PACIFIC REPORT : Recruiting to Span the Language Gap

Peter Fernandez was becoming frustrated that the car-leasing deal with the Japanese customer hadn’t closed.

It had been two weeks since he began playing the “getting-to-know-you” game that Japanese insist on before doing business: He was going to the customer’s office, to dinner and drinks with him, even to his house. During that time not a word was mentioned about a lease.

Now the customer had invited Fernandez--the Japanese-speaking son of a Latino/Filipino father and Japanese mother--to his house a second time.

He said his American side began thinking, “Gosh, can’t this guy make up his mind?” But “then I began listening to my Japanese side, and I became patient again.”

It paid off. When the visit was over, the customer told Fernandez to bring a 1991 Cadillac to his office the next Monday. In Japanese fashion, no figures were discussed; the customer had learned to trust Fernandez and knew he would get a fair price.

Fernandez got his job with San Francisco Fleet & Leasing, a division of L. T. Endo, because owner Tadaki (Tad) Endo wanted someone who not only could speak Japanese but who understood the culture.

To find that person, Endo, a native of Japan who is now an American citizen, turned to TKO, a San Jose-based employment agency that specializes in recruiting bilingual/bicultural employees.

With Japanese companies sprouting like mushrooms on American soil the past 10 years and American companies’ exports to Japan jumping from $28 billion in 1987 to $48 billion in 1990, the number of bilingual-focused employment agencies has grown from zero in the Southland and the Bay Area 10 years ago to a half dozen in each location.

The agencies are finding bilinguals for Japanese companies in the United States, for American companies trying to do business with Japanese transplants here and for American companies seeking to penetrate Japan.

Some--like TKO, Ruth Breslin’s Pacific Rim Human Resources and Deborah Okuma Associates in the Bay Area--are small operations started by American entrepreneurs with ties to Japan.

Others--like Persona Personnel Services, Nippon Manpower of America, Interplace Personnel Services, Ciema Corp. and Toyo Business Partners in the Southland--are arms of large Japan-based companies.

Most say they are booming at a time when many mainstream employment agencies report declining or flat business because of the recession.

Japanese companies want bilinguals in their American subsidiaries for better communications with the Japan home offices, to help head off misunderstandings with their American employees and customers and, increasingly, to keep them from running afoul of U.S. equal opportunity laws.

The jobs the bilinguals are filling range from clerical to middle management to executive positions that command six-figure salaries.

Peter Byun said Nippon Shinpan selected him as general manager of its Los Angeles commercial-loan office more for the fact that he had an international finance background than for his bilingualism. Byun, who was hired through Persona Personnel Services of Los Angeles, has an MBA from the University of Illinois and worked in trade administration for the Commerce Department and international banking for First Interstate Bank of Hawaii.

But the 32-year-old South Korean native said his superiors in Tokyo converse with him in Japanese--and, as a practical matter, someone without bilingual abilities would have a difficult time keeping up with the home office’s wishes.

One reason that Nippon Shinpan probably picked Byun for the position instead of transferring one its Japanese nationals to Los Angeles is that two-thirds of the U.S. unit’s loans have been to American companies. Since Byun grew up in Hawaii, he didn’t have to learn American culture in order to do business effectively here--as a Japanese national would.

Byun learned Japanese from his parents, who attended college in Japan, and from his Japanese wife, Yumiko.

Many Japanese transplant operations have had much-publicized misunderstandings with their American employees--and some are hiring bilinguals to bridge the gap, said Ken Reed, owner of San Jose-based TKO, which places bilinguals in the Bay Area.

“There are times when the cultures are butting heads with each other,” said Don Jacobsen, whom TKO placed as manager of administration at Ando Corp., a semiconductor-testing equipment manufacturer in Sunnyvale that is a unit of Ando Electric Co. of Tokyo. “When that happens . . . it gives me the opportunity to explain one culture to another--to explain to one culture that, hey, your culture may not have all the best ideas. You can borrow from each other.”

Jacobsen, 58, a retired Marine Corps fighter pilot, immersed himself in Japanese culture when his family lived in the village of Wakimura near Iwakuni Marine Corps Air Station from 1969 to 1971.

He said they made a conscious effort to cultivate their neighbors. “For example,” he said, “I told my children that when they passed a Japanese person on the street to nod. It’s the simplest sign of respect--acknowledging a person’s existence.”

Before they left Japan, he said, the village threw a farewell bash--”and the tears flowed freely, on both sides.”

Jacobsen said that after he joined Ando he changed some personnel practices to head off potential problems with American “wage-and-hour and discrimination laws.”

Other Japanese companies in the United States haven’t been as fortunate. Many American employees have collected sizable court-awarded damages for national-origin, race, sex or age discrimination in recent years.

As a result, when most bilingual employment agencies help Japanese companies hire, they try to educate the companies about U.S. employment laws. The message doesn’t always get through.

Ken Reed of TKO said he sent one highly qualified administrative secretary after another to a Japanese company without results. Finally, a receptionist informed him of the overarching qualification: “Mr. Matsudaira wants a blonde, Ken.” The disclosure gave Reed another opportunity to explain American hiring laws to the executive.

Some bilingual employment agencies have used Japanese companies’ ignorance of U.S. hiring laws to generate new business.

President Hitoshi Arai said Persona Personnel Services acquired Pacific Palisades Group, a Santa Monica employment consulting agency, to instruct Japanese companies in complying with fair employment practices. Persona, the U.S. arm of Japan’s largest employment agency, Temporary Center, is running Pacific Palisades in a joint venture with Germany’s biggest employment agency, Kienbaun Consulting.

Although many bilingual employment agencies are trying to turn around Japanese subsidiaries’ discriminatory hiring practices, for a while one Japan-based agency was part of the problem, according to U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission officials.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Weigel of San Francisco took the unusual step last year of temporarily closing the U.S. offices of Interplace/Transworld Recruit after the EEOC alleged that agency employees used secret codes to illegally screen applicants for positions. For example, the code “Talk to Mary” meant that the employer preferred a Caucasian, the EEOC said.

Interplace Personnel Services, the successor to Interplace/Transworld Recruit, is a unit of Japan’s Recruit Co., which was at the center of a scandal involving free or bargain-priced stock to Japanese officials that brought down the government of former Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. Interplace declined to be interviewed for this article.

Although a lot of bilingual recruiting is for Japanese subsidiaries in the United States, some agencies do the bulk of their prospecting for American companies in Japan.

Toyo Business Partners of Torrance says 75% of its executive recruitment business involves sending American bilinguals across the Pacific to help U.S. firms establish beachheads in Japan or expand there.

“Many more Americans are learning Japanese--including reading and writing,” said Kiyoshi Oda, president of the U.S. office of Tokyo-based Toyo.

Oda said American companies have also hired Toyo recruits to attract business from Japanese subsidiaries in the United States. The recruits have been placed “especially in the Midwest,” where many Japanese automobile and automobile-parts companies have sprung up, he said.

Some American companies are hiring bilinguals both for their U.S. and Japanese operations.

High-flying Mountain View software company Adobe Systems has used TKO to help recruit many of the 10 bilinguals in its U.S. and Japan operations, said Adobe employment manager Anne Brown.

Senior Vice President Stephen MacDonald said the company licenses software technology to many of Japan’s top laser printer manufacturers. During the development phase of the complex products, there is almost “day-to-day contact by phone and fax” between Adobe and Japanese customers, making it essential to have employees who can speak Japanese.

Adobe has been marketing a version of its Postscript software in Japan that allows computers to print in kanji characters, MacDonald said.

One of those cheered by American firms’ recent willingness to hire bilinguals as a weapon in the global trade wars is Richard Drobnick, a trade expert at USC.

“We’ve been shouting in the wind for years about this,” he said.

“Even with a Japanese distributor,” an American executive in Japan who can’t speak Japanese “will never be able to go on a customer call,” Drobnick pointed out.

“Also, an American president of a Japanese subsidiary has to have everything filtered (to employees, customers and vendors) through three or four English-speaking staff” instead of being able to address issues directly. That means that the executive just can’t be on top of the job the way he wants, Drobnick said.

Bilingual Agencies in California The number of California employment or executive recruitment agencies that focus on bilingual applicants has ballooned from zero 10 years ago to near-double-digit figures today. Some of the agencies and their California headquarters:

The Southland

Data Skills Agency, Los Angeles

Interplace Personnel Services, Los Angeles*

Nippon Manpower of America, Los Angeles

Persona Personnel Services, Los Angeles*

Toyo Business Partners, Torrance

Ciema Corp., Torrance

The Bay Area

Deborah Okuma Associates, Burlingame

Pacific Rim Human Resources, San Francisco

TKO Personnel Inc., San Francisco/San Jose

* Also in the Bay Area

Source: Japanese Consulate

Japanese Plants in California The growing number of Japanese subsidiaries building manufacturing operations in the United States is the reason for a surge in employment agencies that focus on bilingual job applicants. California has twice as many plants as any other state:

1985: 115 1986: 143 1987: 163 1988: 189 1989: 200 1990: 246 Source: Japan External Trade Organization