Many highly successful companies never start up in Japan, or only enter the Japanese market through a distributor, because they fear the Japanese business culture.
This is often the result of a misperception, perhaps fuelled by those infamous myths about doing business in Japan, that it’s too risky to deal with Japanese business culture.
Fortunately, Japanese corporate culture is not an insurmountable obstacle to successful business in Japan, as evidenced by the very large share of the Japanese market held by Apple, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co. and many others.
It’s true that Japanese business culture is different from that of the USA or Europe, but these differences don’t make it any riskier to do business in Japan than anywhere else in the world if your company offers quality products or services.
In fact, certain aspects of Japanese business culture, such as the very stable long-term relationships resulting from the Japanese’s conservative sense of loyalty to trusted partners and suppliers, are highly beneficial to foreign companies who know how to swim with the Japanese cultural tide rather than struggle vainly against it.
How is Japanese business culture different?
The differences are obvious as soon as a foreign executive arrives at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport (or Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport, Osaka’s Kansai International Airport or any other international airport in Japan).
White-gloved baggage handlers carefully line up your luggage on the conveyor belt (including economy class), polite customs inspectors, the cleaner standing at the top of the escalator to JR Narita Express and Keikyu SkyLiner station (at TokyoTokyo Narita International Airport), making sure the escalator ramp is clean, the cleaning staff who clean and leave the express train quickly and quietly before it departs for Tokyo, the ticket inspector on the train who takes off his hat and bows before entering the carriage, and so on.
The same applies when you arrive at your hotel: the bellman who bows and opens the door, the porter who carries heavy bags to the room but politely refuses to tip. Politeness and consideration are part of the customer-oriented service that is the most obvious aspect of Japanese corporate culture. This is (still) far from being the case in Europe…
Shima KÅsaku: the best manga for understanding Japanese enterprise
The famous salaryman Shima KÅsaku first appeared in 1983. Since then, the manga series bearing his name, which you can discover on Japscan, has charted the course of Japanese business, economics and society for over 40 years.
A pioneering manga on today’s Japanese business culture
From the post-war years until the end of the 20th century, Japan’s burgeoning economic power attracted worldwide attention. After the country became the world’s second-largest economy in the 1970s, American sociologist Ezra Vogel wrote a book entitled Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979), which locates Japan’s success in a communitarian culture where companies treat their employees like family members, where there is a collective will to learn and improve, and where exam-based education is meritocratic.
Of course, Japanese companies were not unreservedly praised. People scoffed at the Japanese business model, which they saw as that of an “economic animal” that produced only imitations of Western products, thought only of money and profit, disrespected workers’ individuality and expected them to sacrifice themselves totally for their organization. Foreigners satirically referred to Japanese companies as “Japan, Inc. “and it was not unusual at the time to joke that Japan was the “most prosperous socialist nation in the world” (a term which, amusingly, was later applied to the People’s Republic of China).
The image and reality of “Japan, Inc.” was essentially based on the “salaryman”, the permanent full-time worker who devoted his life to the company. The salaryman still exists today, of course. However, there are nuanced differences between the image of the contemporary salaryman and the one who made the morning commute at the time Vogel wrote his book.
For example, the practice of long-term employment was common, and a seniority-based personnel system, which guaranteed slow but upward mobility, was still in place. If you studied hard, graduated from a good school and got a permanent job with a good company, it was assumed that you were set for life. The company guaranteed stability for you and your family, even though these salaried workers were expected to prioritize their work over other aspects of their lives.
Even then, the Japanese wage-earner was not universally admired. These men were considered proud elite figures, but their existence was a sad one. Dressed in impersonal gray suits, they took the train to work every day. They had little time to reflect on their personal lives, and were often neglected by their families, who saw them as outsiders to the household.
Seeing their parents sacrifice themselves in this way, a new generation began to reject this destiny, as if to say: “I don’t want to be an ordinary wage earner! They seek freedom rather than stability.
Yet this humble existence has been the inspiration for a new kind of storytelling in Japan. Although there are few exciting or dangerous plots, Hirokane Kenshi’s Shima KÅsaku pioneered the salarymen manga genre.
On the eve of the economic bubble
Shima KÅsaku: Section Chief began serial publication in Kodansha’s Morning magazine in 1983. The following year, the Nikkei exceeded 10,000 points for the first time, and the 1985 Plaza Agreement, aimed at restoring the balance of trade between Japan and the United States, was about to be signed. This was the eve of the financial madness of the bubble economy that took place in Japan in the second half of the 1980s.