Doing Business : A Bean Grows in Tokyo : Maine’s L.L. Bean has opened up shop in Japan. And sales are booming.

Smack in the middle of the trendy Jiyugaoka area of Tokyo, an oasis of down-home U.S.A. beckons to overworked and stressed-out city slickers.

The scent of pine fills the bright and airy store of glass and blond timber. Above the entrance, a mounted canoe and color photos of stunning natural settings adorn the wall. All manner of outdoor gear--from mountain bikes and backpacks to parkas and boots--lines the walls, and books in Japanese and English explain the joys of fishing, camping, hiking.

L.L. Bean, the Maine manufacturer of outdoor specialty goods, is singing a siren song to the Japanese: Tear off your ties, forget about work and take a break in the great outdoors.

That song may be just the right tune at just the right time in Japan. As the national government exhorts people to cut their work hours and take longer vacations, as people themselves begin to value more free time, L.L. Bean this month opened its first overseas retail outlet here to help share one thing Americans still do pretty well: taking it easy.

“We do more than just sell products; we promote a lifestyle,” said Dick Leslie, L.L. Bean’s director of international marketing. “We represent a frontier spirit of doing things outdoors in the woods, of being informal and casual.”

To help the Japanese relax, L.L. Bean has teamed up with Seiyu Ltd., a supermarket and department store retailing group, and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the world’s largest maker of consumer electronics. The two Japanese firms formed a joint venture, L.L. Bean Japan, and under a licensing agreement with the New England cataloguer plan to open five retail outlets throughout Japan over the next five years.

“Japan has entered the era of the outdoors,” said Koji Minobe, general manager of L.L. Bean Japan. “So we wanted to get involved in the business.”

The firm is riding a trend of less work and more play that began in the late 1980s. Once a virtue, now perceived as a vice, the Japanese penchant for overtime has drawn international criticism as one aspect of unfair trade. As a result, the government has pushed to shorten working hours, expand vacation time and develop the leisure market.

“In one European Community report, the export powerhouse of Japan was censured by the West as being workaholics who live in rabbit hutches,” said Kosho Yamada, research chief of the government Leisure Development Center. As a result, he said, the national government began a “course correction” with the expansion of domestic consumption to offset exports and burgeoning trade surpluses; getting Japanese to relax and spend money on leisure was one of the strategies.

The national media quickly jumped in and made “free time” and “resorts” two buzzwords of the late 1980s. According to the Leisure Development Center, average annual working hours have dropped from 2,168 in 1985 to 2,052 in 1990; firms adopting a five-day work week increased from 49.1% to 77.3% during the same period.

Meanwhile, the national government launched a law in 1987 to develop resorts in three dozen local prefectures, although the current economic downturn has put a crimp in those plans. Nevertheless, the Environment Agency is requesting a $4-million budget increase to develop more family camping grounds; the Japan Autocamping Federation reports that camp users are increasing by 2 million a year and reached 12 million last year.

At the same time, the government-funded Japan External Trade Organization has promoted Japan’s growing leisure and recreation market to foreign firms with business seminars, market information pamphlets and the like.

Yamada added that foreign pressure wasn’t the only reason for such policies. Younger Japanese are demanding more vacation time, and “if you don’t offer at least two days off, young people won’t even look at you,” he said. Indeed, he added, a Kyoto pollution equipment maker and Tokyo department store, in an effort to compete in the tight job market, recently began offering four-day work weeks.

A September survey showed that 59% of people polled said they would prefer more free time rather than earning extra money with overtime. (Another poll, however, showed 70% said they felt they would have to change their planned leisure time on account of work and 60% said they could not leave work if their superiors or colleagues were still there.)

Still, analysts say, the trends are clear, and L.L. Bean was in the enviable position of being wooed by not one but several Japanese firms interested in teaming up, Leslie said.

L.L. Bean had already established a presence in Japan through its mail-order sales, which reached $14 million last year, the biggest overseas market after Canada. But because mail order is not nearly as developed in Japan as in the United States, retail stores were considered the best way of expanding L.L. Bean’s profile.

Enter Minobe, L.L. Bean Japan’s personable general manager. As a Seiyu manager in charge of developing the leisure business, he had sniffed the market trends but realized the most suitable partner probably was overseas, where the recreation industry was more advanced. Seiyu approached Matsushita, which devotes an entire company division to seeking international business partners, and the consumer electronics giant scouted out L.L. Bean.

“The reason we valued L.L. Bean was because they put the customer first, and their products are high-quality, functional and reasonable,” Minobe said. He added that the firm’s policy of a 100% satisfaction guarantee, for instance, or not quibbling with customers who return a product for even minor flaws, was in line with the Japanese philosophy that “customer is king.”

L.L. Bean’s homespun motto hangs prominently at the entrance of the Jiyugaoka store, complete with Japanese translation: “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers as human beings and they always come back for more.”

To promote the nature lifestyle, L.L. Bean also plans to introduce its much-touted “public outdoor clinics,” offering a range of lessons, such as how to repair a bike and cross-country ski, how to tie a fishing fly and backpack.

The firm has the luxury of a virtual virgin market. It is still so new that no one seems sure just how big the market is. Although several other firms offer outdoor wear, including Japanese retailers and the U.S. brands of Eddie Bauer and Northface, for instance, L.L. Bean officials say there are no significant competitors offering the entire range of sportswear, gear and outdoor education.

Public response has outstripped expectation, Minobe said. Although the store anticipated 1,000 customers on opening day, 3,000 showed up; the store added to the festivities by flying in 54-year-old Ralph Dehahn to demonstrate his trade of sewing moccasins by hand. Overall sales are 50% above projections.

To Ayako Nakagawa, 15, and Akari Yamamoto, 16, L.L. Bean’s products are “cute and colorful,” while 35-year-old trading firm manager Hiroshi Kawaguchi finds them “comfortable, hardy and outdoorsy.” Despite the general Japanese image of U.S. goods as shoddy, the two girls said American-made clothes are popular among teens for having better style and selection; Kawaguchi said rough-and-tough goods don’t require the exacting quality standards Japanese consumers expect from higher-priced products.

Minobe said families have been the most conspicuous consumers so far, and, taking advantage of the current economic downturn, he hopes to promote camping among more of them. A family of four spending two or three nights at a resort would spend $2,400, but camping in one’s own four-wheel-drive would cost only $400, he said.

“Our big aim is to see more families take off in four-wheel-drives and spend quality time between parents and children,” he said. “We’re promoting a lifestyle not of expensive brand products, but of leisure, latitude and the outdoors.”