A Bicultural Approach to Japan Trade
Tadaki (Tad) Endo knows that in these days of fierce global business competition you need any edge you can get.
The owner of the L. T. Endo Co. import-export company in San Francisco has learned that a significant edge in serving his main customers--the Japanese--is an understanding of the Japanese mind.
“When you’re doing business with Japan, there are a lot of dos and don’ts ,” said the native of Japan who is a naturalized American citizen. “If you don’t understand this, you may offend” potential customers.
With that in mind, Endo decided before he expanded his mom-and-pop operation a few years ago to hire only bilingual, bicultural staff. He sought out Ken Reed, owner of TKO Personnel of San Jose, whose employment agency specializes in bilinguals.
Reed has helped Endo assemble a multicultural, multiethnic operation. In addition to Endo’s Chinese wife, Lana Soo, the company’s accountant, L. T. Endo has a Latino/Filpino/Japanese manager and a black manager.
Peter Fernandez, sales manager of Endo’s San Francisco Fleet & Leasing, spent much of his childhood in Japan. His father, Antonio, a retired Army colonel, arrived in the late 1940s with Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s occupation forces. Fernandez’s mother, Sumiko, is Japanese.
Crystal Boykin, manager of a silk-lingerie importing operation for Endo, became interested in trade with Japan while taking Asian-focused international relations courses at the University of Alabama four years ago. She spent 18 months learning Japanese culture at the Japanese Consulate in Atlanta before heading for the West Coast, where she knew the Pacific trade action would be.
Together, Endo’s staff has produced some notable successes that are directly related to its bicultural approach:
* L. T. Endo has become the third-largest exporter of chicken meat to Japan partly because it persuaded giant Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson Foods Inc. to devote one of its plants to deboning chicken the way Japanese customers want. Tad Endo arranged for deboning specialists from Japan to fly to a Tyson plant in Missouri, where they stayed for three months training Tyson staffers in the Japanese technique.
* Endo helped Rocky Mountain Log Homes of Hamilton, Mont., go through the painstaking, yearlong process of obtaining Japanese government certification that its log homes are fire-retardant and earthquake-proof. The certification is needed before Japan allows the homes to be imported. Since it obtained the approval--one of the few American companies to do so--it has sold material for 80 homes to Japan.
* Endo’s San Francisco Fleet and Leasing has grown from leasing 12 cars in 1989 to a projected 200 this year by providing service that would be considered extraordinary in the United States but commonplace in Japan. The company takes customer calls at night and on weekends at employees’ homes, delivers to customers’ homes, even dispatches service technicians to change customers’ flat tires for free. Most customers are Japanese business people posted in the States.
