Private Eye to I : Workplace: Japanese executives hire private detectives to gather information about themselves--to determine their chances of getting promoted.
As a private detective, Eiko Yonezawa is smart and enterprising. Using one of a dozen personas, she can track down cheating husbands, dig up potentially embarrassing dirt on future brides and uncover the people behind the money in a hostile takeover.
In recent years, however, she has found herself working on a new kind of assignment that is among the toughest she has encountered: clients asking to have themselves investigated.
This “self-investigation” trend is not a new outgrowth of some eastern “know thyself” religion or existentialism. It’s an expensive form of career planning.
These businessmen are eager to know what their chances are for promotion against rivals, and they are hiring private detectives to find out.
“To have yourself checked is to know yourself by knowing your enemy,” says Atsuta Masanori, a management commentator. “It’s a kind of war tactic.”
The Tokyo Private Investigators Assn. estimates that there were 2,000 “self-investigation” requests last year, up sharply from about 100 in 1986. Businessmen are paying anything from $2,300 for a three-day investigation to nearly $30,000 for a two-month probe. They get a lengthy report card based on interviews with colleagues, bosses, neighbors and even bar hostesses.
One reason for the sudden increase in self-investigation cases, says Tashiro Kosei, president of the newly established association, is the growing labor shortage and the resulting increase in the number of headhunters trying to lure lifetime employees away from their sinecures. “They (executives) want to know how far they are going to progress,” says Kosei. “If their career at the company isn’t that promising, they may take up other offers and change jobs.”
Middle-aged businessmen are particularly anxious about their future because they are part of the baby boom generation. Although they have worked hard, often making many sacrifices for their companies, there are so many of them that competition is fierce for promotion.
Although social norms dictate that a hard-working businessmen ought to be able at least to reach section chief before he retires, only one in four of the baby boomers will make it, according to a survey by a think tank associated with Japan’s Labor Ministry. By 1995, when the average boomer will be age 45, 70% will still be below section head.
Employees who don’t make it to section chief by their late 40s or early 50s are generally shunted off to less prestigious jobs at small subsidiaries. Once they have been tapped to be sent out to pasture, they are less likely to be attractive to headhunters, so figuring out the odds of promotion can be critical.
For many businessmen, a few nights out drinking with colleagues and subordinates may be all that’s necessary to find out. But many businessmen are socially awkward or have difficulty relating to younger subordinates who don’t want to go drinking. Yet the views of subordinates can be critical when determining promotions. That’s where the detective comes in.
One serious-looking 44-year-old trading section chief asked Shibata Private Investigators Agency to find out if he was in line for promotion to division chief. The agency’s 17-page report gave him a poor chance. Its detectives discovered that fellow workers attributed his past success to his cousin, who worked in senior management. They also complained that while he entertained clients, he seldom took his subordinates out for a drink or attended their weddings.
Most “self-investigation” clients are fast-track executives who work hard but seldom relax and consequently aren’t aware of what is going on around them, says Shoichiro Yabe, a private detectives who has a glass cabinet full of old miniature cameras and bugging devices he has used in his work. In a society in which the perceptions of others is often more important than reality, that can be deadly.
Investigating a person without arousing suspicions can be difficult. On one recent case, Yonezawa pretended to apply for a job as an insurance saleswoman in order to talk to a client’s boss. (She is licensed as both an insurance agent and a travel agent.)
She then pretended to be a delivery person who happened to arrive at the client’s home when he was away. She used the opportunity to grill neighbors about her client’s reputation for drinking, gambling and working late.
In the evening she had drinks at her client’s favorite bar. She told the bar hostess she was planning a marketing seminar and wanted to know if her client would make a good impression.
Companies sometimes hire detectives to investigate an employee before promoting him to a position in which vices like gambling could lead to embezzlement. Clients who have such problems sometimes hire detectives to find out how much a company investigation is likely to uncover.
“They want to know if this kind of information will come out in an investigation so they can take some steps,” says Kosei of the private investigation agency.
Some observers express concern about the self-investigation phenomenon. “It’s a symptom of the disease of Tokyo’s over-competitive world,” says Tooru Sekiya, a Tokyo psychiatrist. He worries that too many executives who get negative results from the investigations lose confidence and become more depressed. “They can’t discuss it, so they hide themselves. Some develop neuroses.”
Private eye Shoichiro Yabe says many of his clients appear neurotic to begin with.
One of his clients was a 50ish division manager of a large department store who had spent two years in France, where he concluded an important deal with a French company. When the manager returned to Japan, he was insecure about his place in the company and felt he was being spied upon. He asked Yabe to find out who his enemy was.
When Yabe came back with a positive report, he refused to believe it and left his job anyway.
One young woman who came into Yabe’s office with her mother was convinced that she couldn’t get along with her colleagues because someone was spreading vicious rumors about her at work. For nearly a year, she never spoke in the house, writing messages to her parents, because she believed the house was bugged. “These people should really go to a psychiatrist, but they get angry when you suggest it,” Yabe says.
