Japanese work mentality

Many million years ago I worked for a Japanese bank.  An aggressive institution with a very high number of Japanese expats.  This firm, the result of a merger about a decade earlier had three HR departments, one for each of the old employees from the pre-merge firms and one for all the employees hired after the merger (it tells you something about efficiencies in Japanese financial institutions).

These were the Go-Go years of the late 1980’s when deregulation came to the City.  I had started in the City for a money centre US banks a few weeks prior to the crash of 1987.  The day I joined this bank had more than 600 employees in London.  Two years later it had less than 50!

I had joined this Japanese bank on the counsel of a friend who said that they were the only ones with “gobs of cash” which was true by the way.  I lasted about two years there before being head hunted away.  Although regulations were lax then, by the Japanese standards it was still restrictive.

Famously, every year before the auditors came to town, the Japanese staff would be in a frenzy of file creation.  Moreover, days before the auditors arrived, inconvenient files would disappear from the office and the officers of the company would take them home.  The internal auditors were not so much a problem, these guys would arrive and be out drinking at lunch and dinner every night.  The first day or so they did some work, but by Wednesday they were so exhausted (I was told that they often closed the clubs – this was London so clubs would close around 5 am…).   Eventually, the bank fired one too many “local” employees who had created a meticulous file on the branch’s transgressions and forwarded this file to the BoE – one day the Bank of England showed up (en masse) with more than 30 examiners.  I had already left the firm by then, but I understand that the entire senior management was sent packing, and the bank paid a hefty fine to the BoE.

What this has to do with the current events in Japan is that for the Japanese form is as important as content, sometimes even more so!  A few years ago, at another Japanese nuclear power station, workers were caught transferring nuclear material in buckets – almost creating a fussion event, this was an unwritten procedure, implemented to speed up operations and reduce costs.  What we are seeing at TEPCO seems to be a desire for things to be better by wishing them better.  It is evident that TEPCO was not prepared for a major incident, all the drones flying or entering the facilities are owned by the Americans, this from a country that invented the industrial robot… because most Japanese organizations are top down operations, and there is no questioning of one bosses decisions, it creates an atmosphere were senior management’s wishes are realized by lying or embellishing.  

Now, two weeks on, TEPCO is finally asking for help, it may be too late for even a Chernobyl solution because senior management at TEPCO could not accept this level of failure.