Hitachi’s Envoy to U.S. Is Changing...

In the battlefield of Beirut in 1976, after his Hitachi Ltd. office had been demolished by mortar shells and the banks had shuttered, Masayuki Kohama would scurry through town carrying as much as $10,000 stashed in a money belt.

“In that dangerous place, only cash can save you,” he said.

Now cash is helping save Hitachi from peril again--and Kohama is once more the bearer of it. Three years ago, he landed in Los Angeles with one order: to improve Hitachi’s battered image. The Japanese industrial giant had been socked by allegations of industrial spying against International Business Machines Corp. in 1982. It was accused of dumping semiconductors in the U.S. market three years later.

As congressional tempers flared, the $48-billion-a-year maker of bullet trains and some 20,000 other products suddenly became known, in Kohama’s words, as a “rather notorious bad boy.”

But the “bad boy” is bent on becoming a good corporate citizen these days, and Kohama, 51, is equipped with both the bank account and the backing from Tokyo to tackle that transformation.

Since he’s arrived, the vigorous executive has handed out more than $242,000 for such causes as the Los Angeles Music Center, the Bay Area Quake victims and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. He spent $300,000 organizing a symposium on California transportation issues in 1987 and $250,000 on similar forums on housing in the San Francisco Bay Area and on air quality in Los Angeles.

He packs his schedule with receptions, luncheons and speeches. He organizes seminars on affirmative action and other sensitive topics for the Japan Business Assn. of Southern California. When Toyota Motor Corp. held a benefit for the United Negro College Fund, he was the only Japanese not affiliated with Toyota to attend.

He even turned up on the “Lou Rawls Parade of Stars” telethon to give the fund a $10,000 donation.

“We can say our company is not only doing business, taking profits and making money,” Kohama said, beaming proudly from his 27th-floor office in Century City. “We are concerned about problems in California.”

Established in 1910 as an electrical repair shop, Hitachi spans the globe today with operations in power systems, industrial machines, consumer products, chemicals and electronics. It employs 6,000 Americans in 50 U.S. subsidiaries, including 2,000 Californians involved in a range of jobs, including television assembly in Anaheim, auto part sales in Torrance and computer research in Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara.

The firm’s philanthropic gestures might be routine for an American corporation. But for a Japanese firm, both the mission and the man are unusual.

Although the attitude is beginning to shift, corporate philanthropy has not been a tradition in Japan, where social needs are generally the responsibility of family or government, Kohama said. Nor are corporate public relations as necessary in a country where business, government and the media cozily cooperate and overt displays of self-promotion are considered vulgar, he added.

Most of all, to promote a company through the persona of one man runs counter to Japanese sensibilities against individualism and invites the proverbial hammer on the nail sticking up.

“In Japan, everyone must be at the same level. If someone steps up, someone puts him down,” Kohama said. “In order to raise up the image of Hitachi, I have to be the face of the company. But from the viewpoint of Japan, there are sometimes misunderstandings--’Oh, he is selling himself’--and that is very bad.”

As a result, Kohama must wrestle with such seemingly minor matters as whether to put a picture of himself in the Hitachi newsletter. Would a photo of him in a cowboy hat at a Hitachi-sponsored chili contest be seen as too frivolous? Such questions sometimes keep him tossing in bed until midnight.

“I have to show up to the maximum here,” he said, flinging out his arms. “But in Tokyo I have to show the minimum,” he added, hunching his shoulders inward. “So my position is very delicate.”

Many Japanese executives here, looking toward returning home in three to five years, simply choose not to risk offending superiors back home. Thus they tend to avoid the speeches or other visible behavior that could get them in trouble, Kohama and others said.

“They usually say they are too busy” to participate, said one Japanese executive, who asked for anonymity.

But Hitachi decided to blaze a new public relations path. No less than the top three officers--President Katsushige Mita and senior executive managing directors Toshi Kitamura and Tadashi Okita--conceived the idea, giving Kohama direct reporting access to them and considerable authority to make funding decisions and to speak out.

The office opened one year after Hitachi launched an image-polishing program, setting three targets: more job-producing investments in the United States, more purchases of U.S. products and training of its buyers in English so Americans could more easily sell to them.

At the same time, from 1985 to 1986, Hitachi’s worldwide revenue was dipping for the first time in five years. Kohama attributed the decrease to the strong Japanese yen and the semiconductor slump, however, not the image problems.

But officials were clearly worried. “We felt a kind of very serious situation might come if we didn’t do our action program,” Kohama said. “Without doing good cooperation with the U.S., our company would not exist.”

To tackle the sensitive assignment, Hitachi tapped a lifelong company man with proven adaptability to foreign cultures. Kohama joined Hitachi’s domestic sales office in 1962 after graduating from Osaka University in law and switched to the international division four years later. He has traveled to 60 countries and lived in New York, Beirut and Cairo before moving to Los Angeles.

He is fluent in English, direct in speech and expressive in gesture. His tools of persuasion are not just dollars. Hitachi has also sponsored such cultural events as Grand Kabuki theater, in an effort to show Americans “that Japanese are not people who are just cold, money minded, stingy, but the same people with a warm heart,” he said.

His flexibility--and stamina--were apparent on a recent Wednesday. He began the day at 7:30 a.m. listening to a pitch for United Way donations at Bank of America in downtown Los Angeles. At noon, he joined the head table at a luncheon of the Japan America Society, where he serves on the board.

At 6:30 p.m., he climbed into his Chevrolet Brougham and took off for KCET-TV’s 25th anniversary party. It was 8:30 p.m. before he finally went home, but he still characterized the day as “rather quiet.”

Throughout the day, Kohama collected some 10 new business cards. He slipped easily into bows or handshakes as the occasion warranted. He handled conversation topics from the Bay Area Quake to Los Angeles neighborhoods and he graciously smiled over social banalities: “We bought a Hitachi television set for our daughter and it works perfectly!”

His visibility has attracted a growing number of funding requests--about four a week--and admiring reviews from community leaders.

“He does set the example to his own community of involvement and concern,” said Jeff Matsui, executive assistant to Mayor Tom Bradley. “The mayor was in Japan in 1984 and 1985 trying to encourage this very thing.”

But the father of two, whose wife, Masako, lives with him in an apartment two blocks from his office, said the job not only benefits his company. It has also allowed him to repay the personal debt that he said he feels toward Americans, who befriended him when he first visited the country in 1966.

“Americans were so kind, so generous,” Kohama said. “Now I’m able to contribute something back.”