old fashioned term for Korea, implying North Korea) and even had stones thrown at him.  To this day he is attacked online for his ancestry.

When he returned to Japan and founded his own company, he had the choice of using his Korean surname or his Japanese surname, as both were on his passport.  “To live in Japanese society, it would have been better to use Yasumoto.  There are many celebrities and sportspeople [of Korean ancestry] who do this.  I’m not criticising them for that.  But even now there are still various invisible handicaps [to having Korean ancestry] which are causing pain and anguish to people, even small children.  When I was at primary school and junior high, I even thought about killing myself, quite seriously.”

“My family were opposed to me doing it… but I thought that those children in Japan who are having a hard time should see even just one example of someone using their ancestral name and overcoming all those handicaps to succeed.  My family were worried of course that if I used the Son name then they would all be exposed…. called “Kimchi eaters”.  I told them they could pretend I was not part of their family.  They are strong adults and can cope with a bit of discrimination, unlike children, who need some rays of hope.”

“Japan’s industries have lost their confidence, are collapsing or turning in on themselves.  I wanted to make sure that at least one company took on the big enemies in the USA – that way I could contribute to society.  It’s not just our company now, but also Yanai (of Uniqlo/Fast Retailing), Nagamori (of Nidec), Rakuten, DeNA – there are signs that Japan can come back to life.  It’s important to look after those who have fallen by the wayside if you are opposing discrimination, but it’s also important to have success stories that are rays of hope – to be praised as a Japanese Dream, Japanese Hero by society.”

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Englishnization – a precursor for the Rakuten Economic Bloc going global

RakutenMalaysiaDespite the acquisition of Spanish streaming media company Wuaki.tv and Viber (Israeli founded VOIP instant messaging company) and plenty of noise in the Japanese media about forcing employees to speak English, Rakuten’s profile in Europe seems pretty low to me, considering it’s the ‘world’s 3rd largest e-commerce company’.

Indeed, according to Nikkei Business, only 14% of its revenues are from outside Japan and it seems is not very profitable either.  Japanese domestic business – the so-called ‘Rakuten economic bloc’ of e-commerce, travel, banking and e-publishing – makes up the bulk of Rakuten’s business.

To charges that Rakuten’s business model does not work outside Japan, the founder Hiroshi Mikitani counters that he has only just assembled the ingredients for overseas success and that the first market in which he has started “cooking” is Taiwan.  He is hoping to learn from the experience to speed up overseas expansion.

It’s five years since Mikitani announced that the corporate language would be English, attracting much scepticism in Japan. “If we had not done that 5 years ago, we would not be the company we are today” says the Global HR GM Koichi Noda.  Japanese, Chinese and English flow around the canteen, and when different nationalities sit together, they naturally converse in English.

Mikitani’s recurring comment “Easy English is OK”, to Japanese struggling to present in English, must have helped overcome the Japanese perfectionist attitude to using English, as well as allowing people to attend English lessons during working hours. The average TOEIC score of Japan based Rakuten staff has risen from 526 in 2010 to over 800 in 2015.

As the Nikkei says, this has ensured that when overseas acquisitions join the family, other employees besides the person who led the acquisition can now converse with the new subsidiary.  Indeed, this is often the frustration of the local and expatriate executives of overseas acquisitions I have worked with, that the number of people in Japan HQ who could happily join a global conference call to improve communication flows is very limited.

The next phase of “Englishnization” as Mikitani calls it, is to improve conversation and presentation skills.  Just speaking English does not make you a global person, Noda agrees.  The second phase is intended to enable employees to negotiate and debate and will be using Pearson’s Versant testing rather than TOIEC as a measure.  The third phase is the Global Experience Program – whereby 100 or so Japan based employees spend half a year to a year overseas.

All very laudable, and I imagine there plenty of longer established Japanese companies who wish they could get away with doing something similar.

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A truly global HQ, where Japan is just one of the regions?

Passport-695x469I mentioned in a previous article in this series that Japanese companies such as Fast Retailing and Rakuten are adopting English as their corporate language.  In reaction to this, various surveys of Japanese employees’ attitudes to speaking English appeared in the media, including one that showed that 73% of Japanese are reluctant to have English as a corporate language.

Adding to this, another survey just released by the Sanno Institute of Management found that 67% of the businesspeople it questioned did not want to work abroad.  The conclusion drawn by many Japanese commentators is that this is all part of Japan’s withdrawal from the globalized world. In particular there is a worry, shared by the Japanese government, that the younger generation have become more inward looking and cautious, and this will have a negative impact on the economy.  My personal conclusion is that these reactions show that Japanese people rather enjoy agonising over surveys about themselves, particularly if the results show how different Japan is or are in some way a cause for gloom.

It seems to me any such trends are more related to economic factors than anything peculiar to Japanese society.  There is not the urgency to rebuild the Japanese economy through export led growth that there was in the post-war decades.  The slow death of lifetime employment means that younger people are less loyal to their companies and therefore less willing to go wherever their employers tell them.

Japanese companies have adapted over the past twenty years to the changing global environment.  They expatriate fewer staff to the expensive developed world, relying on local managers instead, and have turned their attention to investment of capital and personnel in emerging markets.

The same trends can be found in the matured economies elsewhere in the world.  The US used to have a mobile workforce, who would pack up and move state in search of a job, but apparently this is less true now, despite the persistent unemployment problem there.  And although Europeans love pointing out how only 20% of Americans have passports, compared to 70% or so of the British population for example – it is noticeable how most of the migration within Europe is from Eastern Europe, rather than from Western Europe.

Rather than force reluctant Japanese employees to transfer abroad or adopt English as a corporate language, many Japanese companies are trying to globalise by encouraging employees from Asia to transfer to Japan or hiring Asian students who are studying in Japan.  I suspect the expectation is that these employees will have to blend in as much as possible, however, so the impact on the Japanese staff in the headquarters will be minimal.

The worry then is that the non-Asian part of the business will become increasingly disconnected from Japan and Asia, with very little exchange of staff between the two regions.  A radical solution might be to accept that the majority of Japanese staff prefer to focus on Japanese domestic sales, and split the Japanese domestic side from the global headquarters.  This headquarters could be situated anywhere in the world, and yes, the working language will probably be English.

This article originally appeared in the Nikkei Weekly

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Last updated by Pernille Rudlin at 2015-08-29.

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