Program Six in the eight-part documentary series, “Nippon: Japan Since 1945.” Produced by the BBC in 1990. Released and broadcast in US as “A&E Premiers” with Jack Perkins as host and narrator. 50 minutes.
Do not be misled by the title and opening segment of this documentary. It begins by posing quite silly and stereotypical questions about “Being Japanese,” like “what is the “basic character of the Japanese”? “How different are they from us?” How have they been changed by the shift “from an old feudal economy to a modern industrial state”? As I suggested in class, such framing of corporate organization as an expression of an alleged Japanese national character was very common from the 1960s through the 1990s, by foreign observers and by Japanese themselves.
Quickly, however, the documentary shifts more “ethnographically” to the people who work for a major company, Fuji Film, at its main production and research facilities at Ashigaru. It profiles in particular the families of Norio Kusakabe and Kozo Noguchi, and it vividly illustrates a number of key dynamics of Japanese large organizations. I draw your attention to the following segments:
- The opening reminiscences of Teruo Oshima, the 60-year-old Fuji retiree [Note his age: company retirement was age 55]
- The office layout and shop floor procedures
- The 1990 new year’s recruits, including the 23-year-old Hiroaki Shimosaka, fresh from Waseda University [note that the class of 1990 consisted of 300 college graduates, of whom 282 were male, while half of the high school recruits were female]
- Company ceremonies such as that for the new recruits, when Shimosaka is chosen to give the recruit response to the company president
- Women’s (mis)use in the factory, as shown through training films
- Mrs. Masuko Noguchi at home in the company apartment complex, describing her marriage to Kozo at age nineteen (despite his mother’s efforts to promote a different candidate), their thirteen-year assignment in Germany, their return three years ago, and now her work as head of the residents’ steering committee (a position she is accorded by the status of her husband’s job)
- Leisure pursuits, including Noguchi’s pachinko and Kusakabe’s golf (the latter funded by selling the family car)
- A rather poignant segment on pre-retirement planning organized by the company for men in their early 50’s, who read aloud letters from their wives (this company’s pre-retirement programs began for employees at age 45—for a retirement at age 60)
- The three-generation Kusakabe home, and Toyoko Kusakabe’s discussion of getting along with her aging mother-in-law
- The management-union meeting to discuss management demands for more overtime and union demands for more time-off
- The central role of the personnel department and Personnel Director Kameji Nagai’s account of its recruitment and career planning responsibilities
- The current media attention to karoshi, “death from overworking”
- The initial assignments of the entering class of company recruits was determined by the head of recruiting in the Personnel Office. Shimosaka, who wanted to go to the Export Office and then abroad, seems quite disappointed that he was assigned instead to something called the “Number Two Sales Office.” What do you make of his comments at end, as he leave office late at night?
As an extended case in our consideration of Japanese workplaces, it fits somewhere between Rohlen’s view of Ueda Bank and Jeannie Lo’s perspective on the office ladies and factory women of Brother Industries. To what degree, do you think, does Fuji Film represent the key features of “Japan-style management”?
The three cases above–Ueda, Fuji, and Brother–illustrate large corporate organization in the decades from the late 1960s through the mid-1990s. For a profile of a company deep in the throes of current economic difficulties, NHK, the public television network in Japan, produced a documentary in the summer of 2003 about the survival struggles of a regional bank in the northeast prefecture of Fukushima (the site in 2011 of the TEPCO nuclear power plant complex). A streaming version is available on the course’s v-2 site, but please note that it is in Japanese without English subtitles.