The Japanese Businessman and Technology

Basic descriptions of Japan are often of a country where the latest in high-tech is balanced in harmony with a highly-valued traditional culture. In some ways this is true. Japan is a country that leads the world in the technological advancements of everything from rockets to toilets. Yet, at the same time, there is a great value given to ancient structures and traditions, like the Great Bhuddas of Nara and Kamakura, the tea ceremony, sumo, kendo, etc.

Are these things always balanced, though? I think that is a question only a non-Japanese would ask. The irony of practicing kendo for a couple hours after school, a sport based in over 800 years of bushido tradition, then going home to play the latest Playstation game would be lost on most Japanese high-school boys.

(It's the things in those "in-between" ages that are tossed away with little regret. Autos are rarely kept more than five years, as the tax on cars older than five years is so high, it's usually more economical to buy a new car. The same is true of houses. Only about 1 in 5 houses purchased in the US is brand new, where only about 1 in 5 houses purchased in Japan has a previous owner. Again, this is partially based in the culture of wanting new things, but also because of laws that attach higher taxes to the purchase of a used house. This stems from the strong lobbyists the construction and automotive industries have on the easily influenced [in other words, bribe hungry] politicians the greatly apathetic voters allow to get into office. But this is a subject that may be better tackled on another day.)

So despite our slightly skewed vision of balance between the past and the future in Japan, is technology as embraced by the masses as we expect? (Wired Magazine, an American computer and technology related publication has a regular column entitled "Japanese Schoolgirl Watch" which features the latest, coolest, and often completely unneccesary, gadgets and trends the youth of Japan are using today, assuming the next fad doesn't hit the streets before sundown.) Thanks to lower birthrates, young people today have more cash than the kids from even a decade ago. This makes them juicy targets for cell-phone makers, game designers, and any other electronics manufacturers.

However, now we are met with another issue. Japan's population will reach its peak in 2006. Because of the high cost of living after the economic bubble burst of the early 1990s, people started getting married later and having less kids. Now many Japanese women are putting off marriage all together. Traditionally, marriage means quitting a career and staying at home all day, and many young Japanese women don't want to give up the freedoms they have grown accustomed to. What that means is over the next few decades we will see a rapid "graying of Japan".

Despite the desire to put the newest gadgets into the hands of the young and affluent, that population is declining. Companies must start to respond to the needs of the growing over-50 Japanese market. Some already have. Convenience store staple, Lawson, will begin opening convenience stores catering to older customers this year. More than one Japanese cell phone maker has designed phones for their older customers, who are intimidated by all the features (mail, cameras, games, etc.) on modern phones. These phones have the traditional 12 phone keys, a green pick-up botton, and a red hang-up button, and that is it. Until now older folks were ignored as new technology was introduced (and still largely are), and it isn't uncommon to find people, in this modern day, who have lived with VCRs for 20 years, but still have never learned to program them to record, or even know how to set the clock. It is this generation, the generation born around the time of or right after WWII, that technology basically forgot.

Because this is a generation where women generally did not hold powerful positions in business places, I will be basically talking about the cultures of technology and the Japanese businessman.

I recalled in a post a little while back the visit of a Japanese businessman who came to Oregon to drop off a report at a city office. At that time I talked about the need for Japanese business to take place face-to-face. This is for a few reasons we discussed...reading the kuuki, and a sense of safety when business is conducted person-to-person, rather than by phone or email. Another reason for this is the trend of a resistance to embrace new technology by men of this age group.

Several months ago we translated the website of a Japan-based technology-related company from Japanese to English. The website was a big undertaking, over 300 individual pages. As is typical with Japanese clients, daily updates were requested and communication happened frequently. Finally, when we felt we were completed, the owner of the client company wanted to make the final review of our work. A few days went by after we finished and uploaded the final page. Then one morning the mailman arrived with a thick envelope addressed to the translation team. Instead of the owner using his computer and the many means available to register the edits he had for our translation, he printed out the entire website, and then with a red pen marked the changes he wanted us to make. He then placed the huge stack of papers in an international courier envelope and sent it to us to review. This surprised me, as time was of the essence for the client, but this is what made him the most comfortable. Since then I have noticed the "red pen" treatment with other clients, as well.

Certainly this isn't true for all of our clients, and we have worked with some very tech-savvy individuals living both in Japan and the US. However I do think that since folks aged over 35 were never the targets for new technology marketing campaigns over the last couple decades, that many of these men, now higher-ups in big corporations, never had the desire to ride the wave of technology. I remember ten-plus years ago the Japanese Secretary of Technology delcaring the Internet as "a passing fad" (or some words to that effect). He ended up getting demoted, but not before Japan lost years on the rest of the world in internet technology. (Individuals are catching up like crazy, now, however.) Japanese government offices of today look like the offices of the mid-eighties in the US, with sometimes as many as five employees sharing one computer. As a result, many city and national government workers bring laptops from home, often with much newer OSs and software than the ancient government computers.

We can see that Japan does not always have the Midas touch in terms of the technology it embraces or rejects, and one can't help but think that the Japanese Secretary of Technology didn't make his declaration out of ignorance, but out of a fear of change, a fear of not understanding what is new. Presently they are behind in the areas of internet security, and there have been some very embarrassing scandals involving companies not employing the best security measures to protect their customers, and themselves. Problems like this only scare these older businessmen away, but it's clear the technology isn't going anywhere, and to maintain Japan's return to strength in the world economy this attitude will have to evolve. One thing I wouldn't look for is drastic changes in the technology of red pens coming out of Japan.