U.S. Workers Tested : Bosses From Japan Bring Alien Habits

It didn’t take John Slyter long to realize that the supervisory job he applied for two years ago at a Fujitsu America electronics plant in Hillsboro, Ore., was going to be like no other job he ever had.

The interview--the six interviews, actually--made that plain. Instead of the typical questions about job history, Japanese managers wanted to probe Slyter’s ideas about product quality and knowledge of Japanese culture.

“I knew very little, to tell you the truth,” Slyter recalled. “I could probably identify sushi .”

The 41-year-old Slyter, a veteran of 14 years at an American electronics firm, got the position, nonetheless. And he has been taking a short course in working for the Japanese ever since.

Six-Day Weeks

He spent a month working 6-day weeks on a Fujitsu assembly line in Japan, then returned to Oregon to a company where Japanese managers often looked over his shoulder and performance was judged not just on individual initiative, but on one’s ability to work as part of a team.

“In a typical American kind of environment, it’s, ‘John, you got a problem? Go fix it,’ ” Slyter explained. But at Fujitsu, four or five engineers have to sign off on every solution. “I just can’t change things by myself,” he said.

For James A. Ristow, an on-the-job education in Japanese business came to an abrupt and bitter end when Toshiba fired him four years ago.

The San Clemente man thought loyalty, teamwork and high performance had won him a job for life after 13 years as a sales executive for the electronics firm in New Jersey and Southern California. Toshiba’s Japanese employees, after all, enjoyed the security of lifetime employment.

Now Ristow knows better.

“I thought of American companies as being very cold, calculating, and ruthless,” said Ristow, who sued Toshiba on charges of racial discrimination. “But the Japanese have arrived, haven’t they? They’re cold. They’re ruthless.”

When Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay 134 years ago, it took a show of naked power to force an isolated Japan to open its doors to Western trade. In the following years, America grew to dominate international commerce, while Japan, vanquished in battle, charted a course of modernization.

Now the tide has turned. Japan has landed on America’s shores--not by dint of force, but by dint of its financial might. And while Japan dispatched its princes to confer with Matthew C. Perry, today it is America’s workers negotiating a new cross-cultural compact with Japanese business.

When rubber workers make Firestone tires, they are working for the Japanese. When Bruce Springsteen records a song for CBS Records, he is working for the Japanese. Americans build cars for Nissan, Mazda, Toyota and Honda. They bottle wine for the Japanese at the Chateau St. Jean vineyard in Kenwood, Calif., and soy sauce at Kikkoman Foods in Walworth, Wis.

Many U.S. workers, imbued with the notion that economic leadership is America’s national birthright, are put to the test daily bythe distinctly alien decision-making habits, personnel practices and performance standards of their Japanese bosses. Expectations, like Ristow’s, of a benevolent new kind of workplace are turning to frustration. Wonder, like Slyter’s, is giving way to a workaday familiarity with Japanese methods.

“Americans are on the receiving end of multinationals, rather than the giving end as we were accustomed to the last many years,” observed Thomas B. Lifson, a former Harvard Business School professor who is now a management consultant in Berkeley.

The number of U.S. workers engulfed by Japan’s foray across the Pacific is growing at a staggering pace. From 1985 to 1987, employment at Japanese-owned manufacturing plants in the United States more than doubled. With major buyouts this year, the corps of Americans working for the Japanese has pushed past 300,000, according to U.S. and Japanese government statistics.

Strong Yen

With no slowdown in sight for the factors driving Japanese investment in the United States--the strong yen, the seemingly bottomless pockets of Japanese investors, Japan’s anxious desire to combat protectionist sentiment--some experts say Tokyo’s estimate that 840,000 Americans will work for Japanese companies by the year 2000 is beginning to look conservative.

For many Americans like Slyter, the workday in a Japanese firm is a continual effort to bridge the immense cultural gulf dividing them from their Japanese superiors--bosses who themselves are often singularly ill-equipped, by the nature of Japan’s business culture and social mores, to run multinational enterprises.

“The symbols are different. The gestures and languages are just so different. Japan and America are radically different countries--just fundamentally at opposite ends of the spectrum,” said Michael S. Kaye, chief executive of Secomerica, a Japanese-owned holding company, and its Irvine-based subsidiary, Westec Security.

“We’re both industrialized and we both wear suits to work,” said Kaye, a rare American executive who speaks fluent Japanese and studied and worked in Japan for four years before taking charge of the growing U.S. operations of Secom, Japan’s largest security firm. “But we’re very different countries.”

Morning Calisthenics

Some of the differences are easy to spot. At Kyocera’s ceramic components plant in San Diego, workers line up each morning for calisthenics. At Fujitsu America, they wear company-issue uniforms. At Three Bond of America, an adhesives maker in Torrance, one wall of the main office suite is dominated by a wooden Buddhist shrine to which the firm’s handful of Japanese employees offer prayers once a month.

Such atmospherics--parodied by Hollywood in “Gung Ho,” a movie and later a short-lived television series about a Japanese firm’s takeover of a rusting U.S. factory--are actually becoming less widespread as Japanese companies struggle to “Americanize” their operations. But even as the trappings of Japanese ownership fade, American workers continue to be jolted by those profoundly foreign attitudes and practices of their Japanese employers that resist Americanization.

The two societies, for example, have different notions of the role that work plays in everyday life and of the demands companies can make on their employees. America’s ethnic diversity and the growing presence of women in the work force are exotic phenomena for Japanese managers accustomed to a homogenous, mainly male workplace, according to Japanese and U.S. experts.

Figurehead Jobs

The Japanese--often xenophobic and dubious of American managers’ skills--are loath, meanwhile, to share authority and information, although they often prop up Americans in figurehead jobs with important titles. Decision-making styles are starkly different in Japanese and American business; as a result, the direct, aggressive profile that wins rewards for Americans in U.S. companies is abhorred by the Americans’ reserved and consensus-minded Japanese managers.

Some Americans thrive in the novel environment created by the Japanese. At age 22, Kevin Fallon turned a speaking knowledge of Japanese and a degree in Asian studies into a high-responsibility job as a sales coordinator in New York for Mitsubishi International, the U.S. arm of Japan’s largest trading combine.

“Those Americans who do have an understanding of the Japanese language and the Japanese way of thinking and their culture seem to be a lot happier,” Fallon said, “than those who just have a knowledge of a certain business and put in their time and don’t understand why things happen the way they do.”

Other Americans--their expectations of benevolent and sophisticated Japanese employers based on little more than legends of universal lifetime employment and news reports of Japan’s commercial prowess--find their hopes dashed by the realities of layoffs, long hours, speeded-up assembly lines, prejudice, uncommunicative supervisors and limited opportunities for promotion.

Labor Rifts

Despite their reputation for emphasizing teamwork and close worker-management relations, Japanese-owned companies in the United States have not been immune from the labor rifts that plague American firms.

Nissan is fighting an organizing campaign by the United Auto Workers at its assembly plant in Smyrna, Tenn. A Japanese-owned Pepsi bottling company on Long Island, N.Y., has battled striking Teamster truckers. Turnover in Japanese-owned companies in the United States is no lower than in American-owned firms, according to studies by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business.

Distinctive intercultural conflicts dog the Japanese-American work relationship as well. In lawsuits, Americans have accused Japanese companies of offering them fewer benefits and less job security than Japanese employees on temporary assignment in the United States. Other suits charge Japanese firms with making false promises of genuine authority to Americans and with discriminating against women and minority employees.

‘Foreigners’ at Home

“We’re gaijin --foreigners in our own country,” complained Ristow, who lost a jury trial in federal court and has another complaint pending against Toshiba in Orange Country Superior Court.

David M. Proctor III is the ultimate gaijin : an American hired by Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, the world’s largest, to advise the Japanese who run its Los Angeles-based operations on the ways of American banking. He is the highest-ranking American at both the bank’s Los Angeles branch and its small California retail banking subsidiary, which together account for $6.8 billion of Dai-Ichi Kangyo’s $330 billion in assets.

Typically, Proctor arrives at his downtown Los Angeles office at 6:30 a.m. and leaves at 7:30 p.m. “And I’m somewhat guilty leaving at that hour,” he said, “because I’m the first to go.” It isn’t rare, he explained, for the bank’s Japanese employees to work through the night.

Language Problems

Every meeting during his marathon workday is conducted in Japanese. Proctor understands 20% to 30% of what goes on--and is never quite sure how much else he misses. “The information I receive is either information I asked for specifically or information the Japanese thought it was necessary for me to know,” he said.

Proctor tries to make up for being shut out of the internal grapevine by staying in touch with his American banking counterparts. Often, that means a lunch outside the bank with a lawyer or credit officer. But those contacts, he said, seem curious and perhaps a bit threatening to his Japanese colleagues. “It isn’t totally understood by the Japanese staff why I have a need to maintain those relationships,” Proctor said.

But he is reluctant to impose on Japanese colleagues by joining them for lunch. “If I want to have lunch with my co-workers,” he said, “I understand it is an intrusion on quiet time for them for me to join them, because they have to laboriously speak English.”

Likes Job Security

Still, Proctor seems to like his job--to like the challenge of awakening a conservative institution to the more aggressive marketing methods of American banks and to like the security the bank offers its employees.

Working for the Japanese bank is “a ground-floor opportunity to work with an organization that is expanding its presence here in the U.S. and is known to have a great deal of loyalty,” Proctor said. “In banking, as an industry, employer loyalty is something that’s all but disappeared in the last five years.”

The odd mix that defines Proctor’s work life--the security of a good job and the precariousness of working on unfamiliar turf--is the subtle paradox underlying many Americans’ jobs in Japanese companies. And for many, the honeymoon initiated when a Japanese employer rescued a closing factory or brought hundreds of new jobs to a previously stagnant region is still alive.

When Elaine K. Jolissaint worked for an American electronics company in San Jose, she engaged in her share of Japan bashing, condemning the Japanese for ruthlessly snatching away business from American firms. “I would say, ‘Well, you know, we’ve got to save our jobs,’ ” she recalled.

‘Switched Sides’

But now, as a manufacturing engineer at Fujitsu’s plant in Oregon, she views the Japanese as allies of American workers. “I think I’ve even switched sides,” Jolissaint said. “I come here and they’ve created our jobs.”

Japanese industry is hardly a monolith, and with the increasing presence in the United States of small and mid-size firms that don’t fit the traditional Japanese mold, many Americans may barely be aware that their employer is from Japan.

Since its acquisition six years ago by Secom, for instance, Westec has adopted none of the outward signs of Japanese ownership.

American managers run the company without a nod to consensus-style decision-making. Secom executives in Japan are consulted almost exclusively in connection with acquisitions or other major expenditures. The lone Japanese manager at Westec’s headquarters in Irvine was sent home; with Kaye’s fluency in Japanese and close ties to Secom’s chairman and founder, Makoto Iida, there was no need for a Japanese national to act as liaison to the home office.

‘Local Flavor’

“Iida’s feeling, very strongly, is that a service business is very closely tied to the local culture,” Kaye explained. “A local flavor, he felt and I feel, is very important.”

Far more typical in the American subsidiaries of Japanese companies is a tangible Japanese presence that--however starkly or subtly--fosters conflict and complication, as Americans learn to work under another culture’s rules and the Japanese strive to adapt those rules to the management of Americans.

The language barrier between Americans and the Japanese is the single most nagging problem in their working relationships. A study last year by the Columbia business school of more than 150 Japanese-owned companies in the United States found that both American and Japanese managers cited communication problems more often than any other kind as major obstacles to their firms’ performance.

Misleading Mannerisms

Americans--few of whom speak or understand any but the most rudimentary Japanese--complain that Japanese co-workers slip into their native tongue in the midst of important meetings. Japanese managers’ English may be difficult to comprehend. And their mannerisms can mislead Americans.

“I took no response as meaning no action, and that wasn’t always the case,” said Victor R. Landa, a vice president at Fujitsu Systems of America, a San Diego-based software development arm of the Japanese electronics firm. “I was taught very quickly that ‘yes’ and nodding didn’t mean, ‘We agree.’ And knowing that frustrated me more than anything, because I know they heard me and I was waiting for a response back, which didn’t come for some time.”

Americans accustomed to direct feedback, regular performance evaluations and constant give-and-take with their supervisors are often surprised by their Japanese bosses’ unwillingness--based on Japanese cultural standards of propriety--to tell them where they stand.

Communication Problems

“They will not tell you what you have to do,” said Jose R. de la Garza, an assistant vice president at the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank of California in San Diego. “You do it because you know you have to do it.”

Language differences and the Japanese reticence leave some American employees feeling cut out of their company’s flow of critical information--a problem Japanese managers typically do not face in the homogenous environment of home.

“If you don’t have a sense of inclusion because communication is less frequent, less meaningful, less deep . . . then you tend to feel of lower status, of lower importance,” said Clifford Clarke, president and chief executive of IRI International, a cross-cultural management consulting firm in Palo Alto.

“Since the Japanese think Americans are motivated pretty exclusively by titles and money, they give high titles and lots of money and think guys will be happy,” Clarke said. “But what they miss is that Americans are also motivated by inclusion.”

Outsider Status

That outsider status is intensified by the racism some Americans perceive in their Japanese colleagues’ aloofness.

“The Japanese are prejudiced against almost everybody,” said Ray B. Lippincott, assistant general manager of Mitsubishi International’s branch office in Atlanta. “They just can’t come to grips dealing with anybody but themselves and feeling 100% comfortable.”

Beyond the basic struggle to communicate is the clash between American and Japanese styles of business communication and participation.

Traditional Japanese companies value team spirit over individual ambition. Their consensus-based decision systems demand that opinions be carefully mulled and strategically tested with key co-workers before they are voiced in a group setting. Risk-taking is a cardinal error in the face-saving Japanese organization.

So for Americans accustomed to taking chances and talking off the tops of their heads, working for the Japanese can require a major personality overhaul.

Readjustment Difficulty

“It was a real shock,” said Jolissaint, recalling her first months at Fujitsu in Oregon. “I was very borderline just readjusting to this whole thing. It was like I came to really do a job, and I felt like I got the wind knocked out of me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t doing my job. It was that I had to finally learn how to work with other people.”

“Instant gratification doesn’t come in Japanese companies,” according to Mel James, president of Three Bond, the adhesive company in Torrance. “You have to be patient.”

How patient? “We use the term over and over of nemawashi, “ said Joan Gosewisch, vice president of human resources for Fujitsu Systems in San Diego.

“Literally, it is a gardening term that has to do with a Japanese gardener who is . . . going to transplant a tree,” she explained. “The first week, he digs part of the trench. The second week, he digs the other part of the trench. The third week, he clips the root. The fourth week, he clips the root. The fifth week, he clips another root. Finally, when it is time to move the tree, there is no shock to the tree.

Following ‘Nemawashi’

“In a business sense, the use of nemawashi is before an idea is really finalized,” Gosewisch said. “Say I want to do a new program here at Fujitsu. I will start going to the vice president of finance. I’d talk to him about my idea and I’ll get him to kind of sign up. Then I’ll go and talk to someone else. By the time it is presented at a staff meeting with the president, everyone in the room knows all about it, they all have signed up to it. There is no shock.”

What is a shock to Americans working in Japanese companies--at least in a considerable portion of the non-unionized 75% to 80% where work rules are not the product of collective bargaining--is the intense commitment to the firm that the Japanese expect of their employees.

“The basic notion of work is different in the two cultures,” said Lifson, the Berkeley consultant.

If Americans work to live, the Japanese live to work. The difference is most evident in the length of the workday. Many Japanese on assignment in America maintain the 12-hour or longer day and do weekend work, the norm in the home office. Some ambitious Americans try to match their Japanese colleagues hour for hour; others nurse grudges about what they consider an unreasonable pace.

Long Hours Expected

Proctor, for instance, was recently asked to split his time evenly between his duties with Dai-Ichi Kangyo’s Los Angeles branch and the California subsidiary.

“To you and me that might mean, ‘Spend the morning here and the afternoon there,’ ” he said. “They mean eight hours here and eight hours there.”

Long hours are not considered a sacrifice by many Japanese workers, at least in large, traditional Japanese firms. A paternalistic environment that provides the worker’s primary social milieu and the promise of a lifetime job naturally engenders loyalty in return. Companies--with the expectation that they will be taken seriously--go so far as to encourage employees to regard their work as a spiritual commitment.

Three Bond’s first “company rule,” for example--one of a list of seven principles handed to every employee, Japanese and American, and posted on office walls--counsels: “We shall be guided by the belief that faithful execution of our duties contributes to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and that working for the prosperity of the company is at once working for the well-being of society, country and mankind.”

At Odds About Loyalty

American workers are not used to making that sort of leap of faith about their work. “The kind of loyalty to one’s company, which is successful in Japan, grows out of a more general cultural norm of loyalty to the family and the country,” said Nan M. Sussman, a Staten Island, N.Y., consultant on U.S.-Japanese business issues. “Americans don’t have that same kind of allegiance to their families, to the group, so you can’t expect them all of a sudden to have this loyalty to the corporation.”

But Japanese employers push only so far. They have left many of their most basic business practices at home, seniority-based pay systems and lifetime employment among them. They make compromises--adopting American-style incentive pay plans for sales representatives, for instance, though individual reward is a concept alien to Japanese business.

“I don’t think the Japanese have illusions that they can change American business culture,” said John Q. Anderson, a management consultant with McKinsey & Co. in Los Angeles. “Most take it for granted they will have to mostly be adaptive to the U.S. approach.”

“The roots are Japanese roots,” added Milton M. Chen, a management professor at San Diego State University who has studied Japanese companies in America. “But they start growing something else here.”

Americans are changing too as they work for the Japanese. De la Garza, the loan officer for Dai-Ichi Kangyo, not only works long hours like his Japanese colleagues but has set out to familiarize himself with Japanese culture. He studies the language, attends Japanese art exhibits when they visit San Diego and serves on the advisory board of the Japan Studies Institute at San Diego State.

“The Japanese presence, their influence globally, is going to be for many years to come,” De la Garza said. “I think it behooves us to learn about who we’re dealing with.”