How Japan Does It

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early postwar rush to rebuild its economy, the nation's businessmen searched the globe for patents and industrial technologies. In 1953 the Sony Corp. paid Western Electric a mere $25,000 for the nonexclusive rights to manufacture the transistor, and thereafter built the investment into an entire microelectronics industry.

Japanese businessmen today still descend on foreign executives to learn, often in the most excruciating detail, exactly how they conduct business. The nation has an insatiable hunger for foreign technical and scientific manuals. Universities and corporations stockpile them and refer to them assiduously, and businessmen and engineers eagerly use their best ideas.

CONSENSUS. For all their cross-cultural borrowing, the Japanese have remained astonishingly unchanged. One of the most important of their native characteristics is a willingness to achieve consensus by compromising. Asian Scholar Edwin Lee of Hamilton College suggests that a clue to this might be found in the Japanese word ie, a concept that can be interchangeably applied to everything from self to home to family. A person is an extension of his immediate family members, his company, his community and his nation as a whole. All are bound together in an encompassing common purpose.

Japan feels itself to be a "family" because in a real sense nearly everyone has at least some voice in running society. No matter what the group—from the smallest upstart enterprise to the largest multibillion-dollar multinational—nothing gets done until the people involved agree. The Japanese call this nemawashi (root binding). Just as a gardener carefully wraps all the roots of a tree together before he attempts to transplant it, Japanese leaders bring all members of society together before an important decision is made.

The result is an often tedious, and sometimes interminable, process of compromise in the pursuit of consensus. But in the end the group as a whole benefits because all members are aligned behind the same goal.

FUTURISM. Japanese society is forward looking in a manner that is difficult for Westerners to understand. Individuals are seen to benefit only through the elevation of the group as a whole; corporations are not after the quick payoff or big quarterly jumps in shareholder dividends, but a solid market position that will be rewarded over the longer term. Businesses and government look five, ten, even 20 years ahead and try to build a prosperity that can last. Says Eishiro Saito, president of Nippon Steel: "Executives in Japan must constantly do their utmost to provide employees and their families with a stable life and hope for the future."

One reason that the companies are not under constant pressure for fast profits is that much of Japanese industry is owned by banks and not by individual shareholders. Major holdings of many of the country's biggest and best-known companies, such as Toshiba, Fujitsu and Nippon Steel, rest with banks that are less interested in short-range dividend increases than in seeing their firms' profits reinvested to ensure future growth.

This long-haul mentality is reflected in Japan's dedication to savings. Nothing has given more momentum to the Japanese economic juggernaut than the propensity of its citizens, no matter how wealthy or modest their means, to save their money. Their deposits

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