Week 5 Reflection Ryo

In the last class, Michael and KU talked about the difference of the company between Individualism and collectivism. They gave us the difference between the Japanese company and American company as an example that shows the individualism and collectivism. The Japanese company was considered to hold very traditional and inefficient meeting whereas the American company have the very efficient and productive meeting. For example, the boss has absolute decision about the project and their subordinate has to obey with the boss about whatever he said in the meeting in the Japanese company. Therefore, they do not discuss deeply the contents of the project. On the contrary, in the American company, they discuss the concrete contents of the project and whoever can claim their opinion. In my view, this difference might be emphasized or kind of a stereotype. However, there is a tendency of this difference to a certain extent.

Japan is a homogeneous society and the advantage of the company is cooperation. They cooperate each other and have the loyalty to the company、and instead they are guaranteed the lifetime employment. In addition, we have the seniority system that senior member in the company tend to have more responsibility to do the project and get the higher salary. With the lifetime employment and the seniority system, we are assured that we could stay in the company in the whole time and get higher salary with the years. So, we could show loyalty to the company and work hard. This Japanese traditional system was successful through 1960 s or 70 s during the years of high economic growth. In that time, the Japanese economy was in the time of the development and many workforce were required. In addition, they did want to lose time by changing employee such as hiring new employee and educating them. They want to keep existing employee in the company who know the process of the work in the company thoroughly. That’s why Japanese company grew rapidly at that time. However, Japanese industry is now mature and exposed to global competition such as rise of the Chinese or Korean company, a neighboring countries, and Japanese traditional system is on the contrary counterproductive. Since the members are almost all Japanese and they only know Japanese distinct style of communication, they have difficulty in handling the global business. They have never worked with foreigners and cannot even speak English, international common language. In addition, they are accustomed to the traditional Japanese style of work and think they just do their work as their boss told, they cannot make prompt decision by themselves to advance into foreign market. It takes time to check with the top person of the company each time. And of course they are not familiar with the situation of the foreign market.

In this globalized time, Japanese companies are struggling, however some companies started to adopt globalized company system such as accepting foreign employees or sending the Japanese employees into the foreign department. I believe that Japanese companies adapt to the global market with the strength such as collective power and industriousness.