Japanese Give U.S. Workers a Mixed Review : Americans Seen as Talented but Lacking Intuition and a Sense of Teamwork

Working with Americans can sure be frustrating.

Secretaries go home, leaving letters half-typed. Blue-collar and clerical workers won’t do things outside their job descriptions. Unqualified people get jobs in the effort to promote women and minorities.

At least that’s the thinking of many Japanese executives who have returned home after working on the other side of the Pacific. Understanding and motivating Americans, they say, takes a lot of effort.

Not that American workers don’t have their good qualities. Japanese officials view many Americans as quite talented and especially eager to find out how they can improve. Some are struck, and favorably impressed, by many Americans’ openness and honesty.

And some Japanese executives wonder whether they did enough to communicate with and befriend their American colleagues.

But when Japanese are asked to reflect on their experiences supervising Americans, they see plenty of areas that aren’t functioning quite right.

Communications

Tetsuhide Kokido spent six years in New York for the Mitsui Bank, and to him the biggest difference between American and Japanese workers was that Americans lack ishin-denshin --the ability to comprehend, without verbal instructions, what their superiors expect.

“Without spelling out instructions explicitly, Americans won’t understand,” said Kokido, now senior manager in the bank’s human resources department in Tokyo. Japanese secretaries would know intuitively that they must proofread a document that their bosses ask them to send to a customer, he said, but not Americans.

Americans must be told not only what to do, but why they should do it. Motivation must be spelled out, said Akiya Imura, president of the New Jersey-based Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. He said he inaugurated monthly round-table meetings with Matsushita’s American managers to improve communications and understanding--a practice he would not propose in Japan.

Language is clearly a problem, and Japanese acknowledge that it has been a difficult obstacle for American managers hoping to get promoted. Toshiyuki Yasui, who spent eight years in New York for Mitsui & Co., said the need to communicate with headquarters in Japanese denied Americans “a place on the corporate ladder.”

Mitsui & Co.’s highest-ranking American is a Japanese-speaking manager of its Washington office, a Caucasian educated in Japan. In New York, only one American--in the tax department--has risen as high as a general manager, said Yasui, who headed the trading company’s fertilizer division.

The Japanese recognize that they pay a price for the lack of advancement opportunities for Americans. Many Americans simply quit, and those who stay may not be as good. “Even though their salaries would go up, a title and status in the company was important to Americans,” Yasui said.

“That’s a fault of Mitsui,” he said. “There were many high-quality Americans at Mitsui in New York, but many of them stayed only a few years. The employees who stayed a long time were not always of high quality.”

For lower-echelon workers, a job at Mitsui & Co., Yasui said, was “just for the paycheck--as it is anywhere.” Higher-echelon employees sought jobs with the trading company for the experience before moving on to work in other jobs, often involving Japan and the United States, he added.

In contrast with the trading company, Mitsui Bank, a member of the same group of companies, recently launched a management “localization” program, according to Kokido. Its chief feature was the exclusive use of English in communications with the head office in Tokyo, he said.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. for years has conducted all communications between Japan and the United States in English, and most of its management posts are filled by Americans, according to Imura. Two of five standing members on the board of Matsushita America also are Americans, he noted.

Attitudes Toward Work

One of the most frequent complaints is that Americans are not team players like their Japanese counterparts.

American employees “think of work as limited to their own assignment, and they ignore problems that occur outside their areas,” said Takeshi Koshio, who was for three years assistant general manager of the Los Angeles office of the trading company Marubeni Corp. “Americans don’t have the same concept of teamwork that Japanese do.”

American workers also are faulted for low productivity. Kosuke Ikebuchi, who was manager of the General Motors-Toyota plant in Fremont, Calif., for almost three years, said that productivity at Fremont, although more than double what it was under General Motors, is still 30% below that of Toyota factories in Japan.

Absenteeism, which was rampant at Fremont when GM ran the auto plant there, has been reduced to about 2%, Ikebuchi said. While not complaining, he noted that the number is still double the rate at Toyota factories in Japan.

The Toyota executive also objected to United Auto Workers rules there banning extra pay for extra performance. In Japan, “we think it fair to reward workers for doing a good job” but extra pay at Fremont, he said, “is considered unfair” by the union.

“If differentials were permitted, they (Fremont workers) would do better,” he said.

Ikebuchi also complained that American workers and managers at Fremont were reluctant to confess mistakes. They “intensely disliked” Toyota’s practice of spreading word of mistakes throughout the factory--to prevent a recurrence--even though the company guaranteed that no one would be punished for mistakes.

Affirmative Action

Japanese managers are perplexed about what they regard as the legalistic nature of American labor relations, although they say they tried to abide by laws designed to encourage the hiring and promoting of minorities and women. Ikebuchi said he had trouble finding qualified applicants to fill affirmative action goals for promotion.

Americans and Japanese “have a different concept of what constitutes fairness and equality. Americans are too sensitive about fairness,” said Ikebuchi, who returned to Japan in February, 1987, to take charge of administration at Toyota’s Takaoka plant. Americans, he said, go “too far” with egalitarianism, including trying to open all jobs to women.

“There are certain jobs more suited to men than to women,” such as tasks in which heavy lifting is part of a job, he said.

American laws also hobble the process of interviewing job candidates, they say. “There are all sorts of questions you aren’t allowed to ask a prospective employee--including many that don’t seem to have anything to do with bias,” said Yasui of Mitsui & Co.

The Japanese cited instances in which they were interviewing married women with children. They had no objection to hiring the women but wanted to know if they had relatives who would be able to take care of the children while they were at work. They said they were forbidden to ask such a question.

Despite their complaints, Japanese executives also praise some characteristics of American workers.

In terms of “fervor and ability,” Ikebuchi said his U.S. work force is roughly on par overall with the company’s Japanese personnel, although Americans’ individual performances vary widely. In Japan, he said, talent is more uniform.

To bring out the talent on the factory floor in America, however, “workers must be trusted and allowed to assume responsibility for the job they perform,” he said.

Koshio, the Marubeni executive, found that his most ambitious Los Angeles employees performed exceptionally well, even though at heart they were working for themselves and not the company.

“They aimed for senior positions from the start,” he said. “And they were very eager to demonstrate that they deserved it. Japanese are more like marathon runners.”

Terumasu Kanazawa, who was head of America Honda Motor Co.’s power products division in Gardena for eight years, returned to Japan impressed with the honesty and candor of his subordinates.

“People would ask what was wrong if they didn’t get a raise. They wanted to know what their weak points were so they could improve,” he said. “They also didn’t hesitate to challenge a decision they disagreed with. Japanese don’t do this. We should learn from the Americans to be more open.”

While Kanazawa said that having beers with his salesmen at the end of the day was an essential part of his job, other executives said they sought out contacts with American staff mainly at lunchtime. After normal work hours, they fraternized mainly with other Japanese.

Kokido of Mitsui Bank said he assumed that Americans were in a hurry to go home to their families. But he noted that Americans were “highly enthusiastic” about playing baseball over the weekend in a league formed by more than 100 Japanese firms in New York. Thanks to a chauffeur with a fastball that “no Japanese catcher could handle,” Mitsui Bank, he recalled fondly, nailed down second place in the league one year.

“Maybe,” he added, “I should have tried inviting Americans out to dinner.”