COLUMN ONE : Japanese Managers Go Native : America’s charms are not lost on Honda executives. After a few years here, some have extended their stays. And their families are 100% behind them.

This is the story of the Americanization of Toshikata Amino.

And with him, maybe, just maybe, the first halting steps toward the Americanization of Japan Inc.

Listen to what this quiet manager of the sprawling Honda auto plant here has to say about living in the United States. Ask him how a decade in Ohio has changed his family, his outlook on the world, and the stereotypes quickly start to fade; the walls of mistrust and hostility begin to fall.

“I would like to stay in America until I retire,” Amino says--in smoothly flowing English. “And then, my wife and I would like to live in Marysville after I retire. I don’t want to go back to Japan.”

Why?

“Maybe because we have made more friends in this country in 10 years than we did in Tokyo in the previous 10 years.”

In the midst of all the talk in Washington and Tokyo about a trade war between the United States and Japan, all the stories about how the arrogant Japanese now look down on an America in decline, one startling fact emerges from Amino’s story and from conversations with many other Japanese managers here:

More and more of the Japanese assigned to the United States are becoming enamored of the American way of life.

Some of them even admit they like living in America better than in Japan. A few, such as Amino, don’t want to go back home.

“I’d like to stay here permanently, and my kids agree,” said Akio Kasai, a Honda manager whose 9-year-old son now argues with his befuddled parents in perfect American English. “My wife would like to stay if she could get a work permit. If she does, then we can stay.”

Of course, Amino and Kasai and others who push their companies to let them remain in the United States represent only a small minority of the Japanese who are based here.

“I have no doubt that there are a number of Japanese managers who want to stay here, but compare that to the many who want to go home, who never adjust to life here, and you have a more accurate picture,” said Yukari Ohnishi, a San Diego-based consultant in cross-cultural management who works with American and Japanese firms.

With most Japanese corporations, an American tour of duty lasts no more than five years, and Ohnishi noted that managers often can’t wait to return to headquarters in Tokyo or Osaka to be close to the seat of bureaucratic power and to put their children back on track in Japan’s rigidly structured school system.

Yet the fact that some of Japan’s best and brightest managers are breaking ranks suggests that America is having more impact on the structure of Japanese business than anyone had anticipated.

Over the past decade, a flood of Japanese businessmen has come to run the American operations of Japan’s burgeoning economic empire. Today, about 6,000 Japanese companies have offices or plants in the United States, and experts estimate that perhaps 50,000 Japanese managers and their families are living in this country.

To many worried Americans, these shock troops of corporate Japan have resembled nothing so much as an occupying army--the winners of the peace.

Few of Japan’s American outposts have been more visible than Honda’s massive manufacturing complex here. With 9,000 employees--including 400 Japanese managers--Honda is now the largest private employer in central Ohio.

Yet if they are economic colonialists, these Japanese, like other victors throughout history, are starting to go native.

They are doing so because they have found, after a few years in America, a more expansive life that would be impossible in Japan.

“There’s a lot more space here,” noted Bob Okumura, who left a Japanese bank six months ago to join a San Diego commercial real estate firm. “That gives me a much more comfortable feeling to want to live here.”

“They get a bit of the flavor of America, and they get swept away,” observed Steve Clemons, executive director of the Japan-America Society of Southern California. “And then they want a bigger bite of it. I can tell you countless stories of people who love the quality of life here and don’t want to go back to Japan.”

In the United States they find a life that is far removed from the constraints of Japanese conformity and equally far from the suffocating crowds, overbearing corporatism, cramped apartments and sky-high cost of living in Tokyo.

Their wives, especially, find unprecedented freedom here. For many Japanese women America is the place where they can drive their own cars, have spacious homes and belong to clubs and organizations independent of their husbands. “I think it will be a little bit difficult to go back to Japan,” said Junko Kobayashi, a Honda manager’s wife who is taking American cooking classes.

The children, meanwhile, quickly adapt and, if they stay here long, often are heavily influenced by American culture.

Katsushi Mori, a Honda engineer based in Marysville for eight years, said with a sigh: “When we went to Japan to visit, my son listened to the movie on the plane in English because, he said, he couldn’t understand it in Japanese.”

And the Japanese managers themselves find career challenges here that are unheard of in Japan. They are, essentially, given the freedom to create new industries in the United States. “Business in Japan is becoming mature, but here we have flexible, challenging work,” Kasai said.

Above all, these Japanese families are being seduced by the very thing that seems to so frighten Japan as a nation--the lure that has drawn immigrants ever since the day the Mayflower landed:

Individual freedom.

When asked why he wants to stay, Kasai said simply: “We have much freedom here.”

“If you want to express yourself in some way a little bit differently, then you will say, ‘I want to be in the U.S.,’ ” Honda manager Hisao Kobayashi added.

“Today you hear a lot of Japanese executives openly expressing that they like America, that they want to be here, and their ability to say so publicly is, I think, indicative that something new is happening among them,” said Hugh Leonard, general manager of Leonard Training & Consulting in Los Angeles, which conducts training sessions to help Japanese and American managers work together in Japanese companies.

“Deep down, many Japanese here tremendously envy the space of America, and the freedom to say and do what you want,” added Leonard, who lived in Japan for many years.

Many Japanese concede, in fact, that although their nation is politically free, a broad streak of conformism runs through their national psyche, providing an internal check against strong self-expression. Once in America, away from the cultural constraints, some Japanese say they feel a sense of personal liberation.

This growing fondness for life in America, at a time of heightened tensions between the two nations, helps to underscore a Japanese ambivalence toward the United States, the sense that Japan both loves and hates America. Japanese businessmen here say they believe that American industry does need to become more competitive, yet on a personal level, they find themselves increasingly drawn to the very aspects of American culture that have made it so hard for U.S. firms to compete with the Japanese.

“I think the situation is somewhat schizophrenic,” said Clemons. “You’re getting a fragmentation in Japanese attitudes.”

American culture is also having an intoxicating effect on those Japanese who don’t intend to stay, most notably young managers who may soon return to Japan with new and strange ideas that could rock the Japanese corporate culture.

“When I go back, I will probably be outspoken,” Hisao Kobayashi said. “Probably some people will not like that.

“But that won’t matter, because I know that more and more will accept it, since more and more people in the company will have different experiences in foreign countries.”

Indeed, the effects of Americanization can already be seen in Honda’s executive suite back at headquarters in Tokyo. Seven of the top nine Honda officials in Japan have served in the United States. And Shoichiro Irimajiri, who ran the Marysville complex for four years until he returned to Tokyo in 1988 to take over Honda’s worldwide manufacturing operations, reportedly is in line to be the next company president--and the first to have worked in America.

In fact, rumors have been flying on both sides of the Pacific that Honda, which now sells more than twice as many cars in the American market as in Japan, may become the first major Japanese company to move its headquarters to the United States.

To be sure, Honda is not a typical Japanese company. Founded in the post-war era by Soichiro Honda, a maverick engineer who once said he felt he was better understood in America than in Japan, Honda has never gained entree to the inner circle of older, tradition-bound corporations that dominate Japan. It has long attracted managers who are slightly more independent-minded--and thus, perhaps more open to the enticements of the American way of life--than those at companies such as Toyota or Nippon Steel.

Honda also has gone to extraordinary lengths to make its managers feel at home in Ohio. It operates a large family center in nearby Columbus, where their wives and children can learn English from five full-time teachers. The center’s staff is also available to help Japanese transfers with real estate negotiations and legal problems. Translators are provided to accompany them to parent-teacher conferences at their children’s schools.

America has had more time to work its wiles on Honda’s people, since Honda was the first Japanese firm to open a plant here more than a decade ago. And Honda permits executives who choose to stay longer than the usual three, four or five years to do so.

Now, the experts say, other Japanese companies are starting to allow extensions of American tours.

America has certainly worked on Toshikata Amino.

After 10 years in Ohio, the 54-year-old Amino is not just a Honda executive vice president any more. He is a Boy Scout leader, a convert to Christianity active in the First United Methodist Church of Marysville--a pillar of this very Midwestern community.

“Toshi and his wife come to potluck dinners and get involved socially very easily and are very active in the church,” said First United’s pastor, Charles Cecil. “They are not just involved on a token basis. They are really committed Christians.”

“In our church we found a secure place where we are accepted as friends,” Amino said.

And his love affair with the United States began late in life. He saw this country for the first time at the age of 41, when he was assigned to Honda’s Los Angeles headquarters in 1976. After three years in sales there, he returned briefly to Tokyo, but by 1980 he was transferred to Marysville--on a temporary assignment that was to have lasted just three weeks.

He was quickly caught up in the excitement of supervising construction of the first Japanese auto plant in the United States, so he stayed on.

By 1982, he was overseeing the building of an auto parts factory in Marysville. He stayed on to run it, and in that smaller, isolated operation, he started to get to know Americans. “I enjoyed that more than anything else I’ve done in my career, working and socializing with many Americans at that small plant,” Amino said. “I still have many friends from there, friendships that are not the boss-subordinate type of thing.”

Soon he found himself going to weddings, barbecues and progressive dinners for which his wife would provide the one Japanese dish. She, meanwhile, was volunteering at the local hospital and for so many other groups that Amino found himself being introduced in a way that would mortify men back home in Japan. He came to be known as “Satoko’s husband.”

It took longer for his children to adjust to Ohio, however, since several of them were almost grown when they left Japan. Four of the five have since returned to Japan for school or for work, still, the American experience had an impact. The oldest, 32-year-old Taro, is now a computer programmer in Seattle, while 26-year-old Haruko, who now lives in Kyoto, plans to return to the United States to work as an artist.

“We expect to have Japanese-American grandchildren,” Amino said.

By the time Amino and his wife moved into a big new house in a rural subdivision outside Marysville, they were hooked.

“Fortunately, our children are grown, so there is no strong reason we have to go back to Japan,” Amino said. “We do miss Japanese TV, and Japanese food is expensive here,” he added.

“But what we gain here is much more than what we have given up.”