Japan Has to Get Used to the American Way

As more Americans learn the joys and irritations of working for the Japanese--the subject of a major series of articles beginning today in The Times----they should be aware that work in Japan is no longer the lifetime security blanket it’s often made out to be.

In a way it never really was--and that’s a key to understanding where the new Japanese employers of some 300,000 Americans are coming from, what conditions back home have formed their attitudes. The truth is, in coming to America, the pressure is on the Japanese employers, who come with a reputation as super managers--but an over-inflated reputation earned in a hothouse work environment different from anywhere else.

“One of the most difficult things for an American to understand is the Japanese lack of opportunity,” says Jiro Tokuyama, senior adviser to Mitsui Research Institute and a Tokyo University and Harvard-educated longtime student of the two societies.

“This is a densely populated, highly developed nation where nearly everybody competes,” explains Tokuyama. What he means is that Japan is a nation of 120 million people in an area slightly smaller than California--and not just any old people but ambitious college graduates.

These days, 40 out of every 100 youngsters graduate from college in Japan, where before World War II, only three out of 100 (in a population of 70 million) graduated from college and dreamed of competing for good jobs. Yet even in the prewar period, Japanese industrial relations were notoriously bad.

So, since the war, says Tokuyama, Japan has devised a series of “unwritten nonaggression pacts to keep people from bloodshed competition, including lifetime employment, seniority promotion (meaning young men are not promoted over old) and company unions.”

Such measures took some of the fear out of working life and allowed the Japanese to channel their rank consciousness into the ritual exchange of business cards--which is not a cordiality but a means of checking who outranks whom--and the equally ritual bowing to superiors. In Japan, you always know when the boss enters a room because employees bow--sometimes performing a 90-degree bend from the waist--an exercise that Americans might find good for the stomach muscles, if hard on the ego.

System Changing

Other rituals stem from those postwar measures also, such as the nightly drinking and dining of male office staffers--”That’s where they do the routine work of the office,” says one manager--and the wearing of company uniforms, a custom reflecting poorer days in Japan and now restricted mostly to female employees.

But that peaceable system is changing now as Japan moves production beyond its home island and takes its place in the fast-moving world financial system.

Changing how? Specialization, for one thing. Seniority promotion rules are breaking down in the financial sector as companies raid each other to hire away specialists in bond and Euro-currency trading.

And demands of Japanese baby boomers for promotion are pushing more older Japanese office workers into early retirement or a cruel twist on lifetime employment called “the desk at the window”--where an employee is given a desk and newspapers to read but no pay raises and no work to do.

However, the biggest change for Japanese employers is leaving bowing workers for what they often regard as less capable foreigners. “Americans are hard to work with,” says Hirohiko Okumura, chief economist of Nomura Research Institute, reflecting a common attitude. “Here in Japan, I don’t have to tell my staff every single thing to do. They know what to do.”

But that attitude may be out of date even in Japan, where an affluent younger generation’s devotion to work is suspect, says Kenichi Ohmae, the Tokyo-based senior partner of McKinsey & Co. the management consultants. And it’s definitely not useful elsewhere in the world, says Ohmae, where the “Americans have developed systems that can make workers with modest education and intelligence perform well and therefore improve the productivity of large numbers of people with average qualifications.”

Now Japanese companies must learn how to do that, although they have been reluctant pupils--which is why they typically have only 5% of their production outside Japan, while U.S. and other nations’ firms have almost 20% outside their home countries.

A top Japanese executive blames the failure to go abroad sooner on “the labor fear, the fear we couldn’t make a quality product with American labor.”

But you don’t hear American management say it can’t make a product with Korean or Taiwanese or Mexican or British or German labor. What the Japanese are doing is rationalizing their fears of leaving cooperative company unions and their society’s other security blankets. “Logically, Japanese managers know they must go abroad,” says Ohmae, “but if you could read their thoughts you’d see they don’t want to go.”

So why don’t they stay home? Because they can’t; because Japan’s people are now hooked on a standard of living that can be sustained only by selling to the world. “If we close up, we die,” says one Japanese leader.

And that means Japan’s companies increasingly will be coming to America and employing Americans. That being the case, they’ll help themselves if they adjust to the place--like legions of immigrants before them--instead of complaining how much it is unlike Japan.