The Spirit Of Japanese Companies
Getting The Still Useful Bow Down
The Role Of The Greeting Ritual
The All-Important Pre-Agreement Meetings
The Importance Of Following Up
More On Failing To Follow Through
Dealing At The Negotiating Table
Mastering The Art Of Doing Business At Night
The Importance Of A Hidden Art
“Nomi-Nication”: Gathering Wisdom In Bars
Why The Japanese Are Quality Conscious
The Art Of Servicing Customers
Making Hay In The Japanese Market
BUSINESS GUIDE TO JAPAN
PREFACE
The “Smell and Taste” of Japanese Companies
JAPAN IS ONE of the most lucrative consumer and industrial markets in the world. It is also one of the world’s most challenging markets, requiring special knowledge and special talents as well as extraordinary commitment, patience, and persistence.
Japan’s maverick author, consultant, and criticat-large Michihiro Matsumoto says that the best way to understand how Japan’s business world works—and to succeed in it—is to look at each company as a glob of natto (not-toe).
Natto is a traditional Japanese food made from fermented soybean paste. It looks terrible, smells awful, and to the unconditioned foreign palate tastes like a batch of glue gone bad. Until recent times, one of the ways the Japanese used to measure the commitment of foreigners to Japan was by whether or not they could eat natto. The question was not if they liked it, but whether they were able to eat it despite its taste and smell.
Matsumoto describes all Japanese organizations, political, professional, and social as well as economic, as natto organisms, and he makes several points with his pungent analogy:
1. Japanese companies are quintessentially Japanese and are therefore unlike companies in any other country.
2. Japanese companies have a distinctive character and flavor that only the Japanese can fully understand and accept.
3. And, foreigners who have not acquired a “taste” and appreciation for Japanese companies over a long period of time will inevitably find them difficult to deal with.
Until the 1990s, one of the unique characteristics of Japan’s natto companies was that few of them had permanently established, well-defined “doors” for letting in outsiders, whether businesspeople or the public at large. Each organization was more or less a gluey monolith that was difficult or impossible to penetrate using the typical, straightforward Western approach.
A great many of these natto characteristics are still discernible in most Japanese companies, including those with conspicuously Western images, and there has been little if any change. In many large older companies such adjustments are neither visible nor measurable in practical terms.
The
