Contents
Volume 44 / Issue 3 / March 2007
特集 Features
闇社会で急拡大している分野、
それが現代版の奴隷制
度とも言われる人身売買だ。人身売買と戦う
「ポラリス
プロジェクト」
の活動をレポートする。
Cover Story
Targeting Human Traffickers
The Polaris Project helps fight the criminal world’s fastest-growing
industry – the modern-day slave trade.
By Julian Ryall
ジュリアン・リアル
広告業界の常識が変わる
広告業界が厳しい時代を迎えている。消費者の広告注
目率が低下する中、事態打開のキーワードは、
「ソフト
な物腰」、
「無料」、
「ドキドキ」、
「オールドメディア」
だ。
ルシール・M・クラフト
BRICsに死角はないか
活力あふれる新興市場国BRICs（ブラジル、
ロシア、
イ
ンド、
中国）。
その市場の可能性に投資家は熱い視線を
送るが、
リスクも大きいと専門家は警告している。
アンソニー・フェンサム
CFO円卓会議、今後の行方を討論
先ごろ、
エコノミスト誌の第2回日本CFO円卓会議が
開催され、金融商品取引法、M&Aなど最新事情につい
て議論が交わされた。
成功する仕事術
手な付き合い方」
をテーマに、実践的なアドバイスと戦
略を指南する。
Media Watch
Workers wanted. Urban bliss. Wal-mart super center. Thin flexible
batteries. Shoplifting soars. By Mark Schreiber
The Decade Ahead
Ad Industry Rewrites the Rules
The advertising industry is facing tough decisions and challenges as
it fights a low attention span with soft sell, freebies, adrenaline and
old media.
By Lucille M. Craft
FIE, M&A and more from the Economist’s Second Japan CFO
Roundtable.
By Justin McCurry
Making it in Management
Opinion Leader
Protiviti Japan Co., Ltd. President and CEO Hyo Kambayashi on enhancing
corporate value.
プロティビティ ジャパン代表取締役社長、
神林比洋雄氏が企業の価値を高めるポイントを徹底解説。
Classic Journeys
A rare visit to Iwo Jima, including the peak where the Stars and Stripes
was raised in 1945; the island is still littered with unexploded ordnance.
By Julian Ryall
Right on Course
In golf, there are two keys to hitting the ball long: solid contact and
swing speed. By Steve Dahlby
FDI Portfolio
Bullish About BRIC?
CFOs Face the Future
Bates Asia Japan Inc. President David Meredith on the advertising
industry’s next ten years.
Osaka-Oz for ¥20,000 return. Entrepreneur fact-finding tour. Coach
cruises. Triple Five Soul launches. Sport fashion. Upmarket spa.
By Nicole Fall
Behind the Book
We look at Brazil, Russia, India and China – the darlings of investors
looking to exploit the potential of dynamic emerging markets. But
experts warn of huge risks, too.
By Anthony Fensom
ジャスティン・マカリー
職場でいかに立ち回るべきか。今月号は
「上司との上
President’s Message
Japan’s Love-Hate Relationship with the West by Sukehiro Hirakawa
Business Profile
Courtesy The Boeing Company
カバーストーリー
人身売買を見逃すな
Note from the Editor
illustration for the accj journal by darren thompson
PhotographY for the accj journal by Mattias Westfalk
Departments
Organic food is going mainstream thanks to companies such as
this natural-foods supplier with roots in Saitama since 1987.
By Gabrielle Kennedy
In Case You Missed It
A Sendai university is finding that microbubble research may help cure
cancer, dissolve blood clots, and perform drug and gene therapy with
unheard-of precision. By Robert Cameron
Latest in a series for getting ahead in the workplace, with practical
tips and strategies on How to Manage Your Boss effectively.
By Dr. Robert Tobin
ロバート・トービン
/ ACCJ Journal / March 2007
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / Note from the Editor
On the Spot
T
hree talented writers made this issue a record
80 pages and deserve special mention. Saving
you up to ¥120,000 in delegate fees, we bring
you the Economist’s Second Japan CFO Roundtable
– a grueling session with top leaders condensed into
six pages, thanks to excellent reporting by Guardian
correspondent Justin McCurry. Despite having another
major deadline, McCurry frantically took 50 pages of
notes and our photographer 150 pictures to deliver a
timely wrap up of this key event.
We also offer a memorable glimpse of Japan that
few people ever see. A rare invitation from the SelfDefense Forces via the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of
Japan saw regular contributor Julian Ryall land on Iwo
Jima to deliver a fascinating, topical account, expanding Classic Journeys to three pages. Ryall’s human trafficking cover piece will likely move you, too.
Finally, Behind the Book – which features business,
Japan and U.S. issues – debuts with the provocative
Japan’s Love-Hate Relationship with the West by
University of Tokyo Prof. Sukehiro Hirakawa.
[email protected]
Letters
The article about executive coaching by Nicole
Fall (January) was extremely well-written, the
opinions balanced and the trends that are
developing and continuing are well outlined. I
liked what she wrote and the selection of people
and quotes. I would like to add my thanks and
appreciation for the work.
Heinz Buechner
Executive Coach
Mike Jacobs’ article about Okinawa (February)
was very thoroughly researched and covered all
aspects – geography, history, sightseeing, arts
and culture (music, dance, karate), and its very
unique food and alcohol. It was quite evident
that Mr. Jacobs did his research as the article was
very informative and spot on. For those who
have never heard of Okinawa, I think it would
spark some interest. For residents of Okinawa, it
is always nice to read how lucky we are to live in
this paradise.
Mike Holland
American Chamber of Commerce in Okinawa
By Charles D. Lake II / President’s Message
The ACCJ and CSR in 2007
C
orporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a key business imperative continues
to rise in importance in Japan
and globally. Accordingly, it’s no
surprise that the level of interest
in this issue from ACCJ members
and Japan’s business community
at large is high and growing.
In recognition of this environment, at its recent 2007 planning
session, the Board of Governors
approved a plan to again make
CSR one of the two primary pillars of the ACCJ’s activities. To
help execute this plan, the Board
also approved the formation of
a standing CSR Committee. The
newly established CSR Committee
will play an important role in
helping ensure that CSR remains
an important and integral component of the ACCJ’s activities in
2007 and going forward.
ACCJ members have a longestablished record as good
corporate citizens meaningfully
contributing to Japan’s continued
growth and prosperity by offering top-quality products and
services to Japanese consumers;
introducing innovation, global
best practices and new business
models; and providing quality
employment and healthy working
environments for tens of thousands of Japanese workers. As you
know, ACCJ members also engage
in a broad range of CSR activities,
including the promotion of business ethics, values-based behavior,
diversity, corporate governance
and philanthropic activities that
benefit those in need. The ACCJ
complements these activities
through its own community
service activities, raising over ¥30
million for charity in 2006 alone.
It is fitting, therefore, that
CSR was a major focus for the
Chamber in 2006 as well. The
2006 CSR Initiative featured a
series of speaker events, as well as
the release of a major publication
outlining the spectrum of CSR
and highlighting the broad range
of ACCJ member companies’ CSR
activities. This Initiative helped to
establish the ACCJ as a leader in
the CSR dialogue in Japan, and I
am certain that the activities of
the CSR Committee in 2007 will
further cement our central position in this dialogue.
The mission of the CSR
Committee is to promote and
foster CSR awareness, and facilitate the dissemination of CSR best
practices among ACCJ members,
make a sustained contribution to
the ongoing dialogue about CSR
in Japan, and strengthen the profile of the ACCJ and its members
as constructive contributors to
Japanese society by highlighting
their positive impact in the marketplace and on society overall.
While last year’s CSR Task
Force worked to define CSR and
shine a spotlight on the CSR
activities of ACCJ members, the
CSR Committee will focus more
on providing practical tools for
companies looking to improve
their own CSR practices in Japan.
The Committee will also strive
to hold CSR events of general
interest to all ACCJ members, and
help facilitate communication
and cooperation between the
Chamber’s corporate and nonprofit members. Building on the
success of the 2006 CSR Initiative,
I am certain that an active year by
the CSR Committee will form the
foundation for the ACCJ’s leadership in the CSR arena in Japan for
many years to come.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 13
Targeting Human Traffickers
How an NGO helps fight the criminal
world’s fastest-growing industry.
J
ulianna holds up well for most
of the time she is talking,
despite her harrowing tale.
The petite 28-year-old Colombian
is calm as she describes how
gangsters had threatened to kill
her parents and three-year-old
son. She is matter-of-fact as she
recalls how the job she had been
promised was a lie. Instead, she
was forced to sell her body on
the streets the day she arrived
in Japan. She even retains her
composure initally as she recounts
how she was required to service
as many as 15 men a day when
she was seven-months pregnant,
only breaking down after revealing that since her escape from the
gangsters who had tricked her into
sexual slavery she has learned that
they are still looking for her child.
14 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
Julianna does not want her
real name used in this article.
Her story is shockingly common,
according to an official at the
Colombian Embassy in Tokyo
who has helped dozens of her
compatriots escape the clutches
of 21st-century slave traders – and
tries to help them recover from
the ordeal. The official also asked
not to be identified.
“The problem started in the
1980s, when Japan was at the
height of the economic Bubble
and a lot of Colombians began
to come to Japan. Pretty soon
Colombians saw the opportunities
and became traffickers themselves,
working closely with Japanese
gangsters and bringing in larger
numbers of victims,” the embassy
official explains. “The peak years
were between 1992 and 1996.
In 1996, we received 173 official requests for assistance, and
double that number approached
the embassy for help and advice,
but refused to give their names
because they were frightened.”
Every year, 50,000 women
enter Japan on entertainer visas,
but there are never that many
working as dancers or singers,
according to the official. “But we
know there are a lot more than
that because they are entering
on forged passports, and simply
don’t show up on the statistics.”
The official adds: “To be honest,
we don’t know how many
Colombians are in Japan at the
moment.”
The victims – typically poor
women from traditional coffee-
By Julian Ryall / Targeting Human Traffickers
“After I was deported the first time, I only came back to Japan because
the traffickers threatened they were going to kill my family …”
growing regions of Colombia
experiencing economic hardship
– are approached through the
network of extended families
and acquaintances that permeates Colombian society. They are
offered well-paying jobs in restaurants, hotels or casinos in Japan.
They are told to travel on forged
documents; Julianna was given a
fake Norwegian passport the first
time and an Argentinean version
the second time. Slave traffickers
take advantage of travel routes
and entry points around the world
where Colombia’s drug traffickers
learned were most susceptible.
As soon as they meet their
contact in Japan, the victims
become ensnared.
“After I was deported the first
time, I only came back to Japan
because the traffickers threatened they were going to kill my
family,” recalls Julianna. “I arrived
at Osaka airport and took the
train to Yokohama, where I met a
Colombian woman. Until then, I
thought I was going to be working
in a casino, but that night she sent
me out onto the streets to work.”
The trauma continued. “I was
terrified. I wanted to die. But they
knew where my family was so I
could not run away, and they told
me I had to pay back the debt
of ¥5 million that I owed them,”
she adds. “I had to work every
day, from 11 p.m. until 3 a.m.
in the summer, and three hours
longer in the winter. I only got
a few hours’ sleep. They had no
compassion.”
Julianna names the Colombian
woman who controlled her and
numerous other South American
women, as well as her Japanese
husband. The name of the
woman is being withheld for legal
reasons. The Colombian Embassy
confirms that it has a thick file
on the woman, which has been
shared with the Japanese authorities; but it is proving very difficult
to pin charges on her, even when
she travels to Colombia.
t
SNAPSHOT
u
The Polaris Project, an international
organization against human trafficking and slavery based in the U.S. and
Japan, empowers survivors and raises
awareness to create long-term social
change with grassroots campaigns such
as Slavery Still Exists. Its Tokyo branch,
the Japan Campaign Against Trafficking
(JCAT), offers shelter, legal advice, medical help, repatriation and employment,
with over 120 calls and emails logged
since multilingual hotlines began in
2005; Fifteen volunteers have given
5,000 hours worth over $85,000 since
launching. ACCJ member Morrison and
Forester LLP gives pro bono legal services to Polaris and the ACCJ donated
¥3 million last month.
www.polarisproject.jp
www.polarisproject.org
Phone: 050-3496-7615
With the help of a Japanese
customer who eventually became
her husband and gave her money
to pay off the debt, Julianna was
able to get away from the manager. However, her situation got
worse when she fell into the hands
of a group of Japanese gangsters.
“There were about 50 of us and
we were their slaves,” she says.
Even when she did pluck up the
courage to go to the police to file
a complaint, the police failed to
act, according to Julianna. She left
her Japanese husband after he
started abusing her, and now she
is in training for a job. She has to
stay in Japan (despite the danger
she faces if her tormentors find
her) because, she says, it is safer
for her family not to know where
she is.
“I’m getting psychological
support from the embassy, which
helps, but I have suffered. I did
think about committing suicide
by jumping from the window of
the apartment, but I’m still here,”
confides Julianna. “And I have
my son.”
And while the plight of
women from South America
and Southeast Asia is well documented, far less common are
cases involving Western women
among the 27 million people
around the world who are victims
of modern-day slavery. Armed
with a singing contract, Rhoda
Kershaw admits she “knew
nothing of a world of real evil”
when she set off for Japan. After
a successful and fascinating first
taste of Japan, she returned in
April 1989 for a second visit – still
only 18 years old. Contracted to
different agencies in the U.S. and
Japan, she believes they were
simply fronts for the business
of selling naive young women
to the highest bidder. With the
promise of a chance to sing, she
was, instead, put on display in a
hostess club in Osaka, and told
that the club she was to perform
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 15
Targeting Human Traffickers
“I was treated cruelly at the hospital – by the police, a lawyer and the
media – and all the while, no one bothered to call my embassy.”
at was still being built. The bar
where she worked attracted a
lot of yakuza, who were, in turn,
attracted by her red hair.
Drugged, beaten
Invited to an after-hours gettogether (and, admittedly, awestruck by the gangsters she was
with), she had a drink. Within
minutes she passed out, and the
last thing she remembered was
being carried to a car. Coming
round in a luxurious suite, she was
surrounded by gang members
wearing only full-body tattoos.
Kershaw made a bolt for the door,
but was caught and beaten. She
woke up on the bed, and was
gang raped over several days. She
recalls them laughing as she called
out for her mother.
Kershaw estimates she was
assaulted by at least 40 men in the
space of the first 24 hours.
“The things done to me over
the next three days are inconceivable to most human beings,” she
says from her home in Tennessee.
“Each one had his own perversion,
and I was tortured.” The abuse
she received resulted in her being
unable to bear children.
Kershaw recalls screaming
“Jesus” before attempting her
second escape; and after bolting
from the apartment, she ran
naked through the streets. She
hammered on the doors of apartments until a stranger took her
in and helped her call the police.
But with the arrival of the authorities, a second, equally terrifying,
experience began. Kershaw says
she expected the police to be
“good people” who would help
her; instead, “I found myself
being treated like a criminal. I
was treated cruelly at the hospital
– by the police, a lawyer and the
media – and all the while, no one
bothered to call my embassy.”
She was initially taken back
to the apartment where she
had been held – followed by
TV cameras and reporters after
someone had tipped off the
media. She had to identify the
gang members and undergo
questioning over the next three
weeks. Again, the men whom she
identified cannot be named, as
she was unable to find a Japanese
lawyer to join her American legal
representative before the statute
of limitations had run out in 1994.
No one was prosecuted for what
happened to Kershaw.
“There are lots of misconceptions surrounding human
trafficking, one of which is that
it only affects people from poor
countries. It is also a mistake to
think that organized crime is
entirely to blame,” says Shihoko
Fujiwara, head of the Tokyo
branch of the U.S. anti-trafficking
campaign group, the Polaris
Project. “There are an increasing
number of ‘family-run’ operations
that involve foreigners living in
Japan who go back to their own
country a couple of times a year
and woo young girls with stories
of the money that can be made
in Japan waiting on tables in
restaurants.”
Fujiwara points to the huge
scale of the problem facing organizations such as the Polaris
Project, operational in Japan since
2002. Human trafficking may be
the world’s third-largest criminal
industry, after drugs and weapons,
but it is the fastest-growing
sector. Fueled by its colossal sex
industry, Japan is ranked as one
of the largest destination countries for trans-national trafficking
of women and children for sex,
as well as forced labor. Some are
as young as 12 years old. The
victims are not always foreign
women, however, as trading of
Japanese women and children is
also a serious problem, according
to the Polaris Project, which benefited from funding from the ACCJ
through last December’s annual
charity Crystal Ball.
Massive problem
According to the National Police
Agency (NPA), there were 1,700
reported victims of child prostitution or pornography in 2003, the
highest number since statistics
were first collated in 2000. That
figure is merely the tip of the
iceberg, campaigners believe.
Thanks to organizations such
as the Polaris Project, recognition
of the scale of the problem has
increased in recent years in Japan.
This movement was also boosted
by the U.S. State Department’s
June 2004 decision to place Japan
on its Tier Two watch list. The
annual Trafficking in Persons
report out of Washington, D.C.
stated that Tokyo – which was
deeply embarrassed to be the
only industrially developed nation
identified in the report – was not
in compliance with the minimum
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 17
Targeting Human Traffickers
Human trafficking may be the world’s third-largest criminal industry,
after drugs and weapons, but it is the fastest-growing sector.
standards toward the elimination
of human trafficking.
Within months, the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs had outlined
a range of measures to combat
the problem, and the government made it a criminal offence
to traffic in human beings.
Immigration procedures were also
revised to allow victims to remain
in Japan for their own safety
– although the temporary visa
they are issued does not permit
them to work, and so leaves them
reliant on shelters or support
from the public.
Crime fighters
In 2004, the NPA finally set up
the Organized Crime Control
Department to specifically deal
with trafficking of people, and
in 2005 it announced 81 arrests.
Courts do not appear to be
keeping pace with the changes,
however, with a mere five cases
reaching the prosecution stage as
of last August, all of which ended
in suspended sentences.
A reduction in the number of
entertainment visas for Filipinos,
however, has only led to an
increase in the number of women
from other Southeast Asian countries entering Japan.
Other nations also have
problems; an estimated 17,500
foreign nationals are trafficked
into the United States each year.
Combined with the additional
population of victims of internal
or domestic trafficking, there
are upwards of hundreds of
thousands of victims of human
trafficking each year in the United
Women are often duped or bullied into
working in red light districts such as
Kubukicho in Shinjuku.
States. Victims work in the sex
trade, farming and as domestic
helpers, particularly in Florida,
California and Texas, according to
the U.S. State Department, which
puts the value of the industry at
some $9.5 billion a year.
Some progress
Tightening up the rules worked
for the Japanese government,
and the U.S. State Department
subsequently applauded Japan’s
progress in its next report.
But there is no indication that
demand for women in Japan’s
brothels is in decline, according to
Fujiwara of the Polaris Project.
“The demand is huge and seems
to be growing. Of course, if the
demand no longer existed, then
the traffickers would be out of
business within days.” she adds.
“But as long as ‘entertainment
districts’ such as Kabukicho exist,
then women will be forced to
work in these establishments.”
A lot of them are not aware that
their embassies will be able to help
them, and still fear they will be
handed over to the authorities if
they should seek assistance.
“In all my dealings with the
Japanese police, no one bothered
to tell me that the American
Embassy would be able to comfort
me and give me real help,” recalls
Kershaw. “Exactly one year after
it happened, I was back in the
U.S., but had still not shed a single
tear. But soon something went
wrong. I had flashbacks of Japan;
and violation, fear and utter
terror blazed before my eyes.”
“I became angry. Grief overwhelmed me. I flipped out,” she
continues. “I just about broke
everything in my apartment.
My boyfriend – who is now my
husband – found me in the closet
and took me to a hospital. I spent
two months in that hospital, and
have had many more visits to
hospitals due to post-traumatic
stress disorder.”
“People think it has been long
enough to get over it, but they
don’t suffer from nightly terrors
to this day [like I do], nightmares
that make it feel like it just
happened when you awake,” she
emphasizes. But Kershaw adds
that after bottling up her trauma
for 17 years, she wants her
experiences to be heard and to,
perhaps, stop others falling into
the same trap as she did.
“If I don’t use my voice, then I
let them win; and the ones who
cannot speak will not have a voice
to speak for them,” she concludes.
Julian Ryall is a Tokyo-based freelance
journalist.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 19
By Mark Schreiber / Media Watch
Help (Badly) Wanted
The 100m-long street that runs
from the west exit of JR Kanda
Station is lined with inexpensive
eateries. The windows in nearly
all of them carry the sign
“Arubaito Boshu” (help wanted).
“I ran ads for two-issues
running in a job recruitment
magazine.” Tomoki Sugano,
proprietor of a newly opened
barbecue restaurant, Sendai
Gyutan, sighs to Aera (Dec.
18). “All I got was two phone
calls. And neither one of them
showed up for an interview.”
Sugano began hunting for five
workers three weeks before the
scheduled opening and had no
luck at all. Instead, he’s using his
younger brother and the mother
of the Miyagi Prefecture-based
chain’s president, Kei Shoji, who
himself commutes into Tokyo
aboard the Shinkansen nearly
every day to help out at the shop
in the evenings.
“I want to expand, and train
managers; but the key to this
type of business is human
resources, and it looks like
recruiting them is the most
difficult thing of all,” he says.
At a convenience store in a
high-rise building complex in
Shinjuku, 30% of the part-time
staff were students from China.
But they returned home, and
the shop has been unsuccessful
in hiring replacements. “We
need at least three or four more
people to help out,” frowns the
manager. “It seems nobody can
get help these days.”
At mobile-phone outlets,
family restaurants and rental
shops, the story’s the same.
Japan’s part-time labor pool has
been hit by the double whammy
of a declining birthrate and
economic recovery. The latter
has spurred more companies to
take on regular staff, causing the
number of so-called “freeters”
making up the labor force to
continue decreasing, from 2.17
million in 2003 (according to
figures by the Ministry of Health,
Labour and Welfare) to 2.13
million in 2004, and 2.01 million
in 2005. Meanwhile, hourly
wages have also been creeping
up, for 24 straight months since
October 2004. In October 2006,
it was ¥1,039 in Kanto and
¥977 in Kansai, up ¥32 and ¥22,
respectively, over the previous
month’s. The number of ads
for part-time workers placed in
job-recruitment magazines has
risen some 2.5-fold from two
years ago. The rule of thumb for
ad outlays to secure new staff
is currently ¥100,000 for parttimers and ¥200,000 for longterm sales staff.
As one means of securing
staff, the Skylark Co., Ltd.
restaurant chain has adopted
a system where up to 50% of a
part-time worker’s wages can
be paid out in advance. The
system, developed by the Tokyo
Tomin Bank, Limited, went into
operation from 2006. It is said
to be especially appealing to
workers who find themselves
facing a momentary shortfall,
and is currently in use by some 90
companies.
Meanwhile, Nikkan
Gendai (Dec. 13) looks at
another phenomenon on the
employment front: it seems that
36.5% of university graduates
who enter companies as regular
staff leave within three years
of their joining. One cause
appears to be frustration with
the system of merit-based
evaluations for wage increases
and promotions. Another may
be an intern system that gives
students an unrealistic view of
what their job actually entails.
“The interns are treated like
special guests,” notes Prof.
Hiroshi Matsuno of Nihon
University. “During their tenures
they don’t get assigned to run
menial errands, like using the
copier, but instead are given
more glamorous tasks. So when
they encounter the real job
situation, they’re disappointed.”
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 21
Retiring in the Boonies
Last November, “Living in
Hokkaido” fairs held in Osaka
and Tokyo attracted a combined
attendance of nearly 2,500 interested parties. Hokkaido projects
that if 3,000 retiree households
relocate to the prefecture, it
will bring economic benefits of
approximately ¥570 billion. To
encourage them to come and
take a look-see, Hakodate City
and some two dozen other communities are subsidizing shortterm rentals (e.g., ¥125,000 a
month for a 3LDK condo).
Why now? From 2007, Japan’s
postwar baby-boom generation
begins turning 60, and large numbers may opt for a more rustic
lifestyle. As the Asahi Shimbun
(Dec. 9) reports, a survey of
50,000 people in Japan’s three
major metropolitan areas by the
Furusato Kaiki Shien Center, an
NPO organized for this purpose,
found that 40.3% of respondents
said they had an interest or
desire in returning to their rural
roots, as opposed to 33.8% who
said they’d prefer to stay put
where they are. Anticipating a
possible population windfall, a
number of prefectures have set
up programs to attract interested
parties. Three municipalities in
Fukushima charge short-term
visitors a bargain ¥3,675 a night;
Shimane offers tours to 11 locales;
three towns in Oita have subsidized visitor programs; and Ehime
(Shikoku) is running full-pension,
3-night, 4-day tours, including air
arrangements from Tokyo and
Osaka, for around ¥55,000 each.
Ehime projects that 500 new
retiree households would bring
¥66.6 billion in economic stimulus
to the prefecture. According to
the Japan Research Institute,
moves by this demographic
group would have an impact of
¥1.5 trillion over the next five
years. Of this, 45,000 two-person
households would invest ¥400
billion, and the remainder would
involve maintenance and upkeep
of second homes in the city, transport between the two places and
other locations, for an additional
¥1.1 trillion.
Wal-mart Watch
Wal-mart Stores, Inc., which announced a tie-up
with Seiyu Ltd. retail chain in March 2002, is finally
testing the waters with the opening on December
13 of a new “super center” in Ushiku City, Ibaraki
Prefecture. The Sankei Shimbun (Dec. 14) reports
that Seiyu Director Kazuo Nakamura, reflecting on
the reactions by some customers that the U.S.-style
big box store was “empty and inorganic,” told
reporters that Seiyu had made efforts to “create an
environment where customers could shop in pleasant surroundings.”
Ushiku and environs is also undergoing a transformation as a bed town of around 500,000 for breadwinners working in Tokyo. Seiyu’s new Ushiku outlet
incorporates a café where shoppers can relax, and
procures its fresh-food items locally. The two-story
22 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
building with a sales area of some 13,000m2 is seen
as a one-stop shopping place where families can
gather on the weekends.
Seiyu has benefited from Wal-mart’s strengths
in low-cost procurements, and sales at its existing
stores have been increasing. Based on its decision
to withdraw from the South Korean and German
retail markets, Wal-mart, as Sankei notes, is quick
to implement decisions; and its business tie-up with
rival chain Daiei Inc. may demonstrate a conviction
that dealings with a single Japanese partner may not
be enough to satisfy the Bentonville, Arkansas-based
discount retailer’s aims. Seiyu, meanwhile, is planning to open another super center in Hamamatsu
City, Shizuoka Prefecture, but has been waffling on
plans for yet another shop in Miyagi Prefecture.
Media Watch
Shoplifting Soaring
Over the past 10 years, according to data from the
National Police Agency, the number of shoplifting
cases sent to the prosecutor’s office has risen some
40%. And what’s more, reports Takarajima (Jan.),
the number of perpetrators in their fifties and sixties doubled over the same period.
A large proportion of these offenders, the
magazine notes, were caught stealing inexpensive
items, and appear to be motivated not out of
desperate economic straits, but from impulse (i.e.,
kleptomania). Such was the case of two men in
their fifties, one the head of a rural NHK bureau
and the other a section head in the public security
division of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, who
were nabbed for shoplifting in May 2006.
Bookstores remain the largest shoplifting victim,
and some stores count annual losses in the millions of yen. “Large items like coffee-table books
or dictionaries are almost never pinched,” says the
manager of a major Tokyo bookstore.
In the electronic wholesale district of Akihabara,
meanwhile, nobody’s sneaky about pilfering;
there, the problem is outright theft. “The electronic detector gate sounds an alarm, but they
dash right through it,” says a store manager.
“We secure laptop computers and other items
with a cable, but they’ll use special cutters to
snip through it and then carry the item out. Since
around 2000, losses from theft have run several
millions of yen each year.”
Presently, a number of retailers in the district
exchange information on crooks and the swindlers’ latest techniques – like a type of atari-ya,
who will “accidentally” bump into store staff,
drop their computers and then demand money
for “repairs.”
Look Ma, No Wires
Researchers at the University
of Tokyo have come up with an
ultra-thin “power-supply sheet”
that can be spread atop desks or
tables to supply personal computers and other appliances with
power, without the need for
cables or batteries between the
power source and the device. As
reported in the Asahi Shimbun
Internet edition (Dec. 7), the
sheet, about A4 size and weighing 50g, is composed of flexible
plastic film into which electrical
coils have been embedded.
The power (supplied to the
sheet from a conventional
AC wall outlet) generates
an electric field, and current
flows to a magnetic induction
coil inside the appliance. The
principle is already in use in
small devices such as electric
toothbrushes or shavers.
Lab tests have shown that,
apart from heat dissipation
and other transmission
losses, the sheets realize a
maximum electrical conduction
efficiency of 62.3%, and are
capable of conducting about
30W of power at present.
Development of a largecapacity version will enable
use for appliances without
the need to change batteries
or for connection cords. But
manufacturers will have to
redesign products to incorporate
induction coils by which
the power is transferred.
“In the future, we’re
hoping to spread the sheets
on floors, walls and ceilings,
to make it possible to use
electrical devices anyplace,”
says Takayasu Sakurai, one
of the developers at Todai.
Mark Schreiber is an authority
on Japanese print media and
co-author of Tabloid Tokyo 2
(published in March 2007, Kodansha
International).
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 23
Ad Industry Rewrites the Rules
New trends fight low attention span with
soft sell, freebies, adrenaline, old media.
S
ometimes I feel as though I am standing at
the graveside of a well-loved friend called
Maurice Saatchi, Financial Times
advertising.”
As far as I know, the redoubtable Lord Saatchi has
never crossed paths with my daughter Corinne. But
when the ad magnate wrote “The strange death
of modern advertising” last June, the assassins he
surely had in mind were teenagers like mine.
To the ad establishment, my firstborn signifies the
end of civilization, as we know it. Corinne rarely
picks up a magazine. Newspapers, never. If she pops
her ear buds long enough to hear the radio, it’s
only because the sacred iPod’s batteries are spent.
The widescreen TV set in our house? Practically a
museum piece. Yes, my daughter’s no couch potato,
but a cyber-spud! From the moment Corinne
drops her books after school, to the minute I am
screaming at her to go to sleep, she is glued to the
Internet, tending her blog like a prize Guernsey for
24 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
the county fair, or cruising other adolescent online
journals, or compulsively alighting at music and
video sites like a gnat on speed – all while trading
smiley faces and instant messages with her pals on
Yahoo! Messenger. When it comes to the blandishments of conventional media, she is as impervious as
a Hummer.
This phenom even has a name – Continuous Partial
Attention – and CPA’s dreaded byproduct – low recall
– spells curtains for traditional advertising, at least as
far as Saatchi is concerned. But hold that requiem.
If advertising pre-Internet was sometimes akin to
shooting fish in a barrel, nowadays it’s more like flyfishing at Niagara. You can still snare eyeballs. But to
reel ’em in, you need a darn good lure.
Insiders such as Linda Kovarik see advantage in
this adversity: “It’s the most exciting time to be in
advertising,” insists the executive planning director
for beacon communications K.K. “In the old days,
people really stuck to formats. Now it’s all break-
By Lucille M. Craft / Ad Industry Rewrites the Rules
“In the old days, people really stuck to formats. Now it’s all
breakthrough thinking!”
through thinking!”
You might call it: The
• Advertising must offer
New Commandments of
something free
Advertising.
New Advertising
• Hard sell is out, subtle is in
Commandment
#1:
• The more intense the
Thou
shalt
provide
emotion, the better the
payoffs. In an era where
bottom line
viewers can click on
• Embrace the Internet, but
or off at will, advertis don’t neglect old media
ing now must offer
something for nothing. This could be a piece of
handy information, a nifty way to commune with
kindred spirits, or a bit of entertainment, premiums
– whatever. These days, advertisers hanker for what
you might call watercooler cred, “the new idea that
makes people stop, in a world of mundane blather,”
says Mark Detrick, an executive with Asatsu-DK, Inc.
“If people talk about it, you’re 90% there. If they
don’t, you’re 90% on the road to failure.”
One guy who seems to have cracked the code for
attention-deficit teens is Takashi Takeda, of JWT
advertising agency. Five years ago, the adman was
puzzling over how to reverse the melting fortunes
of a certain U.S. candy bar, whose “Have a KIT KAT”
TV slogan had clearly lost its crunch. “We decided
to use the Internet to create buzz, to have a dialog
with the consumer,” he recalls. JWT zeroed in on
the most pressured, not to mention most junk
food-susceptible, of the Clearasil set – those taking
university entrance exams. Thus, Breaktown.com
was born, a forum for beleaguered students to
vent their frustrations, watch movie shorts, listen
to music, play online games and otherwise goof off
when they were supposed to be hitting the books.
Meanwhile, chocolate samples were given away
bearing postcards of encouragement that played off
the product name: “kitto katsu!” (“You’ll get in for
sure!”). And, faster than you can say “attack of the
munchies,” the chocolate bar became so thoroughly
insinuated into the ritual of exam hell that anxious
mothers now send their kids to exams carrying
chocolate bars for good luck.
“We still use TV ads,” Takeda adds. “But mostly
for guiding traffic to the Web site.” So far, the
t
SNAPSHOT
u
strategy has worked: Sales routinely rise 50% in
January and February, the exam season, and have
surged two-and-a-half times in the last five years.
The strategy of giving customers what they crave
and getting them hooked – “creating a community”
– has been deployed aggressively by sports-apparel
companies such as Nike Inc. and the adidas Group,
whose Web sites pack on a sumptuous feast of
goodies: from soccer-highlight video clips, to interviews with football heroes, interactive blogs, contests, wallpaper, and the like.
New Advertising Commandment #2: Thou shalt
not hard sell. Yes, advertising may be going extinct
– but only as one-way forms of indoctrination. Hard
sell is out, subtle is in. “You can’t bullhorn your way
into people’s consciousness,” cautions Koichi Hama,
a veteran copywriter who now develops ad-marketing strategy for his clients.
Advertising has become like judo, suggests
Dominic Carter, president of Carter Associates K.K.,
which studies ad effectiveness. “If people feel
you’re pushing too hard, the buyer will use that
force against you.” To a time-starved manager, for
instance, an advertiser might offer executive-life tips
on the best golf resorts, finest restaurants or the
hottest DVDs – without pushing his own widgets.
New Advertising Commandment #3: Thou shalt
speed up pulses. Contrary to the doomsday soothsayers, insider Kovarik says the old 30-second ad
is headed for reinvention rather than extinction.
The advent of finely wrought, even cinematically
produced, commercials ironically recalls the postwar
“golden age of TV,” when the medium’s staple fare
was not Jackass or The Search for America’s Sexiest
People, but highbrow drama.
“The more intense the emotion, the more it
heightens business results,” Kovarik offers, firing up
her MacBook to screen a gothic Levi’s ad. Funereal
music accompanies a pair of teens as they blast
through walls and pulverize masonry, before galloping into the woods and finally leaping into the
great blue yonder. The ad left Japanese audiences
cold, but played well in China. “The Chinese,” she
explains, “are strivers. Japanese are fun-seekers.”
Kovarik shows a second film, a Dali-esque short
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 25
Ad Industry Rewrites the Rules
“If people feel you’re pushing too hard, the buyer will use that
force against you.”
Don’t underestimate the usefulness of traditional, mainstream media.
called “getting dressed,” which was artful and riveting, but left me clueless about what was for sale (a
deodorant called Axe).
But to know the mother of all ad-branding films,
you have to go all the way back to 2001.
Four million dollars and 10 minutes a hit. That was
the brief for John Woo, John Frankenheimer, Ang
Lee and five other Hollywood A-listers – creators
of an iconic “branded entertainment” campaign
waged online by BMW. The automaker asked each
director to film a story of his choice, provided the
car got at least a supporting role. The result was an
adrenalin-laced, car-chase-heavy series, “The Hire,”
which proved a hit with young males. “On the
Internet, you’ve got to give people something, or
they won’t stay for long,” says BMW Japan’s senior
marketing director, Peter van Binsbergen.
“The art of advertising is no different than it
ever was,” argues Carter. “How to reach people
is changing.” Where bmwfilms(.com) succeeded,
he says, was by triggering emotional responses
in viewers. Once BMW got men to identify with
a sexy Clive Owen racing to save the damsel
in distress, in other words, the company was
well on the road to selling Z4 roadsters.
New Advertising Commandment #4: Respect thy
elder (media.) We’ve all heard the hype. With volunteer armies of “citizen bloggers” posting their own
news, professional journalists are an anachronism.
With free, do-it-yourself video sites such as YouTube
supplying the thrills, who needs TV? If MySpace and
Craigslist provide a place to sell our cars or plug our
yard sales, newspapers are finished. Mainstream
media, R.I.P.
Yes, the “paper” in newspaper is becoming obsolete as news organizations go online. Yes, TV networks in general and cable channels in particular are
surrendering market share. But, as audiences atomize and attention spans shrink, as media executives
struggle to regain footing in a shifting, ever more
ruthlessly Darwinian frontier, a strange thing is happening. Some of that old-fashioned media – and the
advertising that is the lifeblood for most outlets – is
proving harder to kill off than the bloviating blogosphere would have us believe. What the survivors
have discovered is that content is still king. “Good
content will always be in vogue,” says Asatsu-DK’s
Detrick. “It’s the difference between something of
value and something generic.”
The most successful of the old media are going
the way of National Public Radio and the BBC in
becoming “news aggregators,” helping readers sift
through an ever-expanding pile of mostly chaff; letting readers assemble their own news feeds – and,
of course, talk back.
Rather than being passed over, old media remains
a critical part of the arsenal, albeit reduced in
stature. “As an agency, we’ve become much more
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 27
Ad Industry Rewrites the Rules
© The New Yorker Collection 1993 Robert Weber from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
Even today, few Internet sites can reach millions of viewers the
way TV can.
channel-agnostic than before,” claims JWT Japan
President Ambar Brahmachary.
“If you want to reach new target audiences, the
mainstream media is still effective for generating
awareness,” says Van Binsbergen, whose company
faithfully continues to run full-page newspaper ads
and expensive TV commercials while still experimenting with new media. “I can’t see it dying out.”
Despite its reputation as broadband and mobilephone paradise, Japan remains remarkably slow to
join the online migration. Tomoyoshi Kuzushima,
who analyzes the media industry for Nomura
Research Institute, Ltd. (NRI), says that the most
damning indictment of TV ads perhaps happened
late in 2005 when Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.,
Ltd., shifting into damage-control mode after its
defective heaters asphyxiated two owners, yanked
all its TV commercials off the air for two months.
It made not a whit of difference, however, to the
company’s plasma TV sales – which continued to do
a brisk business despite the ad blackout.
But not all products need a mass audience; and, in
many cases, returns on investment clearly favor new
media, where it’s easier to track results. “Do you
want 10 million viewers? Or 100,000 who you can
quantify?” asks Asatsut SNAPSHOT u
DK’s Detrick of his clients.
Most Trafficked Sites in Japan
So why isn’t the exodus
1.Yahoo!*
from old to new media
2.Rakuten (auction site)
as dramatic here as in the 3.Mixi (a local answer to
West? A partial explana MySpace, the social
networking site)
tion has to do with the
* Japan is one of the few countries
unusual oligopoly that is
where Yahoo! beats Google.
Japan’s Madison Avenue.
Nearly half the market here is controlled by just
three behemoths, who have good reason to preserve the status quo.
Kuzushima of NRI and other experts reckon that,
as long as domestic ad agencies can get away with
charging fat fees for TV ads to, perhaps, naive and
risk-averse clients with passive shareholders, there is
no incentive to behave differently. “If you are a big
Japanese agency, you have built your cost structure
around the commissions from clients spending tens
of millions of dollars on TV commercials. But a lot
of interactive marketing can be accomplished for a
fraction of the cost of a TV campaign,” notes Hama.
“So how are you going to keep paying the salaries
of all your employees?”
Even today, few Internet sites can reach millions
of viewers the way TV can. “TV is still – and will
be for a long time – the high-reach medium,” says
Carter. A 2006 survey of Japanese ad viewership by
the goo online research company bears this out:
TV garnered a 60.8% score, followed by newspaper ads at 12.8%. PC banner ads came up third at
9.7% – but mobile ads gleaned a pathetic 0.2% of
respondents’ eyeballs.
You don’t have to be a soothsayer to read the tea
leaves. An August Nikkei Shimbun story, citing figures from industry-leader Dentsu Inc., showed stagnant ad revenues for old media (i.e., newspapers, TV,
radio and magazines). From a peak of almost ¥4 trillion in 2000, income for the last three years has been
in the tank, hovering around ¥3.6 trillion. But online
ad spending, growing at a 40-50% clip for the last
few years, is forecast to keep climbing – at least
through the end of the decade – according to NRI.
Lucille M. Craft is a freelance writer based in Tokyo.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 29
Bullish About BRIC?
Brazil, Russia, India, China emerging
markets offer opportunities, risks.
J
im Rogers’ baby daughter
may only be two years old,
but the billionaire U.S.
investor says she can teach us a
great deal about this century’s
new economic realities.
During a visit to Tokyo in
2006, the Alabama-born investment whiz – he founded the
Quantum Fund with George
Soros in 1970 – said in a speech
at the Foreign Correspondents’
Club of Japan that his daughter
is “learning Chinese, getting
out of U.S. dollars and owns
commodities,” not stocks.
Predicting the current bull
market in commodities will last
until 2014-22, Rogers sees a rosy
future for China’s so-called
30 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
capitalist roaders. His own Rogers
International Commodity Index
has increased by a remarkable 245% since its launch on
August 1, 1988, on the back
of surging energy demand
from a resource-hungry Asia.
“China is the next great
country in the world, whether
we like it or not,” he said. “The
19th century was the century
of the UK, the 20th century
was the century of the U.S.,
and the 21st century is going
to be the century of China.”
Add the three other economies
identified by U.S. investment
bank The Goldman Sachs
Group, Inc. in 2003 as the next
big players – Brazil, Russia
and India – and you have the
four anticipated economic
pacesetters of the 21st century,
otherwise known as the BRICs.
As of 2006, the BRICs had
grown to account for over
40% of the world’s population,
11% of the global gross
domestic product (GDP) and
29% of total land area.
According to Goldman Sachs’
global economic research
team led by Jim O’Neill, if all
goes to plan, the combined
GDP of the four BRIC nations
could exceed the combined
GDP of France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, the UK and the U.S.
(i.e., the Group of Seven major
industrialized nations minus
By Anthony Fensom / Bullish About BRIC?
Far from surrendering its position, Japan is staying right where it is due
to its technological investment.
The World in 2050
50,000
GDP (US$bn)
40,000
30,000
20,000
ly
Ita
K
ce
an
Fr
U
y
er
m
an
ia
ss
G
Ru
il
az
Br
n
Ja
pa
a
di
In
.
.S
U
in
a
10,000
Ch
Source: Global Economics Weekly, November 29, 2006 (Goldman Sachs)
60,000
Canada) within four decades.
While the U.S. economy would
triple in size to about $35 trillion
by 2050, China is seen growing
30 times as large, to reach the
top spot with a GDP of over $50
trillion. And it’s not just a China
story – the combined spending
power of the other BRIC
economies is expected to exceed
China’s over the same period.
In its latest report released
in December 2005 (“How Solid
Are the BRICs?”), the team
now sees the U.S. conceding
the world’s top economy spot
to China, which is experiencing
continued growth, by 2040. India
is expected to surpass Japan by
2033. China, the U.S. and India
would be the three respective
leaders, with Japan, Brazil and
Russia some way behind.
Given such projections, people
living in the current number-one
and number-two economies
(i.e., the U.S. and Japan) might
be forgiven for feeling a little
out of sorts. Many expatriates
in this country find learning
Japanese tough enough without
taking on the Chinese language.
(Rogers’ daughter at least has
the benefit of a Chinese nanny.)
Happily for those without the
inclination to return to the classroom, a number of respected
Japan analysts see the situation
somewhat differently.
Probably the most bullish
among them in terms of the
prospects for Japan and the U.S.
is Jesper Koll, chief economist
at Merrill Lynch Japan Securities
Co., Ltd.
His first message is: don’t
believe the hype. “Economic
growth is unlikely to be in a
straight line,” he cautions,
“which is what these projections
that ‘China is going to be bigger
than everybody else by the
middle of this century’ assume.”
“You’re beginning to see
some limits to economic growth
coming through, whether it’s the
brownouts, the infrastructure
bottlenecks or the institutional
fragility,” Koll adds. “For
example, the Chinese banking
system has more nonperforming
loans and bad assets than even
the Japanese banking system had
at the height of its crisis.”
Far from surrendering its
position, according to Koll, Japan
is staying right where it is due to
its technological investment.
“The amazing thing about
Japan is the relentless focus on
R&D – as a percentage of GDP,
it’s the highest in the industrialized world, at 3.3%,” he points
out. “Japan is always going to be
one of the dominant suppliers of
goods – whether its capital goods
or consumer goods – to the
world economy. It’s been able to
maintain its export competitiveness as one of the key suppliers
to the BRIC growth markets.”
Rather than being intimidated
by the economic rise of the BRICs,
the advanced nations just have a
new competitor to keep them on
their toes. Shutting the BRICs out
by raising protectionist barriers
would hurt everyone, he warns.
“It’s like a national team
preparing for the Olympics. Of
course, we’re all scared about
the fact that there are 1.3 billion
Chinese; and if they wanted to,
maybe they could dominate
every sport there is,” he offers.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 31
Bullish About BRIC?
Photos Anthony Fensom
“The view that all will go well indefinitely for these complex and,
in many ways, troubled nations is simplistic.”
James Abegglen has witnessed boom,
bust and boom again.
“But if you look at the results,
the Scandinavian countries, in
terms of per-capita gold medals,
are actually the best performers,
as they focus on specific sports
they’re good at. This is a good
comparison for the business
world.”
James Abegglen, chairman of
Asia Advisory Service K.K., has
been in Japan long enough to
see the nation’s economy go
from boom to bust – and back
again. The man credited with
coining the term “Japan Inc.” –
and whom Newsweek described
as “one of the top 25 ‘Japan
hands’ in the United States” –
points out that Japan is a model
for other developing nations in
terms of stable economic growth.
From 1955 to 2000, the
economy grew in yen terms
by about 65 times – and more
than 200 times in dollar terms,
he says. With China having
grown over 9% per annum since
1978 – the year the pro-market
Deng Xiaoping took over the
leadership – the communist
country may be catching up, but
Abegglen sees trouble ahead for
the BRICs.
“The internal complexities of
India and China allow a strong
argument that these might not
remain single political entities
as they grow economically more
wealthy and complex,” suggests
Abegglen. “Can China with its
immense size and its differences
in language, income and other
levels remain a single country
run by a communist central
government?”
According to Beijing’s own
figures, there were 74,000 uprisings in 2005, a sign that China’s
growth has not been without
significant social upheaval.
Environmental threat
Abegglen also considers that the
environmental issues caused by
China’s boom “are a threat to
that nation and its neighbors –
pollution has closed Hong Kong’s
airport on occasion!” With 16 of
the world’s top 20 polluted cities
being in China, the water unsafe
to drink in many areas due to
contamination from industrial
waste, and the rising cases of
cancer and respiratory disease,
China’s growth has not been a
painless experience.
Furthermore, questioning such
an arbitrary lumping together of
four diverse nations, Abegglen
also points out the divisions
in India regarding “language,
income, religious and social
C.H. Kwan predicts China’s demographic
crunch in 2020.
differences” on top of a Maoist
revolt in areas with significant
raw material wealth.
“The view that all will go well
indefinitely for these complex
and, in many ways, troubled
nations is simplistic,” Abegglen
cautions. “Economic growth is
cyclical – there will be some fairly
savage drops in growth, along
with the upside growth periods.”
Another economist who is
somewhat bearish on China
is himself Chinese. C.H. Kwan
is a senior fellow at Nomura
Holdings Inc.’s Nomura Institute
of Capital Markets Research in
Tokyo. According to Kwan, the
party will come to a crashing
halt in 2020 or so, when China
will face the demographic consequences from its policy of one
child per family, adopted in the
1980s. Although it will overtake
Japan in the size of its economy,
China will still be relatively poor
in terms of per-capita income.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 33
Bullish About BRIC?
Do you join the herd-like rush to the BRICs, or stay on the sidelines
and focus on the current major markets?
“This is a serious problem for
China because, according to its
own projections, per capita GDP
will be $3,000 – less than onetenth of Japan’s current level,”
he points out. “The potential
growth rate will decline sharply
due to the decline in working
population, and the savings rate
will decline.”
Kwan views the next 15 years
as a golden period of growth
for China, in which he expects
the nation to maintain a hellfor-leather pace of 8-9% growth
annually. He has a warning,
though, to policymakers. “You
may say it is the last chance for
China,” he says. “If it misses it,
China will remain a developing
country forever.”
Assuming it does stay on track
– and it is a big “if” – Kwan says
Japan has a 40-year lead on
China, with the latter’s economic
development indicators, such as
life expectancy, infant mortality
and electricity consumption,
presently similar to those of
Japan’s in the 1960s.
In addition, the two countries’ economic structures are
complementary, not competitive,
he continues, with Japan only
competing in about 10% of its
trade. A similar story applies to
the U.S. Amid power shortages
in China, a rocky political relationship, yuan revaluation and
a perceived over-concentration
of resources to the mainland, a
growing number of Japanese
companies are taking a new
look at India as an investment
alternative.
t
SNAPSHOT
u
Goldman Sachs identifies the “Next 11”
as Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran,
South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan,
the Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam. It
sees Indonesia, Nigeria and South Korea
potentially overtaking Italy and Canada
by 2050. Way behind, resource-rich
South Africa, which has been on the list
of many investors, has its demographics
sadly working against it, primarily due to
the spread of AIDS.
Takashi Imamura bets on India’s IT and
software industries.
According to Takashi Imamura,
chief economist at the Marubeni
Corp.’s Marubeni Research
Institute, there are good reasons
for doing so. In a report released
in April 2006, “people power”
is seen as a special strength of
India. No other country among
the BRICs is expected to post
a population gain during the
period through 2050, boosting
its economic growth to the
mid-4% range in the mid-2040s,
the highest among the four
economies.
But investors should tread
carefully in regard to this Asian
subcontinent giant, Imamura
cautions.
“Many Japanese companies
tried to invest in the manufacturing sector in India, but lost
money.” The country’s software
and other information-technology industries are a better
bet, according to Iwamura.
While China is one of
Marubeni’s biggest plays, in 2004
the trading house also selected
Brazil, Russia and India as important countries for investment,
with rising commodities prices
particularly benefiting exporters
Brazil and Russia.
But what are the prospects for
other emerging markets joining
the BRICs?
O’Neill of Goldman Sachs said
the four BRICs were selected
on the basis of two key factors
– size of working population
and productivity. The U.S., he
said, “has been the strongest
economy in the world purely
for those two reasons.”
Whether the U.S. remains so
and avoids the much talkedabout currency crisis due to rising
budget and trade deficits is a
trillion-dollar question. A number
of commentators, including
Reagan-era trade negotiator
Clyde Prestowitz, have warned of
a dollar crisis; but Merrill Lynch’s
Koll isn’t buying it.
“At the end of the day, if
you believe in globalization
you’ve got a perfect division of
labor going on,” Koll explains.
“The Americans are buying the
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 35
Bullish About BRIC?
© The New Yorker Collection 2006 Robert Leighton from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
“The Americans are buying the products that are made in Asia, and
that’s funded by the deficit that is bought up by the export surplus …”
products that are made in Asia,
and that’s funded by the deficit
that is bought up by the export
surplus – it’s a perfect vendorfinanced relationship.”
Rogers of Quantum Fund
considers buying metals as a
fairly sensible investment. This
is in line with the observation
that the demand for resources
and energy in China and other
BRIC economies accounts for over
70% of the growth in resource
demand over the past few years,
according to Koll.
The BRIC stock markets have
responded accordingly, posting
impressive gains in recent years.
Since 2001, India’s Sensex and
Brazil’s Bovespa equity indices
have tripled in value, while
the Russian market has soared
ninefold. China’s market has
trailed the others, but a 130%
jump in the Shanghai A-Share
Jesper Koll: Bullish about U.S. and Japan
index in 2006 suggests better
times lie ahead. O’Neill says
investing in major multinationals
with exposure to the BRICs, along
with commodities, is probably
the best option – given the lack
of transparency in some of the
emerging markets.
It all adds up to a pretty puzzle
for decision-makers. Do you join
the herd-like rush to the BRICs,
or stay on the sidelines and focus
on the current major markets?
It is worth remembering that
these are predictions about
what might happen if all the
conditions are right. O’Neill
of Goldman Sachs nominated
as the right conditions sound
macroeconomic policies, stable
political institutions, openness
and a high level of education.
China, he said, won’t achieve its
manifest destiny unless there
is a transition to democracy;
but previous transitions in the
country have been anything
but peaceful.
Old-timers in Japan might
also recall the rose-tinted
predictions about this country,
made during the Bubble
Economy (late 1980s), when
the Nikkei Stock Average was
topping 38,000 and the land
value of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace
was said to be worth more than
the state of California.
But regardless of whether Jim
Rogers’ daughter has got the
strategy right, the rise of the
BRICs is undoubtedly good news,
according to Koll.
“They are giving hope to
millions and millions of people,”
he says. “The dream of living in a
better house, driving a better car
and building a better family is a
very powerful force. One would
only hope that it would spread.”
Anthony Fensom is a Tokyo-based
freelance business writer.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 37
PhotographY for the accj journal by Mattias Westfalk
Visible and influential, the new CFO is now under the spotlight.
CFOs Face the Future
FIE, M&A and more from the Second
Japan CFO Roundtable.
J
apan’s economic upturn has
prompted fevered debate
about the changing role
of the chief financial officer
(CFO). Once spoken of in
mildly irreverent tones as little
more than anonymous bean
counters poring over figures
in the back office, CFOs have
emerged from their shells to
become, in some cases, as visible
as the traditional keeper of a
company’s public image, the
chief executive officer (CEO).
The advent of more stringent
accounting regulations in the
U.S. and Japan has made the
CFO’s job more challenging
than ever.
38 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
Success depends not only on
an unwavering commitment to
transparency, compliance and
good governance, but also on
leadership, strategic thinking, a
good grasp of IT and, perhaps
most important of all, an honest
relationship with the CEO.
On January 30, CFOs and
other financial officers from
Japan and other parts of the
Asia-Pacific region gathered
for a day of discussions on
their evolving role, at an
event organized by Economist
Conferences and CFO Asia
magazine, and sponsored
by JPMorgan in Japan
and other companies.
The Second Japan CFO
Roundtable took place against
a backdrop of economic
optimism, tempered by more
stringent market practices
that emerged in the wake
of the Enron scandal in the
U.S. and the Livedoor Co.,
Ltd. debacle in Japan.
About 130 participants
debated an eclectic agenda
that took in all of the major
issues facing today’s CFO.
Graham Davis, director of the
Economist Intelligence Unit’s
(EIU) Corporate Network, and
Tom Leander, editor-in-chief
of CFO Asia and CFO China,
moderated the event.
By Justin McCurry / CFOs Face the Future
About 130 participants debated an eclectic agenda that took in all
of the major issues facing today’s CFO.
t
SNAPSHOT
u
New CFO:
• Supports, complements, partners CEO
• Understands IT, R&D
• Informs, advises, alerts board, staff
• Adds value to company
• Enforces, analyzes internal control
Is:
• Leader
• Manager
• Activist
• Agent of change
Has:
• Higher profile
• Commitment to transparency
• Horizontal approach
Keynote speech
In the morning’s keynote
speech, Masayuki Hirata, CFO
and senior executive vice
president of NTT DoCoMo,
Inc., explained how Japan’s
leading mobile phone carrier
had adapted to the emergence
of a more activist CFO.
Formed in 1992 as an
offshoot of its parent company,
NTT Communications Corp.,
DoCoMo, as a “non-legacy”
company, had no precedent
to which it could refer when
creating a job description
for its top financial post.
“There was no clear
delineation in Japanese law,”
explained Hirata, “so we tried
to gather information from the
business world and from abroad
as to the role of the CFO.”
Hirata described CEOs and
CFOs as having complementary
roles, with the latter stepping
outside their traditional
bailiwick to develop a more
NTT DoCoMo CFO and Senior Executive Vice President Masayuki Hirata searched
worldwide to define the CFO role.
strategic sense of the company’s
direction. “Many firms tend
to be vertically structured,”
he added, “so the CFO needs
to take a horizontal approach
… and even be able to look
at the firm almost from an
outside perspective.”
In an era of stringent new
accounting practices required
by Japan’s Financial Instruments
and Exchange (FIE) law, Japan’s
recently adopted version of the
U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Hirata
emphasized the need to maintain a healthy engagement with
outside stakeholders and other
groups, “so that our values
are in line with those of stakeholders and the rest of society.”
Any CFO worth his salt must
be able to develop a “crossfunctional” view of every facet
of his or her company’s business.
“They must be experts in
management as well as finance
… they must be well versed in
technology and understand
the latest R&D developments,”
Hirata said, adding that,
ultimately, the CFO must be “a
powerful supporter of the CEO.”
Risk and growth in Asia
The changes taking place in
the Japanese economic and
political spheres have spawned
myriad challenges for companies
wishing to benefit from the
globalization of finance and the
emergence of two major global
competitors: China and India.
With expansion come risks,
though, such as those associated
with higher interest rates,
commodity price shocks, political
turmoil, the domino effect of a
sustained slowdown in the U.S.
economy, and disasters such
as earthquakes and bird flu.
How can Japan’s CFOs assess
those risks and act quickly to
mitigate their effects, while
steering a steady course
toward revenue growth and
maximizing corporate value?
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 39
CFOs Face the Future
“The [Financial Services Agency (FSA)] is taking a harder line and
dishing out punishments to those who don’t comply.”
Risk Briefing editor and Economist Intelligence Unit Deputy Director of wire services
Alasdair Ross reckons consumers will replace exports to drive Japan’s economy.
Identify risks and their consequences, says
Marsh Managing Director Duncan Stockley.
Alasdair Ross, editor of Risk
Briefing and deputy director of
wire services at the EIU, opened
with an optimistic appraisal
of the prospects for growth in
Japan and elsewhere. Though
he acknowledged the world had
undergone “another stunning
year of global growth,” Ross
added: “In the international
sphere, although the risks to the
global economy are less, there
are still many downside risks.”
These include fears of a burst
in the U.S. housing bubble that
would hit consumer spending.
The risk factor in Asia, he said,
was “dominated by two very
rapidly growing economies
that are having a gravitational
effect on the global market.”
Ross warned that China was
growing at an unsustainably
rapid rate; while in India there
was evidence of overheating,
although nothing that would
exact much of a toll on growth
Stockley listed several sources
of risk for Japanese companies,
including competition, brand
image, regulation, pension
liabilities, bad debts and
commodity prices, and noted that
risks now have to be identified
by financial executives in their
company’s annual reports.
“Management needs to
ask themselves what they are
doing about the risks and what
the consequences of disaster
would be for stakeholders,”
he continued. “It is the role of
the CFO or risk manager to sell
that message internally and
not end up as the negative
guy who says, ‘You can’t do
this; you can’t do that.’”
Stockley realizes that such
a move costs money, “but he
has to sell it to the CEO and
the board; but to have a riskmanagement system that works
is going to save an awful lot
of money in the long run.”
over the next two years.
Despite concern over recent
lags in consumer spending
in Japan, he said: “We see a
change, that exports will cease to
be the driving force behind the
economy, and that consumers
will step up and create
demand, allowing the domestic
economy to sustain itself.”
At the micro level, risk forces
companies to focus on good
governance and compliance.
In other words, weigh up
“competitive advantage versus
protecting the public at large,”
explained Duncan Stockley,
managing director of Marsh.
In the past, he said, the
situation often needed a brave
individual to blow the whistle
on corporate misconduct in
Japan. But, Stockley went on:
“The [Financial Services Agency
(FSA)] is taking a harder line
and dishing out punishments
to those who don’t comply.”
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 41
“You simply cannot legislate morality, and Enron is a good
example of that.
Tokyo Stock Exchange Managing Director Eisuke Nagatomo turned heads with his take
that staff are better than outside consultants at understanding risk.
FIE
The passage of the SarbanesOxley Act in 2002 came in
response to a number of major
corporate and accounting
scandals, including Enron Corp.
and WorldCom. FIE, nicknamed
J-SOX and adopted in June
2006, is similarly designed to
avoid a repeat of the episodes
involving Livedoor and the
Murakami Fund (formally, M&A
Consulting Inc.), among others.
(The FSA won’t start enforcing
the requirements until FY2008.)
No Japanese CFO can function
properly without a watertight
knowledge of what the new
regulations mean. In addition,
he must ensure that senior
colleagues, including the board
of directors, are kept abreast
of what the regulations mean
for their specific roles.
42 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
Eisuke Nagatomo, managing
director and chief regulatory
officer of the Tokyo Stock
Exchange (TSE), said that Japan
had learned from the example
of the U.S., where accounting
and other financial scandals had
affected the GDP. “So although
the cost of risk management is a
burden, the cost of not doing it
can be much bigger,” he added.
Nagatomo surprised some
in the audience when he
cast doubt on the value of
using outside consultants to
ensure compliance. “It is the
employees themselves who best
understand the risks particular
to their firm,” he cautioned.
“Outside consultants cannot
possibly understand the risks as
well as the company itself.”
Nagatomo did, though, echo
the consensus calling for radical
change in corporate risk-management structures. “Until now it
has been a vertical structure;
but now, as companies expand
their operations, a horizontal
approach has to be taken.”
The TSE managing director
said the recent scandal involving
the confectionary company
Fujiya Co., Ltd. was a prime
example of the failure of risk
management and transparency.
“If they had had more stringent
controls in place, they would
not be in the position of
seeing their corporate value
plummet, and Peko-chan
would not be shunned by the
children of Japan,” he said.
Susan F. Schultz, global
practice leader and member
of the board of directors at
Oak Associates, K.K., advocates
the presence of more CFOs on
other company’s boards. “There
is an increasing recognition
that good boards make good
companies,” she pointed out.
“I would encourage Japanese
CFOs to sit on boards as J-Sox
is being implemented.”
Schultz said the new
responsibilities of CFOs,
which under the FIE include
signing off on the accuracy of
financial statements, should
come with greater authority.
CFOs would be needed to
enhance good governance,
she continued, and act as a
company’s moral compass under
the new regulatory regime.
“You simply cannot legislate
morality, and Enron is a good
example of that,” she said.
CFOs Face the Future
“The Japanese now have a new perspective on going out and
expanding their businesses.”
Cash to value
Japanese companies have grown
accustomed to using cash to
pay down debt; but now, as
the economy recovers and
profits are rising, they have the
opportunity to use cash in more
imaginative ways. Some choose
to protect themselves from
predatory bids by returning cash
to shareholders, but others are
looking for ways to build value.
To use cash efficiently,
companies with numerous bank
accounts in perhaps dozens of
countries covering several time
zones need to know exactly
where their cash is and how to
obtain it with minimum fuss. The
role of the CFO is paramount if
better cash management is to
become a reality for companies
in Japan and across the region.
Lionel Smith, vice president
and head of consulting
(Asia) in treasury services at
JPMorgan, said the creation
of central treasuries would
not only increase efficiency
and eventually lower costs,
but would also enable CFOs to
fulfill their new role as agents
of change on a mission to
add value to their company.
“To identify and manage risk,
you need to know where the
money is ... and have the ability
to act on that information, and
act quickly,” Smith said. “There
comes a time when you can’t
manage the new complexities
with an Excel spreadsheet.”
Advanced treasury center
designs not only enable
companies to better manage
JPMorgan Vice President and Head of
consulting (Asia) in treasury services
Lionel Smith: Create central treasuries to
increase efficiency, lower costs.
their cash, but also allow CFOs
and financial managers to
delegate, and even eliminate,
the work of subsidiaries, thereby
improving the overall control
framework, according to Smith.
Regulators
Japan’s financial regulators have
been kept busy by the fallout
from the Livedoor and other
corporate scandals. Regulatory
initiatives are changing the way
finance departments work, while
the FSA’s targeting of highprofile fraud cases is a trend
no CFO can afford to ignore.
Koutaro Tamura, Cabinet
Office vice-minister for financial
services in Japan’s Financial
Services Agency, believes that
tightening regulations through
the FIE and reforming the
commercial code are essential
if Tokyo is to become a truly
global financial center.
“With the growth of direct
investment in Japan, we want
the money to shift from savings
to investments,” Tamura
explained. “For that we need
an excellent capital market. And
whether investors inside and
outside Japan decide to stay
with us is one of the keys.”
Tamura said he saw a “big
role” for CFOs in making new
systems of internal controls
work so that investors in the
Japanese market are properly
protected. The new regime,
he conceded, “is often talked
of as ‘internal control’ hell, so
we need to adopt a planned
approach. But we also hope that
CFOs will understand why it is
necessary. It’s not heaven; but
it’s not exactly hell, either.”
M&As
Japan Tobacco Inc.’s recent
acquisition of Gallaher Group
PLC in the UK is just one of
several high-profile cross-border
M&As involving Japanese
companies in the past year.
With companies expected to
continue looking beyond Japan’s
shores to supplement their
earnings in the mature markets
at home, the CFO is becoming
more of a strategic partner to
the CEO and, in some cases,
serving as a key member of M&A
committees. Not only does the
CFO need to alert colleagues to
the potential pitfalls, he or she
also has to manage the postmerger consolidation process.
Piyasena Perera, a partner at
Allen & Overy Gaikokuho Jimu
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 43
CFOs Face the Future
The CFO should have the right, and the confidence, to confront his
boss if he senses trouble on the horizon …
Oak Associates K.K. President Charlotte Kennedy Takahashi (right) with global practice
leader and board member Susan F. Schultz, who says CFOs should sit on boards.
Bengoshi Jimusho, identified
two main objectives for the CFO
in cross-border acquisitions:
minimizing costs and minimizing
risks. “The growth of private
equity funding has CFOs
[empowered with] the ability to
raise the bid because there is so
much money around,” he added.
As long as Japan’s recovery
continues, that will remain
the case. “In Japan, first and
foremost, ‘It’s the economy,
stupid,’” Perera continued.
“The Japanese now have a new
perspective on going out and
expanding their businesses.”
The CFO should also articulate
the pros and cons of an M&A
prospect in the widest possible
sense, said Sanjay Singh, finance
director in Northeast Asia
for Procter & Gamble Japan.
“The role of the CFO goes
beyond just the financing.”
A CFO must also find a way
“of dealing with the advocacy,
putting things on paper and
saying exactly what it is that we
want to acquire, and being able
to evaluate and quantify the
plan,” he continued. “That is the
real job of a CFO. Otherwise, you
won’t know when to walk away.”
CFO ROLE
The new emphasis on corporate
governance is transforming
the role of the CFO from backoffice accountant to compliance
officer, with a duty to analyze
internal operations, spot trends
and develop solutions. How will
these changes affect the CFO
position inside the company,
and what will they mean for
relationships with the CEO?
The CFO should have the right,
and the confidence, to confront
his boss if he senses trouble
on the horizon, suggested
Katsunori Hashimoto, director
of finance and executive
operating officer at DuPont K.K.
“Of course, he must say ‘no’
to the CEO if the CEO is about
to do something wrong,” he
continued. “But for that, you
need a good relationship of
mutual trust. Sometimes other
officers become excited about
something, but the CFO should
cool them down and provide
the bigger picture – and present
every possible scenario for
the plan in front of them.”
Arif Iqball, CFO and executive
director of Avon Products,
Co., agreed that CFOs should
attempt to strike a fine balance
between control and decision
support vis-a-vis CEOs.
“The CFO/CEO relationship is
the most important partnership
in the company,” Iqball said.
“The CFO should not be a close
[friend] of the CEO, but should
provide reality checks. But
once you walk out in front of
the public, you are one team.”
The CFO, he concluded, “is the
conscience keeper of the CEO and
the trustee of the shareholder.”
David Hackett, CFO and senior
managing executive officer of
Aozora Bank Ltd., envisaged
CFOs playing a good cop/bad
cop role while juggling several
other functions: managing
the balance sheet, planning
strategically, and communicating
inside and outside the country.
The CFO, Hackett added,
“is in a unique position to act
on behalf of all shareholders
and is well-positioned to
champion the framework of
governance and control.”
Justin McCurry is the Tokyo
correspondent for the Guardian.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 45
Making It in Management
Make your boss work for you.
I
In my work as an executive coach, I see people
fail and succeed in their work because of the way
they manage the relationship with just one person – their boss. If you want to get your job done
well – and if you want to move up – you have no
choice but to manage up. Here are some strategies
that can help you make your relationship with your
boss a meaningful and rewarding one.
Get on the same page
Start by knowing what you’re here to do. You may
think that if you’re running sales it’s to increase
sales – but it’s never that simple. Which new products to push, what information to share with product developers, what to outsource, which channels
to focus on are all directions and decisions that you
can make.
But your boss, too, may have some very specific
ideas about where to focus. Find out first before
you head quickly in possibly the wrong direction.
I repeatedly see major problems multiply due to
a lack of alignment over job priorities. Too often,
46 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
there’s a big gap between our hopes, our thinking
and what is really said and what we hear.
Last year, I worked with an IT executive at a
pharmaceutical company who thought he was
sent to Japan to introduce the latest technology
on database management. On the other hand, his
boss who headed IT for the region really wanted
him to bring the fractious team together. The local
manager schooled his staff in the new technologies, but his team and his boss grew more discontented as the relationships within the team further
deteriorated.
The regional exec thought he had communicated
the importance of focusing on the team and the
local manager assumed he was doing his job perfectly by concentrating on the technology. When I
talked with each separately, there was a high level
of dissatisfaction with the other’s performance and
management style. I asked the local manager if he
knew what the regional manager wanted. His reply?
“I never asked him.” The remedy we brokered? A
conversation about responsibilities and priorities.
By Dr. Robert Tobin / Making It in Management
Take a lesson from the Japanese management playbook: Let everyone
share in success, and thank your team when work goes well.
Take the lead
management playbook: Let everyone
t SNAPSHOT u
John Kotter, a former Harvard Business
share in success, and thank your team
• Know what the boss wants
School professor and top expert on
when
work goes well. This enhances
• Take the lead to ensure
change, says that people in leadership
your stature in the eyes of your boss
understanding
under-communicate direction by a
and the people who work with you
• Deliver results, not just
factor of 10. When there’s this much
everyday.
empty words
• When something goes
potential for under-communication,
wrong, don’t hide it
initiate the conversation to make sure
Tell the truth
• Express your feelings
you and your boss are in sync.
If it doesn’t look like you’ll expand at
honestly
If your boss leaves the priorities and
the rate you expected, if the data from
• Be prepared for when the
strategy to you, start with your own
the employee survey is embarrassing,
boss is away
list, detailing your focus, priorities and
if the global strategy isn’t working
• Adapt to understand your
the results you expect. You can send it
in Fukuoka, let the boss know. Don’t
new superior
to your boss by e-mail, but the discusattempt to hide what is really going on.
• Change yourself, not the
sion is as important as the list. Schedule
Save your surprises for birthday parties,
boss
some telephone or face time to go over
not for the boss.
the list together. It’s the discussions that will make
Philippe Wauquaire, who handles administrative
the relationship work.
matters in Japan for the global translation company
Know what you’ll need from your boss, too. Is it
Jonckers, told me: “Transparency and honesty are
money, support from HQ, more staff, time on your
essential. Never push things under the carpet for
boss’s schedule? Ask for what you need. Priorities
the sake of convenience! Never try to hide mistakes
shift in every organization, so have this discussion
or lie. It will come back to you.”
more often than regular budget reviews.
He’s right. About five years ago, a banking friend
If you have two bosses, it’s the same process, but
met the global CEO of a competitor at an ACCJ
at least three times as difficult. Make up your list
“Meet and Greet Function.” They talked about the
and ask them to sit down – preferably with you
Japanese market and the opportunities each of
– and reach agreement. If there is disagreement
them had pursued. The CEO was surprised to hear
between them, it’ll be up to you to carefully shepthat my friend’s bank had been successful in a line
herd the list of priorities and expectations by each
of business that the CEO had been told was still
boss, one at a time. If there’s a turf war, don’t leave
closed to foreign companies. Who told you that?,
it up to them. You could be forgotten – or be the
my friend asked. The CEO replied, “The head of my
first casualty.
Japan operations.”
Would you want to find yourself having to
Action is louder
explain what you had claimed when your boss conNo one can argue with results. Results buy you
fronts you later? Far better to tell the truth from
leeway to do and get more of what you want, and
the get-go.
results make the noise of organizational politics
fade into the background. Michelle Kristula-Green,
Integrity matters
president of Leo Burnett Asia Pacific, told me: “I’m
Frank Maher, who retired three years ago as presia firm believer that results and actions speak louder
dent of Asia Pacific for Rohm and Haas, goes one
than words.” Put simply: Know what to do, and
step further. According to Maher, “It’s important to
then do your job!
speak your mind honestly.” In difficult situations,
When the results are in, you don’t need to brag
Maher assured his manager that he was willing
to your boss about what you’ve done. No one likes
to move ahead with any course of action his boss
a show-off anyway. Take a lesson from the Japanese
chose. However, he wanted to make his boss aware
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 47
Making It in Management
You can influence your boss, but it’s much easier to change your
reactions to him than to change him.
of what he felt was a better alternative, or additional issues that needed to be considered.
No doubt there are risks. I talk with people
every day who keep quiet because they worry
about being fired; but this is a fear that is more
highly exaggerated than real. Remember that you
are the one closest to the marketplace, and can
offer a perspective on the situation that no one
else can. Don’t short-change what you know by
keeping your mouth shut – but don’t expect to
win all the time either.
Reduce any risk there may be by giving thought
to how you explain it. Maher says, “The way the
feedback is delivered needs to be thoughtful, and
you need to read your manager [to know] about
how best to do this.”
When the boss is away
Having a boss in another time zone has pluses
and minuses. With the latter, there’s the obvious
time difference and you can sometimes feel out
of the loop or abandoned by HQ. But KristulaGreen at Leo Burnett makes the very good point
that “when your boss is far away, they don’t hang
over your shoulder all day, so it’s great for people
who are self-starters.” She runs a region where
her direct reports are based in India, Australia and
Japan. This situation is the norm now.
Find out how much your boss wants to know
– how often and in what way. Does he or she want
e-mail updates, regular conference calls or face-toface meetings like many Japanese bosses prefer.
Bosses are no different than any of us. Some like
to read, some like to talk, some prefer to listen.
Know or find out about your boss’s preferences
and provide the information that way. Don’t
expect that your boss has the same preferences as
you do, or that he or she will adjust to your style.
I hear people complain that e-mails they send to
their boss get ignored. Yet, they keep on sending
them. If e-mails aren’t working, find out if calls
would be better – and how often. If your boss is
not a reader, you’ll get nowhere sending those big
fat e-mail files that clog up the e-mail account.
When your boss changes
When you have a new boss or new reporting
relationships, you need to start all over again – go
back and go over responsibilities and expectations,
and work on developing a new relationship. That
said, all of the work you’ve done so far has not
been wasted – you learned how to communicate
with the prior boss and so you can do it again.
Recognize that the new boss may very well
have new priorities. But don’t mourn too long
either for the former boss. Act like those who get
successfully married for the second time: Start
fresh, don’t talk about your ex and figure out
how to make this relationship better than the
last one.
It’s easier to change yourself
You can influence your boss, but it’s much easier
to change your reactions to him than to change
him. Let’s say you want to have your boss spend
more time understanding the challenges of
the Japanese market by visiting more often.
You can extol the potential of Japan and ask
for more time on his screen, as well as more
money; but eventually it’s you who has to change
and recognize that his priorities may remain
elsewhere.
If the relationship with your boss is not a
good one, recognize the role that you may have
consciously, or subconsciously, played in making it
that way. Have you given your power away, have
you failed to assert yourself or pushed too hard,
have you spent more time complaining about your
boss to your spouse than thinking about what you
could do to make things better?
Don’t spend too much time flagellating yourself,
or your boss, over the past. It’s never too late to
get the relationship headed in a more positive
direction. Everyone will benefit – you, your boss
and your company.
Dr. Robert Tobin is an executive coach, a consultant and
professor at Keio University, Faculty of Business and
Commerce.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 49
By Martin Foster / The Decade Ahead
The Decade Ahead
As media morphs from traditional to tailormade, young creatives will grab the glory.
Every month, we ask an ACCJ leader what challenges and changes their industry face in the next 10 years.
David Meredith, President and
CEO, Bates Asia Japan Inc.
The biggest changes facing
the industry in Japan over the
next 10 years are:
Freedom to delete – As
communication technology
becomes increasingly mobile
and consumers demand
faster access to more choice whenever, wherever,
they will also have more freedom to choose what
they download and what messages they receive. That
means that as an industry we need to understand,
more than ever, exactly who our consumers are and
what makes them pause in their ever busy and ever
stressful daily lives to absorb our messages. No longer
does mass media apply in the traditional sense; it
must be re-tailored for today’s savvy consumer.
Transition from the traditional – Digital
downloadable, programmable, on-demand
television; bespoke magazines containing only
articles that appeal to you; virtual newspapers with
the news that fits you; and radio podcasts. If the
media is being designed just for you, then so must
advertising. Traditional advertising is not dead,
as some might contend, but is alive and well, and
made more effective by being tailor-made to appeal
directly to the consumer most likely to be interested
in the offer.
What are the major challenges?
Adaptation of the species – The silver market
is increasing in importance; but will this large
consumer-spending segment with failing eyesight
and an arthritic hand be able to navigate life with a
mobile GPS-equipped wallet and online banking?
Adaptation of the industry – Advertising is an
industry in transition. Many say the old model is
dead. It is not. It is in transition. Over the past 50
years the advertising industry survived the arrival of
new technology and new media, and it will again.
Advertising lives. It just needs to navigate the brands
to consumers, rather than consumers to brands.
And by understanding change, sorting the trends
from the fads and catching the wave while it is still
a ripple, Bates plans to ensure its clients continue to
benefit from leading-edge advertising. But it will be
delivered in gigabytes and no longer something you
can wrap around yesterday’s garbage.
Creativity will move out of the hands of one man
behind a desk, the traditional creative director,
and into the hands of bright young creatives at
the centers of influence, who introduce and drive
popular culture. These young creatives are connected
through the networks that build these changes
into mass movements. They will be the creators of
tomorrow’s advertising, and technology will ensure
that it is available, relevant, personalized and
deliverable at the right time to the right prospect.
Advertising will survive because it is an art form.
Fads will come and go, but these will not replace
advertising. The medium du jour – blogs – will be
dispatched to Blog heaven because, at the end of the
day, no one is interested in reading about you and
your weekend shopping unless you are Angelina Jolie
and shopping for her new baby Shiloh’s clothes.
Martin Foster is a freelance writer based in Tokyo.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 51
I
nternal Control and Risk
Management are now established legal requirements in
Japan. Both the new Company
Law and the Financial Instruments
and Exchange Law enacted this
past year require corporate management to focus on internal controls and risk management. New
Government emphasis on legal
compliance with severe penalties
has created intense pressure on
company Directors. However, this
new requirement should not be
viewed simply as legal “compliance,” but rather as a “value
proposition” – an opportunity to
enhance corporate value.
We are seeing many corporate
scandals taking place overseas
and in Japan. With the globalization of the capital markets, there
has been a worldwide movement toward demanding that
corporate management be held
accountable for the amount of
risk that attends decisions on
business strategy and investment, the probability of
risk events occurring, and
the relative size of return
with respect to a given
amount of risk. Against this
backdrop, Corporate Social
Responsibility and corporate governance measures,
as well as integrated systems
of risk-management and
company-wide internal controls, have been advocated.
Risk management involves
the management of risk that
is assumed as a company carries out its business strategy. In
order for risk management to
be most effective, a company
should first build internal　controls consistent with its current
capability and environment, and
align its efforts with its present
development of risk-management
capability (RMC). Then it should
take on the hard work of improving its RMC level.
There are five levels of RMC,
according to Carnegie Mellon
University’s model. The Initial
Level involves dependence on
individual “heroes.” In this case,
systematic capability is lacking,
so if that person leaves the company, his/her skills are not passed
on and the company loses RMC
completely. At Level Two, there
is still dependence on individual
capabilities, but the company
is capable of passing on and
replicating the skills. Level Three
involves defining and systematizing policies, processes and other
rules. A company at Level Four
measures and manages risk quantitatively. Finally, at Level Five a
company can develop RMC to its
optimal level, a source of competitive advantage. Capability requirements and urgencies may differ,
depending on the type of risk. For
example, it is absolutely essential
for a food-products company
to bring its safety-management
capability up to Level Five.
The Financial Instruments
and Exchange Law requires
that companies define and systematize their internal controls
over financial reporting, which
represents the Third Level of
Views expressed in the Opinion Leader column are those
of the author and do not necessarily represent the views
or policies of the ACCJ.
52 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
illustration for the accj journal by darren thompson
Risk Management, Internal Control:
Enhancing Corporate Value
By Hyo Kambayashi / Opinion Leader
RMC. This entails the organization observing and correctly
following established rules and
standardized processes. This does
not mean a company can just
create some rules and a manual
to comply. There must be a clear
indication that the organization
is reliably implementing the rules
and processes that have been
established, and that these rules
and processes are operating
effectively. This level of definition
and systemization is by no means
an easy level to reach.
Organizing a company’s present
state of risk management and
internal controls into a framework like the one provided by
the Committee of Sponsoring
Organizations of the Treadway
Commission serves to reveal areas
where too much is being done, as
well as areas where not enough
is being done. However, there are
many examples of U.S. companies
in compliance with the SarbanesOxley Act that have successfully
improved efficiency by cutting
back areas of excess controls or
integrating processes and systems
on a group-wide basis.
For Japanese companies now
addressing the internal-control
mandate, it is important that
companies review their initiatives
to date and recognize the “Value
Proposition.” Companies should
utilize this costly process as an
opportunity to maximize corporate value through effective and
efficient risk-management.
Hyo Kambayashi is President and
CEO of Protiviti Japan.
リスク管理と内部統制を活
用し企業価値向上へ
内部統制・リスクマネジメントに関して、
値により測定管理されるレベル４を経て、
2006年5月に会社法が施行され、6月に
最後にリスクマネジメントが競争優位の源
金融商品取引法が成立するなど、内部統
泉となる最適化レベルまでもっていくこと
制の高度化への要請は一層の高まりを見
が求められる。
リスクの内容によっては求
せている。
日本企業は、
これらの要請に対し
められる能力も異なる。
例えば食品会社で
て個々に対応するのではなく、
企業価値向
あれば、安全管理は、最適化レベルまでも
上に資するために、統合的或いは整合性
っていく必要があるであろう。
の取れた形で取り組む必要がある。
金融商品取引法が要請する財務報告に
諸外国のみならずわが国においても、
企
係る内部統制において求められるRMCの
業決算や上場制度に関する様々な不祥事
レベルは、
レベル３の定義・制度化レベル
が続発する中で、経済社会や資本市場の
であると考えられる。
これは作成したルー
グローバル化に伴い、事業戦略の決定や
ル、標準化されたプロセスを組織が遵守
投資判断に伴うリスクの大きさ、発生する
し、適正に運用している状態である。何ら
確率、
リスクに対するリターンの大きさ等
かのルール、
マニュアルがただ作成されれ
に対する説明責任を経営者に求める動き
ばよいということではなく、
作られたものが
は、
世界的な流れとなっている。
こうした背
組織の中でしっかりと運用され、
さらに運
景の下で、
企業の社会的責任、
コーポレー
用状況が有効であることが確認されてい
トガバナンスの確立の必要性あるいは統
る状態である。定義・制度化レベルは決し
合的リスクマネジメントや全社的内部統制
てやさしいレベルではない。
の必要性が提唱されている。
現状のリスクマネジメント体制、
内部統
リスクマネジメントとは、企業の戦略を
制をCOSOなどのフレームワークで整理し
遂行する上で不可避なリスクを管理する
てみると、
やり過ぎている部分、
不足してい
ことである。
有効なリスクマネジメントを実
る部分がわかる。
米国ＳＯＸ法に対応した
現するには、企業の実態に応じた内部統
米国企業でも、過剰な対応を縮小したり、
制の構築、
リスクマネジメント能力
（RMC）
グループ全体でプロセスやシステムを統合
の発展段階に応じた取り組みが必要であ
したりで、
より業務効率が上がった事例も
る。
RMCとは、
カーネギーメロン大学が開
多い。財務報告の内部統制に取り組む日
発したモデルによると５段階あり、初期段
本企業としては、
これまでの自社の取り組
階は、
英雄的要素に依存した状態である。
みを見直し、
リスクマネジメントを通じて企
制度的能力が欠如しているため、
その人が
業価値を高める絶好の機会として活用す
去ってしまうと匠の世界が伝わらないまま
ることが重要である。
に、
RMCも会社から消滅する。
次に個人の
能力に依存しつつ、連続・反復が可能なレ
ベル２、方針、
プロセスなどのルールが定
義化・制度化されたレベル３、
リスクが数
株式会社プロティビティ ジャパン
代表取締役社長　神林 比洋雄
オピニオンリーダーに掲載されている意見はすべて著者個人の意見であり、
ACCJの意見や活動を代表するものではありません。
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 53
Marketing & CRM | Special Advertising Section
by lorem ipsum / lorem ipsum
Attaining True Market
Leadership – in a
Customer-driven Age
I
n today’s demanding business environment, you either
lead or you fall behind. So, what defines leadership in
an environment where business models shift all the
time and CEOs have 90 days to please shareholders or face
their wrath?
Oracle believes that leadership can be summed up by two
changes you need to make in order to consistently outperform your competitors. You have to empower your employees to continuously improve how you do business and you
have to enable your business to be responsive to the many
changes and opportunities that come your way. Simple,
right? You are probably saying to yourself, “Well, hold on,
they told me ongoing profitability was the hard part.” It
is and it isn’t. Oracle helps companies every day become
better run, have more profitable businesses and leaders in
their industries; but true leadership has a unique set of
challenges. Even the best-managed and best-intentioned
companies end up with many broken business processes.
From a management standpoint, it’s nearly impossible to
review processes often enough to ensure they incorporate
your best ideas.
Let’s face it, business is moving at an incredibly quick
pace. How you make money today is not how you’ll make
money tomorrow. If you are a cell-phone service provider,
tomorrow you may be making more money in downloadable games and videos than by minutes. If you are a bank,
your most profitable product tomorrow may be an insurance offering from a bank you haven’t even acquired yet,
or maybe even one you never acquire but just partner
with. If you are a shoe manufacturer, your most popular
and profitable shoe style next year may be one that your
“prosumers” haven’t even submitted a design for yet. To be
a true leader you really need to rethink how your business
interacts with your customers.
OK, but this all sounds hard. Your employees today may
be too overwhelmed with day-to-day work to help you
think about how to take advantage of next year’s opportunities. Your IT staff may still be reeling from the effects
of your last acquisition. You may be struggling just to see
your customers and their activity patterns through the
many different ways they could potentially interact with
you and via the myriad systems you now have.
Like most things that sound hard, the solution lies in
breaking the challenge down. As the examples suggest,
the answer is in readying your organization to hear, digest
and proactively plan for what your best customers and
prospects want to do next, all the while keeping them
delighted in the present. Here’s a key: If yours is like most
companies, it probably has hundreds, or even thousands,
of employees whose job it is to work with customers every
day – marketing to them, selling them things, taking their
orders, providing service, answering their questions. What
if these employees had better tools and processes to proactively address what customers are telling them? And what
if they were always armed with the insight of their best
fellow employees?
We’d like to suggest that your solution is in your CRM
business practices. Business practices? You thought that
was software. Well, the right CRM software helps you
empower your employees to continuously improve how you
do business and enable your business to be more responsive
to the opportunities that appear in front of you. By looking past CRM as an operational tool to CRM as a total management tool, you can allow your employees to unleash the
power of the information. They can know more about their
customers and they can tailor products and services to
specifically solve customers’ unique problems. They can recognize opportunities otherwise unrecognizable. In addition
to providing operational customer excellence, CRM can be
the enabler of more creativity and speed for your business
in this Customer-driven Age
Dick Wolven, SVP
Applications Businesses, Oracle Japan
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 55
lorem ipsum / by lorem ipsum
Advertising Agencies
I&S BBDO
Tel: 03-6221-8585 Fax: 03-6221-8791
www.isbbdo.co.jp
Our mission is to make I&S BBDO the first
Japanese advertising agency to become a truly
integrated partner in a worldwide network of
advertising and marketing communications
companies. We will accomplish this by combining the I&S knowledge and experience regarding
Japanese companies and culture with the global
resources and experience of BBDO. Our primary
focus will be to provide strategic brand planning
that leads to creative, impactful and effective selling messages for clients seeking to capitalize on
both local business growth and opportunities of
globalization.
Our services:
• Branding and marketing communications, consultation and execution
• Strategic planning services – Consumer insight
search, R&D, Planning of marketing communications and strategies
• Integrated media services – Planning and buying of all media for marketing communications,
including national TV networks, radio, newspapers, magazines
• Creation and implementation of new media for
original marketing communications
• Diversified promotion and communications services – Sales promotions, Event planning and
execution, PR, Interactive communications,
Store design and floor planning, and all of the
Non-mass media-based marketing solutions.
For more detailed information, please contact
[email protected].
Customer Relationship
Management
Avaya Japan Ltd.
Tel: 0120-223-911 (toll free)
www.avaya.com
www.avaya.co.jp
Avaya is a leading global provider of businesscommunications applications, systems and
services focused entirely on serving the needs
of large to small businesses.
Our unique combination of communications
56 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
applications, systems and services helps
simplify complex communications, and work
with existing technologies from other vendors,
enabling customers to unlock value and
potential from their network. By embedding
communications into the very business
processes of an enterprise, we help to improve
the way organizations work – making people
more productive, processes more intelligent
and customers more satisfied.
Drawing on a rich heritage of enterprise
telephony and mastery of IP-based
technologies, we help customers to grow
revenue, lower risk, reduce costs and
achieve superior business results.
As a leader in IP telephony, we help customers realize business value and create competitive advantages by driving the integration of
communications and business applications
across any network and device.
Through our innovative technology and
services, customers can integrate IP-telephony
solutions with existing communications investments to enhance and evolve their networks
and communications applications along their
own path and at their own pace.
NYX Proximity I&S BBDO Group
Member of the Proximity Worldwide
Agency Network
Aligned to BBDO Worldwide
Tel: 03-6221-8004 Fax: 03-6221-8810
E-mail: [email protected]
www.nyx-proximity.co.jp
Being one of the biggest direct-marketing, relationship-building agencies in Japan and part of
the Proximity Worldwide agency network, NYX
Proximity aims to provide the best solutions for
our clients through offering an extensive variety
of services: Digital Marketing, Mobile Marketing,
E-mail Marketing, CRM and Direct Marketing, Data
Analysis/Segmentation, Public Relations, Media
Planning & Buying, Sales Promotion and Events.
As part of the I&S BBDO Group, we offer the
full range of Integrated brand communications.
Aligned to BBDO Worldwide, Proximity Worldwide
is now represented in 46 countries with nearly
2,000 staff, and has been ranked as the top
agency network by the Won Report in 2003 and
2004 successively.
NYX Proximity is in the business of behaviorchanging ideas. As the business world continues
to move at a fast clip, we need to ensure that our
ideas keep up with this fast-changing environment. Thus, we seek breakthrough ideas that will
make a real difference to your business, and not
just an incremental one.
Proximity Thinking tools, consisting of
GrowthWorks, ProfitWorks, MappingWorks and
MindWorks, enable us to get the job done.
For further information, please contact us at
[email protected]
Oracle Corporation Japan
Oracle Direct: 0120-155-096
www.oracle.com (English)
www.oracle.co.jp (Japanese)
Oracle CRM is the world’s leading solution for
maximizing the value of your customer relationships. Oracle’s critical mass in CRM comes
from the combination of the world’s leading
customer management product lines from
Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Oracle. With
an unmatched range of products, industry
expertise and deployment options, Oracle is the
right choice for CRM.
ORACLE IS THE LEADER IN CUSTOMER
RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
With over 4.6 million live users, Oracle’s CRM
product line is the most comprehensive, bestselling and most-implemented CRM solution
available today.
The latest Gartner study shows Oracle
(including Siebel) as the software provider in
60% of CRM projects implemented in 2005.
Compared with SAP in a survey of actual CRM
implementations, Gartner ranks Oracle as the
market-share leader in 27 (82%) of 33 industries surveyed. Not only does Oracle hold the
dominant position in the CRM market at the
moment, we are working to grow our customers’ CRM investment with over $1.8 billion
invested in ongoing research and development
last fiscal year alone.
Oracle is dedicated to providing Enterprise
software products, solutions, consulting,
support services and training for IT-systems
development to the Japan market. With over
1,502 employees, Oracle Corporation Japan has
been listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Tier
1 since 2000.
Corporate Sales Training
3Rock Consulting
Tel: 03-5465-0367 Fax: 03-5465-0368
E-mail: [email protected]
www.3rockconsulting.com
Marketing & CRM | Special Advertising Section
by lorem ipsum / lorem ipsum
Do you need to improve your strategic marketing
capabilities? Have you lost your customer-focused
culture? Do you want to build a systematic
approach to driving innovation? 3Rock can help
you drive growth by challenging your people to
think and act differently through an engaging
mix of competitive team simulations; concept
discussions; and useful, take-away tools that can
be immediately applied to the workplace. Our
“action-learning” workshops focus on developing professional managers by doing, not just by
listening. Participants develop the ability to think
strategically, making quick decisions in uncertain
environments, in order to take full advantage of
new market opportunities and changing environments. Our consultants have extensive experience
and proven results in building competencies over
a range of B2C and B2B industries in our focus
areas of strategy, marketing, value innovation
and project management. With proprietary and
best-of-class simulation software and decisionmaking tools from the U.S. and Europe, our
training develops creative, strategic leadership
and logical thinking skills that will enable your
managers and executives to function confidently
and successfully in the global marketplace. Public
and customized in-house workshops are available
in both Japanese and English. Call for a demo.
Forum Japan Co., Ltd.
Tel: 03-3350-0912 Fax: 03-3350-0937
www.forum-japan.com
For more than three decades, The Forum
Corporation has been helping Fortune 1000 clients to address their most important business
challenges with learning solutions.
Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Forum has
offices in 10 cities around the world, including
four in Asia. As a member of the International
Institute for Research group, Forum assists
around 600,000 business executives every year
by providing them – through a systemized
approach adapted to each company’s particular
needs – the knowledge and skills that enable
them to drive performance to new highs.
Recognized internationally for the quality of
our services, Forum works with clients in the
key areas of:
• Building leadership talent
• Improving the effectiveness of a sales force
• Creating customer experiences that build
loyalty
Forum believes that successful execution of
a corporate strategy depends heavily on the
actions and behavior (not just intentions) of
the people who make up a company. Failure to
invest in the staff is a failure to invest in the
future of the company.
We also pride ourselves on delivering
insightful solutions and learning strategies
that fit individual organization’s needs and
produce a measurable improvement in business.
Education, to Forum, should never be placed
in the cost column.
Executing Strategy
PM-Global K.K.
Tel: 03-5159-2151 Fax: 03-5159-2152
www.pm-global.com
PM-Global provides business performance solutions and services via our four professional services groups:
• Program Management Optimization (PMO)
• Governance & Compliance (G&C)
• Business Continuity Management (BCM)
• Business Performance Management (BPM)
Also, we help expand our customers’ skills
inventories through knowledge-transfer workshops and OJT engagements.
Our long-term relationships under service-level
agreements and fixed-price fee schedules deliver
high-quality, cost-effective and responsive services, while maintaining strict adherence to global
management standards, and employing proven
process disciplines and performance metrics.
Program management has become the core
competency for any organization leveraging
resources to bring maximum profitability and
success across the whole enterprise. Program
Managers with enterprise-wide responsibilities must optimize the return from organizational resources: Capital, People, Process and
Infrastructure.
Reducing risk and creating project success are
the focus of our consulting services. We employ
our proprietary business solutions in operational
areas of Business Integration & Improvement,
Business Reengineering, Change Management and
Business Intelligence.
With over five decades of global experience,
we have become a leading professional-services
group helping organizations in Japan, China and
the U.S. increase profitability and reduce time-tomarket. Our internationally certified project managers and business specialists provide integrated
multilingual and multicultural skills to overcome
the challenges of our customers’ emerging global
business operations.
Government Relations
Asia Strategy
Tel: 03-3506-0013 Fax: 03-3593-0762
E-mail: [email protected]
www.asia-strategy.biz
You may have invested considerable time and sensible research into forming a strategic marketing
plan for Japan. Yet, you can remain vulnerable to
the competitive threats and blind to the business
opportunities created by shifts in public policy.
Nowhere does this impact your marketing success
more than when it comes to government market
development, whether you are offering products
or services to public sector-related consumers
in the healthcare, finance and banking, express
delivery, telecommunications, information services, or energy and power-generation sectors.
We bring an unparalleled understanding
of the interplay among the groups impacting
public policymaking – from business executives,
bureaucrats, trade and business-association
officials, to politicians, academia, consumer
advocacy groups and the media. Our management consultant’s appreciation of the strategic
business-planning process helps you achieve bottom-line marketing results that address not only
the interests of your stakeholders, but also the
demands of your shareholders.
Our experience extends over a wide cross-section and includes many of the world’s largest
industrial and service-provider corporations, globally the best-in-class in their fields. The high level
of satisfaction and confidence in our advice is
measurable by the fact that more than 80% of our
work involves clients served before.
Market Research
Carter Associates K.K.
Tel: 03-5778-1601 Fax: 03-5778-1602
E-mail: [email protected]
www.carterassociates.net
Carter Associates is a research agency known for
providing actionable information and evidencebased consultancy.
We answer our clients’ business challenges
by advising on their most profitable strategic
options, showing them how to set appropriate
and measurable management objectives, and
using research-driven insight to help them to
achieve their goals.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 57
Marketing & CRM | Special Advertising Section
Our scope of consultancy includes advertising, branding, and stakeholder and market-entry
assignments.
Led by Australian market researcher, Dominic
Carter, a leading expert on the Japanese consumer
market, Carter Associates counts among its clients
some of the top multinationals in Japan.
JMRN
(Japan Market Resource Network)
Tel: 03-5464-1990 Fax: 03-5464-1991
E-mail: [email protected]
www.jmrn.com
JMRN is an American-owned and operated market
research company that specializes in qualitative
research – an especially powerful marketing tool
that plays an important role in the development
of successful marketing strategies.
For example, when considering new product introductions or product repositioning,
qualitative research can provide an overview
of customer attitudes and behavior, as well
as identify underlying perceptions that could
negatively influence customer acceptance levels.
It’s also excellent for generating fresh ideas for
new products, advertising or brand positioning.
Often, the nuances of customer attitudes and
perceptions can provide the stimulus for new
approaches and feed into a formal idea-generation process. Consequently, qualitative research
is an invaluable first step for screening products
or marketing concepts before committing them
to final development and market introduction.
Typical methodologies employed by JMRN
include B2B and B2C focus-group discussion studies, in-depth one-to-one interviews and ethnographic techniques that combine observation with
interviewing.
“Most significantly, we apply qualitative techniques pioneered in the U.S. and Europe that are
routinely rejected by local research companies
as being too progressive for Japan,” says JMRN
President Debbie Howard. “Multinationals deserve
the same qualitative research capabilities in Japan
that they have available elsewhere. JMRN delivers
those capabilities.”
Marketing & Advertising
Recruitment Specialists
Optia Partners K.K.
Tel: 03-5549-9850 Fax: 03-5570-5707
www.optiapartners.com
58 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
Optia Partners is a market leader in executive
search in Japan. We currently have over 40
staff covering all major industries, including
Financial Services, Advertising & Consumer Goods,
Information Technology, Pharmaceutical, Medical,
HR & Accounting, Micro Devices and Industrial &
Manufacturing.
Our clients are some of the most reputable and
diversified firms in the world, including Fortune
500 companies and newly established firms seeking mid-level to senior-level bilingual professionals in Japan.
At Optia Partners we employ a team approach
and emphasize industry specialization for each
of our teams and individual consultants. Each of
our practice groups is led by an experienced and
highly successful Partner with a proven track
record, giving us over 40 years of accumulated
experience in the local market. We have executed
hundreds of searches, and understand that sourcing and retaining capable talent is of paramount
importance to our client’s success in Japan. We
are well positioned to offer both retained and
contingency-based searches that can be tailored
to fit a client’s particular needs.
For additional information on how we can
provide the solution to your hiring needs,
please contact: Max Knight, Director: mknight@
optiapartners.com; or Nick Germantsis, Director:
[email protected]
Robert Half International
Tel: 03-5219-6633 Fax: 03-5219-6634
E-mail: [email protected]
www.roberthalf.jp
Founded in 1948, Robert Half International
(NYSE symbol: RHI) is the world’s first and
largest specialized recruitment firm and a
member of the S&P 500 Index. RHI is a recognized leader in professional consulting
and recruitment services, and is the parent
company of Protiviti®, a global independent
internal audit and business and technology
risk consulting firm. With over 400 locations
throughout Asia, North America, Europe,
Australia and New Zealand, our dedication to
outstanding service knows no boundaries.
Built on a foundation of ethics and a dedication to discretion, we provide expedient solutions to unique and specific recruitment needs.
We offer five specialized recruitment resources:
• Robert Half Finance & Accounting provides
accounting and financial recruitment services at all levels.
• Robert Half Financial Services Group is dedi-
cated to the special needs of banking and
financial-service companies.
• Robert Half Management Resources provides
senior financial professionals on an interim
project or contract basis.
• Robert Half Technology places IT professionals in a wide range of fields, including Web
development, systems integration, network
security and technical support.
• Robert Half Sales & Marketing provides qualified professionals for sales, marketing and
advertising positions across all industries.
Contact us to discuss your recruitment and
staffing needs with a Robert Half recruiting
specialist.
Media
The Daily Yomiuri
Tel: 03-3216-8866
Fax: 03-3216-4145
Free Phone: 0120-4311-59
www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy
The Daily Yomiuri, Japan’s No. 1 English-language newspaper in terms of ABC-audited
home-delivery circulation, provides a nationwide international readership with a broad
range of domestic news stories, features, analyses and commentaries as the English-language
medium of Japan’s leading vernacular newspaper, The Yomiuri Shimbun.
The Daily Yomiuri also runs up-to-date information from abroad. In addition to international news agencies, we have access to a number of influential newspapers and magazines
in Asia, Europe and North America. We enjoy
partnerships with the Washington Post, Los
Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and the Times,
as well as all leading English-language newspapers in Asia via the Asia News Network.
In addition, The Daily Yomiuri, the official newspaper of the 2007 IAAF World
Championships in Athletics in Osaka, provides
extensive reporting on a wide range of sports.
A readership survey shows that nearly 70%
of non-Japanese readers have lived in Japan
for more than five years, proving that The Daily
Yomiuri is a daily must for the majority of the
non-Japanese community in Japan.
Photos Julian Ryall
The invasion beach seen from Mt. Suribachi, and (inset) ID tags left by visiting U.S. Marines
paying respects to fallen colleagues.
The Other Side of
Iwo Jima
T
he slivers of metal catch
the sun and move slightly
in the breeze. Cpl. L. Carter
has left one behind, hanging on
its chain over the peeling white
monument. So, too, have Sgt. K.
Chavez and Pfc. G. Harmer. Each
of the dog tags has a different
name, rank and number, but all are
punched with the letters “USMC.”
To the men of the United States
Marine Corps, where I stand is
the holy-of-holies. Hundreds of
marines have left their individual
calling cards draped over a memorial that is at the peak of Mount
Suribachi, and marks the spot
where those before them in the
corps raised the Stars and Stripes
on February 23, 1945, a moment
captured most famously by AP
photographer Joe Rosenthal.
60 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
The 169m peak dominates the
island and also, most strategically to the Japanese defenders
of 61 years ago, the invasion
beach where more than 71,000
U.S. troops came ashore.
U.S. commanders expected
Japanese resistance to break
down within four days. Instead,
it took the marines nearly four
weeks – at a price of 28,000 casualties, including 6,821 fatalities
– before the fanatical defenders
were overcome. Just 1,023 of the
21,000 Japanese troops defending the island were taken alive.
Following the end of WWII, Iwo
Jima returned to being an insignificant volcanic rock in the Pacific,
1,250km from Tokyo, on the way
to nowhere. Former residents could
not return because of undetonated
ordnance still littering the battlefield; the only human presence
was a military one (both Japan
and the U.S.), as well as an occasional party of returning veterans.
Because the victor in the Pacific
theater had been primarily the
U.S., the history of what happened
on Iwo Jima was always told from
the U.S. perspective. That is, until
a macho icon of film and Academy
Award-winning director decided
he wanted to retell the tale.
Initially, Clint Eastwood only
planned to make one movie, based
on the best-selling book, Flags of
Our Fathers (Bantam, 2000), written by James Bradley (with Ron
Powers), which tells the story of
his father, John, and five other
U.S. soldiers who raised the flag
atop Mount Suribachi. But once
By Julian Ryall / Classic Journeys
A helmet with entry and exit holes is next to a warped LP, scorched
documents, china bowls, and corroded bayonets and bugles.
t
SNAPSHOT
u
Iwo Jima (Sulfur Island) is part of
the Volcano Islands in the southern
Ogasawara Islands about 1200 km south
of Tokyo. Covering about 821 km², the
biggest feature is Mt. Suribachi, a dormant vent 166m high. Flat and featureless
with no civilian residents, it is a part of
Tokyo City and Prefecture. Visitors need
special permission, with former islanders and the bereaved allowed for war
memorial services. The U.S. Navy uses the
Maritime Self-Defense Force naval airbase
there for night carrier landing practice.
on the island, Eastwood realized
that his original approach would
only be telling half the story.
“It is not about winning or losing, but mostly about the interrupted lives of young people,
and losing their lives before their
prime,” the director told reporters at a press conference in Tokyo
announcing the project. “These
men deserve to be seen and heard
from ... Those soldiers deserve
a certain amount of respect.”
With the blessing of Japanese
veterans’ groups, who consider the
12km2 island to be sacred ground
because of the remains of many
fallen comrades, Eastwood cast
Academy Award past-nominee Ken
Watanabe as General Tadamichi
Kuribayashi and set about filming Letters from Iwo Jima as the
companion piece to Flags.
“It was a very moving experience, to walk around Iwo Jima,”
Eastwood said, adding that he
wanted the movies to be tributes
to the thousands who fought in
what one U.S. veteran recalls as a
“sulphurous, crater-filled hellhole.”
Released in the U.S. on
December 22, Letters surpassed
expectations – and so had Flags
even two months after it was
first screened – by being selected
as the Best Movie of the Year
by the Los Angeles Film Critics’
Association and nominated as
Best Foreign Language Film by
the Golden Globe Awards (along
with double honors for Eastwood
as nominated Best Director for
each film). It has also been ranked
in the top 10 titles of the year by
the American Film Institute; and
with the Oscars approaching on
February 25, there are growing
expectations that the industry is
going to reward Eastwood for
a movie that is all in Japanese.
Letters took in more than ¥200
million on its opening day, and is
projected to earn some ¥5 billion.
Regardless of what Hollywood
thinks of the movies, Iwo Jima
is an island where many places
remain off-limits because of WWII
debris. In a small museum close to
the Japan Air Self-Defense Force’s
runway, a rusted Japanese heavy
machine-gun stands on its tripod,
beside the skeleton of a flamethrower’s rig, found only earlier
this month in the low jungle
that covers much of the island. A
helmet with entry and exit holes
is next to a warped LP, scorched
documents, china bowls, and
corroded bayonets and bugles.
Beyond the air-base perimeters,
much of the tear-shaped island
is similarly like a museum. The
northeast sector was where remnants of the Imperial Japanese
Army made their final stand,
fighting from well-concealed
bunkers that resisted artillery
and naval bombardment, and
thus required the U.S. Marines
to take them, one by one.
Tenzan Cave proved to be
the last foothold for organized
Japanese resistance; the complex
incorporated two large-caliber
naval guns. A few hundred meters
to the north – a distance traversed in minutes today, but in
those final days at a huge cost to
human life – is the Japanese Navy’s
underground headquarters and
the Imuka-gou hospital cave.
The cave entrance is overgrown,
and a clutch of sake and water
bottles serving as offerings stand
just inside the mouth. Ceramic
bowls, canisters and fragments
of glass and metal stand against
one wall. Holes drilled into the
ceiling to let in air are choked
with undergrowth. The cave
extends a mere 50m inside, yet
the temperature rises steadily
due to the superheated gases
below the floor. The cave actually
wasn’t reopened until 1984; it had
contained the mummified remains
of 54 Japanese service personnel.
Past a monument to the 82 residents of the island who had died
fighting alongside the military during the invasion, I see the remains
of half a dozen reinforced-concrete
ships that were towed to the island
to be sunk off Chidoriga Beach,
providing an artificial breakwater. Inland, the nose of a crashed
Japanese bomber had been
encased in concrete, serving as the
strongpoint for a machine gunner.
Yet, it is Suribachi that will
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 61
Classic Journeys
A rusting artillery piece still trains its muzzle along the invasion beaches of Iwo Jima.
forever be the symbol of this pivotal battle. At its base is a 14cm
artillery piece inside the remains
of a bunker, one of dozens that
protected this strategic key to controlling the island – and had to be
overcome by U.S. Marines as they
inched their way up the mountain.
Suribachi is scarred with 20km of
underground tunnels, providing
1,500 well-concealed firing points.
The Japanese plan was not to fire
on the American forces as they
came ashore, but rather wait for the
marines to lay completely exposed
on the beach below and to the east.
Grainy television images show
the first marines jogging ashore
unopposed and officers indicating with flags the route for opentopped Jeeps to take. Precisely one
hour after the landing had commenced, the Japanese defenders
opened fire from positions that the
American commanders wrongly
assumed had been destroyed in a
three-day aerial and ship-artillery
barrage leading up to the landing.
Japanese gunfire raked the exposed
beaches, leaving 2,420 fallen
marines on the grey, volcanic sand.
The story of the flag being raised
on top of Suribachi is a legend
within the Marine Corps. The photo
that Rosenthal took was later
turned into the famous monument
to the regiment in Washington,
D.C., even though it was not the
first flag to go up that morning. The
previous Stars and Stripes was considered too small, so a party of five
marines and a navy corpsman were
dispatched to replace it. As the flag
caught the breeze, troops still on
the beach cheered and warships off
the coast sounded their klaxons.
It had taken four days to get
the flag flying, but this would
be followed by weeks of fierce,
often hand-to-hand fighting, that
would claim three of the men in
Rosenthal’s picture. The fall of
Suribachi did, however, make the
eventual outcome inevitable.
The remains of concrete
blockhouses, cracked and pockmarked, are still visible amid the
undergrowth surrounding the
peak. As well as the Marines’
monument, there are memorials to Japan’s fallen soldiers. The
south side slopes away steeply
into a smoldering crater, tinged
yellow by emissions of sulphur.
“The role I played was very
hard,” Watanabe said in an interview recently in Tokyo. “When
I saw the island from the plane
for the first time, I remembered
what it had been like when we
had been filming the battle scenes
earlier – and I only stopped crying when we finally landed.”
He added, “It has left an
amazing impression on me.
It’s a terribly sad place.”
After reading correspondence
from Gen. Kuribayashi written
on the island to his family on the
mainland, Watanabe made numerous suggestions to Eastwood and
the scriptwriters in order to better
capture the emotions of the military
commander. The result, Watanabe
believes, shows the general to
have been thinking of his family,
yet steeled to fight – possessing a
good understanding of his adversaries acquired as a military attaché
in the U.S. during the 1920s.
“Eastwood wanted to show the
struggles of this man,” Watanabe
said. “It is not just that he is a military man, but through the lens we
see how men in these situations
thought, functioned and lived.”
That Gen. Kuribayashi carried out
his duty is unquestioned: the U.S.
forces were substantially delayed,
even though Japan could no longer sustain the broader front. The
general’s remains have never been
recovered, and it is yet a mystery
whether he died in action or by his
own hand. The present commander
of the island, Capt. Tomonori
Kudo, has a movie poster of Letters
hanging just outside his office.
Julian Ryall is a freelance writer based
in Tokyo.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 63
Find Your Distance Potential
O
ne of the keys to playing
golf in this era is to hit the
ball long. As courses continue to be designed with greater
distances between tee and hole,
and a more demanding layout,
hitting the ball with power allows
players the best chance to keep
their scores low. Although Tiger
Woods has possibly the greatest
short game in the history of the
game, he also holds a huge advantage over other pros in consistently
64 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
being ranked among the longest
hitters throughout his career. So,
how can you hit it longer?
Quite simply, there are two
keys to hitting the ball long: solid
contact and swing speed. Hitting
the ball in the center of the club
face, with maximum speed, allows
you to send the ball as far as you
can. This, combined with the latest in club and ball technology,
helps you find your true distance
potential.
The first thing you should
determine is whether or not your
current swing hits the ball solidly.
The easiest test involves face tape,
which can be purchased at most
golf shops. Place a strip on your
club face before hitting a shot.
The ball should make a mark on
the tape indicating your contact
point. Ideally, you will find that
you are consistently finding the
center of the club face. That said,
make sure you test both woods
and irons, as you want solid contact with all clubs.
If you find, on the other hand,
that your ball contact is not as
solid as you would like, look at
two things to improve your swing.
One, make sure your posture at
setup is in an athletic position that
is maintained throughout your
swing. Good posture will help you
swing the club around your body,
consistently “on plane,” which
leads to club-centered hits.
Once you are satisfied with
your contact point, the next key
to distance is trying to accelerate
your swing. In a golf swing, there
are three sources of power that,
when combined, will contribute
to swinging the club faster by
supporting the action of the club,
thereby allowing for a consistent
swing to generate power: (1)
proper wrist action; (2) an arm
motion that puts the club in position throughout the swing; and (3)
a powerful body pivot.
In addition, if you feel you are
© The New Yorker Collection 1958 Richard Decker from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
By Steve Dahlby / Right on Course
making solid contact and are effectively applying your power sources,
make sure your equipment suits
your swing. Clubs and balls that are
fitted specifically to your particular
swing will probably give you an
extra few yards as well.
Learning to hit the ball longer is
a very fun part of the improvement
process. Examine your current
swing and determine your needs.
With a little practice, you will
hopefully add a few more yards to
your game.
Remember, if you do hit
the ball farther, you will have
shorter approach shots to the
pin. Therefore, it is valuable to
work hard, at the same time, on
short-game distance control so
you can take full advantage of
your improved distance game.
This should take pressure off your
putting game and allow you to
improve your scoring average.
Steve Dahlby is director of instruction
at Troon North Golf Club, Scottsdale,
Arizona.
飛距離はまだまだ伸ばせる
今の時代、
ゴルフ競技のひとつの鍵は飛距離
である。
ティーとグリーン間の距離はますま
す長く、
レイアウトも難しく設計されるように
なっているので、
ボールを力強く飛ばすこと
ができれば良いスコアをキープするチャンス
が生まれる。
タイガー・ウッズのショートホー
ルの腕前はおそらくゴルフ史上最高のものだ
が、
飛距離についても彼はこれまでずっと代
表的なロングヒッターのひとりに数えられて
おり、
これは他のプロと競う上で大きな武器
となっている。
ではどうしたら飛距離を伸ば
せるだろうか？
簡単に言うと、
ボールを飛ばすにはソリッド
・コンタクトとスウィング･スピードという　２
つの重要なポイントがある。
クラブフェースの
中心で、
最大のスピードでヒットすれば、
ボー
ルは可能なかぎり遠くまで飛ばすことができ
る。
これに、
最新技術を生かしたクラブとボー
ルを組み合わせれば、
自分がまだまだボール
を飛ばせるということが分かるだろう。
まず初めにチェックしなければならないの
は、
自分の今のスウィングがボールをソリッ
ドに捉えているかどうかである。
それを知る
には、
たいていのゴルフショップで売っている
フェーステープを使うとよい。
ショットの前に
このテープをクラブフェースに貼り付けてボ
ールを打てば、
テープ上に自分のコンタクト・
ポイントが印される。
理想的なのは、
常にクラ
ブフェースの中心にマークが付くことである。
これを必ずウッドとアイアンの両方で試し、
どのクラブでもソリッド・コンタクトができる
ようにする。
ボールのコンタクトが思ったほどソリッド
でない場合は、
スウィングを矯正するのに次
の２つのことを行うとよい。
まず、
セットアッ
プ体勢がスウィング中も崩れることのない
安定したフォームになっているか。
姿勢が正
しければクラブのスウィング軌道は一定し、
ボールを常にクラブの中心で捉えることが
できる。
コンタクトで満足の行く結果が得られた
ら、
飛距離を伸ばす次のポイントはスウィン
グ・スピードを速めることである。
ゴルフ・スウ
ィングには、
(1) 正しいリスト
（手首）
の動き、
（2）
スウィング中のクラブの位置を保つ腕
の振り、
そして (3) しっかりとした身体の回
転軸、
という３つのパワーソースがある。
その
３つが上手く組み合わさると、
振り下ろすク
ラブに強い力が伝わってスウィング・スピード
が速くなる。
さらに、
もし自分はソリッド・コンタクトが
できておりパワーソースも効果的に使えてい
ると思ったら、
今度は道具がスウィングに合
っているかどうかを確かめるとよい。
スウィ
ングに合ったクラブとボールを使用すれば、
おそらくあと数ヤード、
飛距離を伸ばすこと
ができる。
ゴルフ上達の過程において、
飛距離を出せ
るようになるのは楽しいものである。
今の自
分のスウィングをチェックし、
何が必要かを
判断しよう。
少し練習すれば、
飛距離はきっ
と伸びるはずだ。
ボールを遠くに飛ばせば、
ピンまでのアプ
ローチ・ショットはそれだけ短くなる。
だから
飛距離が伸びた分のメリットを最大限に生
かすために、
アプローチ・ショットの距離感を
つかむことも同時に一生懸命練習して欲し
い。
アプローチが良くなればパットのプレッ
シャーもなくなり、
平均スコアは確実に良く
なるだろう。
スティーブ・ダールビイ　主任指導員
アリゾナ州スコッツデール　トゥルーンノース・ゴルフクラブ
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 65
Luxury Living in Tokyo | Special Advertising Section
lorem ipsum / by lorem ipsum
Luxury Living
in Tokyo
D
oing business in Japan is more than pursuing
opportunities, meeting face to face with your
clients here. It’s also a whole new way of life,
within a community. Subsequently, like in any genuine
global marketplace, there are choices to be made
regarding where you live, how you live and what you
experience while overseas. The major metropolises,
especially central Tokyo, provide spacious housing,
luxurious serviced apartments and multi-star hotels that
have state-of-the-art capabilities and interiors that meet
your need to get away from the urban hustle and bustle.
Body, mind and soul are catered to, whether at 24/7
bilingually staffed reception desks or in an onsite fitness
center, spa and traditional Japanese garden.
To help you make the ideal match-up between your
particular needs and your home away from home, expert
relocation specialists and well-positioned realtors provide
the ultimate in service based on personal international
experience and a commitment to detail. Most critically,
their focus on your needs extends beyond the time
you’ve settled into your new abode. Private membership
clubs with facilities and organized activities/events
addressing your dining, social, recreational and
educational preferences are truly an enriching haven
for the entire family. Because Narita remains Asia’s
hub, resorts and tropical paradises are just hours’ away,
providing an enticing respite even over a weekend, with
their first-class hotels and facilities, and clubs on prime
private beach property that provide accommodations,
well-run outdoor activities and dining on premise.
While all the aforementioned can come across as
pure hype – or self-promotion – bear in mind that the
dynamics of doing business in Japan requires such
attention. Furthermore, the urban population, such as
in the capital city, has been on the rise. The Ministry
of Internal Affairs and Communication, through its
Statistics Bureau & Statistical Research and Training
Institute, provide why urban planning by the private
sector is crucial. While the overall population figure of
127.76 million released in the 2005 Population Census
was below the 2004 estimate of 127.78 million, Tokyo’s
population remains the largest among the 47 prefectures
at 12.57 million people – followed by Osaka, Kanagawa
66 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
(Kawasaki and Yokohama), Aichi and Saitama. These
five prefectures now account for 34.8% of the total
population. Tokyo has a population density of 5,748
persons per square kilometer – almost 17 times the
national average. Perhaps most telling is the statistic
that the largest single city was the 23 wards of central
Tokyo, with 8.48 million people; this was followed in
decreasing order by Yokohama City (3.58 million), Osaka
City (2.63 million) and Nagoya City (2.21 million).
Providing luxury living, therefore, becomes all the more
imperative for those calling Japan their second home.
Tokyo certainly reflects the country’s dynamics in
both substance and appearance. The skyline continues
to be redefined by new multi-purpose high-rises that
include serviced apartments, office space, malls and
globally branded hotels; stand-alone luxurious hotels;
and towers devoted exclusively to residential living.
Not only are the views from the rooms and guestrooms
breathtaking and panoramic, but also the interiors are
reflective of international standards shaped by Japanese
aesthetics. In living the good life here, you benefit from
the merging of function and form, worldly and ethereal
– West and the Orient.
David Umeda
Apartment Hotels
Sakura House Co., Ltd.
Tel: 03-5330-5250
Fax: 03-5330-5251
E-mail: [email protected]
www.sakura-house.com
Sakura group is one of the pioneers in exclusive foreign community accommodations,
from daily to monthly or yearly stays. If
longer than a month, visit our Web site and
search for your home among 123 locations
throughout Tokyo, Kanagawa and Saitama.
We offer four types of accommodations: selfcontained private apartment; guesthouse
with common kitchen, living room and bathroom with other tenants; 2-3 people share a
room; and dormitory beds. All rooms are furnished and can be rented for a period of one
month or more without any agent fee, key
money or a guarantor. Rents include utilities,
and are also payable by VISA/MasterCard.
Most rooms have a free Internet line. Our
Shinjuku office is open seven days a week.
If you are looking for daily accommodations, our friendly staff at Sakura Hotel
welcome you at Kanda-Jimbocho, which is
just a two-minute walk from Jimbocho subway station, convenient for both business
and sightseeing purposes. Visit www.sakurahotel.co.jp, or call +81-(0)3-3261-3939 for
reservations.
Our newly opened over-160-bed Sakura
Hostel in Asakusa is ideal for a single traveler or a group of 100; our friendly staff
can help plan your trip and include you
in our fun events and parties. For reservations, visit www.sakura-hostel.co.jp, or call
+81-(0)3-3847-8111.
Serviced
Apartments
Apartments 33
Takanawa Executive Suite
Tel: 03-3445-2811
Fax: 03-3445-2809
www.apartments33.co.jp
Apartments 33 offers a captivating view of
greenery set in the heart of Tokyo’s business
district, Shinagawa.
With 14 types of rooms offering five
design concept variations, our rooms reflect
the diverse lifestyles that define Japan’s
capital city. We can fulfill the requirements
to suit your particular lifestyle, from an
executive’s business status to a family’s key
gathering place.
Apartments 33’s professional staff has
our residents’ best interests and comforts in
mind, and we value open communication, as
well as offering a home atmosphere.
We strive to make all residents feel welcome and a part of the community, offering a
complimentary cocktail party twice a month,
allowing neighbors of different nationalities
to get to know each other. Please come and
have a look at Apartments 33.
We want to make your stay memorable and
comfy.
MORI LIVING
(Mori Building Co., Ltd.)
Tel: 0120-52-2481
E-mail: [email protected]
www.moriliving.com
Mori Building Co., Ltd. prides itself on its
long experience in Tokyo, where the firm
operates 14 residences, including four serviced apartment properties. Most are located
in Minato Ward. Included among them
are Tokyo landmarks Roppongi Hills and
Omotesando Hills.
Mori Building residences and apartments
are marketed under the MORI LIVING brand,
which, say company spokesmen, stands for
the highest standard of living in Tokyo. MORI
LIVING residences are typically surrounded
by greenery, and the highest levels of
earthquake resistance are combined with
state-of-the-art security systems to ensure
resident peace of mind. Mori Building takes
special pride in its residents from all around
the world, and in staff who offer the highest
standard of skills and hospitality.
A MORI LIVING neighborhood is “a city
within a city,” with residences, workplaces,
schools, entertainment, shopping,
recreation and dining facilities all within
easy walking distance. The community
includes prominent business and opinion
leaders. The friendships you make, and
the new ideas and possibilities you
encounter are the MORI LIVING experience
you are likely to treasure the most.
MORI LIVING, Bringing new ideas to life in
Tokyo.
Space Design Inc.
Tel: 0120-710-677
www.bureau.co.jp
Space Design is the market leader in the
Tokyo Serviced Apartment Industry. Our
conveniently situated, fully furnished apartments give you the privacy of your own residence in this bustling metropolis.
From the moment you contact us, your
needs and wishes will be taken care of. Our
friendly, vibrant, multilingual service staff
will always support your extended stay in
Tokyo.
We offer 18 buildings, more than 1,300
apartments in the heart of Tokyo. The rent
of furnished apartments includes utility fee,
linen service, housekeeping service and 24hour telephone team support service.
Please feel free to contact us. We take pleasure in providing prompt replies according to
your needs and timeframe.
Healthcare Services
Magnolia Skincare Clinic
Tel: 03-3486-7855
E-mail: [email protected]
www.mg-clinic.com
We are proud to welcome you to our comfortable, professional and nurturing clinic.
Magnolia Skincare Clinic is a medical spa that
provides non-invasive cosmetic treatments for
both women and men.
We utilize cutting-edge equipment, including Intense Pulsed Light treatment, lasers
and injectable cosmetic treatments. In other
words, we offer scientifically proven medical
treatments for problems such as wrinkles, age
spots, unwanted hair, baldness, cellulite and
obesity. Furthermore, these treatments offer a
more lasting effect than an ordinary facial.
We place a strong emphasis on the safety
and comfort of our clients. That is, the
treatment we offer is not only effective,
but also reduces irritation and discomfort,
keeping pain to a minimum. We request that
you reserve a meeting prior to coming to
the clinic in order to arrange a 30-minute
consultation. This is to allow our cosmetic
dermatologist to provide an accurate problem
assessment and suitable advice for treatment.
Our staff are highly trained and professionally qualified.
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Laser hair removal (chests, abdomen, back,
face) is a particularly popular therapy among
men, who represent about 40% of our clients.
There are also many married couples who
receive treatment from us.
Our clinic is at 5F, No. 27 SY Bldg., 1-87 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, a very convenient
location.
Minamiaoyama Eye Clinic
Tel: 0120-89-3810 (Tokyo)
045-682-4411 (Yokohama)
092-283-5555 (Fukuoka)
E-mail: [email protected]
www.minamiaoyama.or.jp/en/english.html
Minamiaoyama Eye Clinic was established
in 1997 as the first refractive surgery center in Japan operated by board-certified
ophthalmologists.
We celebrated our 10th anniversary in
June, and are proud to have performed over
43,000 refractive procedures to date. We use
the most advanced techniques available in
corrective surgery to achieve optimum vision.
Our mission is to provide medical service of
the highest quality. All physicians are boardcertified ophthalmologists, and we continuously provide our nurses, and clinical and
laser technicians with training and research
assignments to maintain the highest quality.
Let us help you obtain the best Quality of
Vision. Also, if you need a referral to a foreign physician, we can assist you. Standard
LASIK surgery costs ¥504,000 for both eyes,
and we have a flexible payment method:
credit card, bank transfer or loan.
Contact us for an appointment by telephone or e-mail to schedule your examination and consultation, which are required
prior to the surgery.
Campaign for ACCJ Journal readers:
Minamiaoyama Eye Clinic will offer a
LASIK consultation and full eye exam for
¥2,500 (normally ¥5,000.)
We would like to express our gratitude to
everybody who helped us achieve our goal
and look forward to serving you!
Shane Clinic
Tel: 03-5439-9583 Fax: 03-5439-9584
E-mail: [email protected]
www.shane.md
Shane Clinic provides clinical services that
conform to international medical and ethical
68 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
standards. Our mission is to offer the excellence in medical care that is not routinely
available within the confines of the Japanese
system. We strive to achieve this by strictly
adhering to the style and quality of medicine
practiced in the United States.
Our director, Fred I. Shane, M.D., has been
serving the foreign community in Japan for
more than 40 years, with extensive experience in American-style family practice; adult
internal medicine; preventive care; gynecology; travel medicine, including immunizations for travelers; and pediatrics, including
child vaccinations. When necessary, we have
a comprehensive network of reliable specialists to whom we refer our patients.
Our second physician, Peter Y. Shane,
M.D., is a specialist certified by the American
Board of Internal Medicine, and is a member
of the American College of Rheumatology.
Dr. Shane specializes in joint diseases and
arthritic disorders. He is a Clinical Assistant
Professor at Tokyo Medical and Dental
University, Department of Medicine and
Rheumatology.
We see patients in both English and
Japanese, but we do not accept payment
by the Japanese National Health Insurance
system. Please feel free to call us for more
information, or visit our Web site.
Hotels & Resorts
Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at
Marunouchi
Tel: 03-5222-7222
Fax: 03-5222-1255
www.fourseasons.com/marunouchi
From its polished minimalist décor to
its prestigious gourmet restaurant, Four
Seasons offers a modern setting for intimate
social functions and private parties – right
by Tokyo Station. The quiet luxury in 57
guestrooms is complemented by Four Seasons
quality service.
• Superb location. The Hotel is at the doorstep of Tokyo Station, with direct links to
Narita Airport and major cities in Japan.
Minutes from Otemachi, Marunouchi and
the Ginza.
• Distinctive design and high-tech
accommodations. Our 57 meticulously
appointed guestrooms all come with 42”
plasma TV, high-speed Internet &
wireless and videos-on-demand.
• Four Seasons service. Warm Japanese
hospitality complements legendary Four
Seasons service – consistent, highly
personalized. Staff are completely
bilingual, making it easy for guests to
communicate.
• Exceptional dining experiences. The hotel’s
EKKI BAR & GRILL restaurant offers highly
distinctive “Contemporary New York
Cooking,” top-quality cuisine in a dramatic
environment.
• Meetings and Events. Two handsomely
designed function rooms offer an ideal
venue for meetings, corporate events
or private dining. State-of the art
technology, including remote multifunctioned A/V system, with dedicated
support staff.
Hyatt Regency Kyoto
Tel: 075-541-3210
E-mail: [email protected]
www.hyattregencykyoto.com
The Hyatt Regency Kyoto will celebrate
its 1st anniversary in March and offer an
exclusive package staying at the Regency
Executive Suite, which has contemporary
Japanese décor and overlooks a beautiful
Japanese Garden.
Enjoy every moment of your luxurious
stay, starting with our welcoming tradition
of serving Japanese green tea in a Japanese
tatami room with sunken kotatsu table,
followed by a healthy dinner accompanied
by a bottle of Japanese sake at Touzan, the
hotel’s Japanese restaurant. A traditional
Japanese breakfast is served either in your
room or at Touzan.
Validity Period: up to Thursday,
March 29, 2007.
Rates: from ¥105,105 (one person); from
¥125,160 (two persons).
The above tax-inclusive prices are subject
to a 10% service charge. Reservations are
subject to availability and must be made in
advance.
If you book the Suite package through our
reservation office directly, you may be interested in staying a 2nd night at Momiji-ya in
Takao, Kyoto, a 30min-drive from the heart
of Kyoto with additional charge. Momiji-ya is
one of the historical Japanese Inns founded
in 1907. You can enjoy a private open-air
bath in each room, along with a dinner of
Japanese Kyoto vegetables.
Luxury Living in Tokyo | Special Advertising Section
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Okinawa Marriott
Resort & Spa
Tel: 0980-51-1000
Fax: 0980-51-1901
www.okinawa-marriott.com
The Okinawa Marriott Resort & Spa sits atop
a small hill; and when viewed from a distance, this 15-story, 361-guestroom resort
and spa seems ready to set sail on a voyage
into the sea – inspired by its unique contour,
reminiscent of the bow of a magnificent
oceangoing vessel. Guests enter a cavernous,
cathedral-like lobby, whose echoing quality reminds one of the throne room in the
Seiden Hall of Shuri Castle.
Choice of guestrooms varies from the
roomy Superior Twin to the emperorworthy 249.3m2 (approximately 2,680ft2)
Royal Suite. Guests can also elect to stay in
the Executive Twin, the Universal Design
Room, the Executive Double, connectable
Superior Twins and Triples, Zui- and Hanatype Okinawa Suites (also available on
the executive floors), Crown or Queen
Suite. A total of 12 types of rooms offer 15
different configurations. Room amenities
include air-conditioning, an alarm clock,
coffeemaker/tea service, crib, individual
climate control, flat-screen television with
cable and more. Executive Floors include
additional special amenities and services,
such as an executive lounge, separate
reception, floor security keys, free spa usage,
free room service, and so much more.
The Pacific Islands Club
Tel: 03-3436-0777
(for inquiries/reservations)
E-mail: [email protected]
www.picresorts.com
The Pacific Islands Club (PIC) is the ultimate
family resort in Guam and Saipan. We boast
an all-inclusive facilities concept where
guests can enjoy over 40 different sports
and recreational activities at no additional
cost. PIC has by far the best and most exciting water attractions. At PIC-Guam: our
“Swim-thru Aquarium,” Water Slide and
various games at seven different pools. At
PIC-Saipan: our “Point Break Wave Machine,”
where you ride the white-water rapids at
Tsunami Falls and rage down one of two
20m waterslides. For PIC’s younger guests,
a daily activities program for kids aged four
to 12 is available by enrolling in our “Kids’
Club,” where your children can experience a
unique international environment created by
our Clubmates. Both Guam and Saipan have
recently built the Siheky Splash Pools for
our youngest guests. PIC takes pride in our
friendly, seasoned staff who make your stay
pleasurable, exciting and educational.
When it comes to comfortable
accommodations, as well as excellent choice
of restaurants, PIC makes guests feel like
VIPs. Whatever you do, PIC has it all for your
next holiday.
Membership Clubs
Tokyo American Club
Tel: 03-3224-3687
Fax: 03-3583-8330
E-mail: [email protected]
www.tokyoamericanclub.org
Discover Tokyo American Club
One big worry Tokyo’s busy expats face
is ensuring their families have a rewarding
day every day. Tokyo American Club is a
perfect solution. A stress-relieving oasis
and a gateway to Japanese culture since
1928, it’s a home away from home for
families. It’s also an office away from the
office for busy professionals. But the Club
has something else that sets it apart even
more from the city’s slick new condos and
fitness centers. Within our walls, people
from around the world gather to form a
friendly, multicultural community. Our
Membership is one-third American and
one-third Japanese, with the balance
representing more than 50 nationalities.
Outfitted for business and leisure, the
Club includes six restaurants, a bar, banquet
services, meeting and seminar rooms,
a fitness center, bowling lanes, squash
courts and a swimming pool. You can enjoy
browsing the 30,000 volumes in our library
(Internet access included) and our video
library. The Club’s thriving social and cultural
scenes come to life through sports leagues,
classes, lectures, domestic and international
tours, an art gallery and our Women’s Group
activities. The Club also offers a barbershop,
a beauty salon, a childcare center, UPS
service and more.
Please contact the Membership Office by
e-mail or phone.
Mortgage Services
New City Mortgage K.K.
Tel: 03-6822-9922 Fax: 03-5549-1817
www.JJLoan.jp/gaijin/
Make your vision of luxurious living in
Japan a reality with financing from New
City Mortgage. Whether you’re looking to
purchase that dream home or invest in rental
properties, New City Mortgage is here to
help. We welcome applications – in English
or Japanese – from Japanese nationals, nonJapanese nationals with a valid visa, and
permanent residents.
Standard residential mortgages range from
¥5-100 million, and Oku+TM jumbo mortgages
are available up to ¥400 million. New City
Mortgage offers 100% LTV (Loan To Value)
financing for Japanese nationals and nonJapanese nationals with permanent residency; and up to 85% LTV for non-Japanese
with valid visas. Even if you are a small-business owner or have recently changed jobs,
you may qualify for a mortgage. New City
Mortgage also offers Investment Property
Loans to finance the purchase of condominium units as rental properties.
Apply online for pre-approval of your loan
– you’ll know the results in seconds in most
cases. New City Mortgage offers free partial
pre-payments and does not require a guarantor or guarantee fees.
Whether you’re purchasing a new home,
investing in real estate, or refinancing an
existing mortgage, New City Mortgage is here
to help. Visit us at www.JJLoan.jp/gaijin/ to
learn more.
Hospitality Recruiting
Specialists
Myriadd
Tel: 03-5459-8721 Fax: 03-3464-2767
E-mail: [email protected]
www.myriadd.com/index.html
Myriadd is a leading recruitment specialist
focused on the Consumer Products, Retail
and Hospitality Industries. We provide a
wide range of services, including executivelevel search, mid- to senior-level search,
volume or mass recruiting solutions, and
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 69
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contract/temporary staffing services.
We don’t view ourselves as a recruiting
company that focuses on Consumer Products,
Retail and Hospitality. Rather, we see ourselves as being in these Industries, providing great solutions for those with whom
we work. This has been essential to our
success, as it allows us to create long-term
partnerships with our clients and candidates
– which, in turn, has allowed us to define,
create and implement services specifically
designed for these Industries.
Through our comprehensive, systematic
approach to search and recruitment, our
experienced team has been responsible for
successfully placing several Presidents, CEOs,
Vice Presidents, Directors and Managers, as
well as staffing entire retail stores of up to
150 employees, for Fortune 250 companies
in Japan.
We are committed to providing unprecedented service that creates partnerships
– putting the right people into the right
organizations through open, honest and collaborative business practices.
Moving & Relocation
Services
Asian Tigers Premier
Worldwide Movers Co., Ltd.
Tel: 03-6402-2371 Fax: 03-6402-2305
E-mail: [email protected]
www.asiantigers-japan.com
Moving can create all manner of expectations. But it’s the best Asian service that we
admire. The politeness, the manner in which
people tend to your every need, the caring
attitude and accompanying comfort are, for
us, the most important.
Combine this with a decisive actionoriented team that allows you the
freedom to make decisions and plan
your move as you wish. All so that you
can have a better experience wherever
in the world you choose to go.
Our team members are masters at keeping
everything under control. It’s quite a relaxing thought and, perhaps, just the kind of
therapy you might need when moving around
the world. We can offer you services in
English, French, German, Chinese, Japanese
and Dutch in order to understand perfectly
all your needs.
We are able to provide you full services for
70 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
all your family members by providing special
attention and care for your children and
your pets.
Through our own Asian Tigers network and
by our co-ownership with our OMNI network,
we can take care of any move, to any destination in the world.
Contact us today for a no-obligation
estimate. Call 03-6402-2371, e-mail info@
asiantigers-japan.com, or visit our Web site
at www.asiantigers-japan.com
Phoenix Transport
(Japan), Ltd.
Tel: 045-212-3251 Fax: 045-212-3414
E-mail: [email protected]
www.phoenixtransport.com
Phoenix Transport (Japan), Ltd. is a leading Worldwide Mover specializing in HighQuality moving for the corporate expatriate,
Japanese and diplomatic communities.
Since our establishment in 1985, Phoenix
has relocated tens of thousands of families
to and from locations in Japan, as well as
around the world, becoming a well-recognized corporate specialist in our field.
Phoenix is an Associate Member of the
Household Goods Forwarders Association of
America (HHGFAA), and is represented by a
worldwide network of hundreds of world-class
movers. There is not a city on Earth that
cannot be reached by our network of professional moving services.
By choosing Phoenix Transport as your
preferred mover, you are guaranteed that
your employees will be well taken care of,
Door-to-Door. We will be there throughout
the entire moving process, arranging all documentation and transportation logistics. We
utilize the best crews, finest packing materials, and have embraced the latest technology
to ensure that the relocation process will be
as smooth as possible.
We are truly committed to absolute quality, and our focus on customer service and
satisfaction is second to none.
With an impressive client list, it’s no wonder that Phoenix Transport is regarded as one
of the world’s finest International Movers.
Santa Fe Relocation Services
Tel: 03-3589-6666 Fax: 03-3589-0420
E-mail: [email protected]
www.santaferelo.com
Santa Fe Relocation Services is a leading
relocation company operating throughout
Asia, providing high-quality relocation services to individual and corporate clients. As a
full-scale relocations services provider, Santa
Fe provides household-goods moving, home
and school search, familiarization programs,
settling-in assistance, visa and immigration
services, and much more. Each year Santa
Fe handles in excess of 10,000 relocations
throughout the world, and is proud to be
a major player in the global relocation
industry.
The mission of Santa Fe is simple: To
provide premium relocation service to corporations and families in a manner that
minimizes the negative impact on the
environment.
Tokyo Orientations
Tel: 03-6821-7010
Fax: 03-5403-7071
www.tokyoorientations.com
At Tokyo Orientations, we recognize that
international relocations present unique
challenges to individuals, families and HR
departments. Cultural and linguistic barriers can intensify a sense of dislocation and
undermine a successful assignment.
Our knowledgeable international staff provide comprehensive, individualized packages
to meet the varied needs of each and every
client, and overcome these challenges.
Our Approach – By paying close attention to details and helping our clients avoid
numerous potential pitfalls, new arrivals are
able to adapt quickly to their new office and
home environments.
Many relocation support services address
the logistical problems of housing and
schools, but they cannot deliver the expatriate perspective unique to our staff. Our multicultural, multilingual office and consulting
staff mirror our client base and facilitate easy
communication with our expatriate clients,
Japanese Human Resources personnel and
local vendors.
Affinity is a key factor in communications
with assignees and HR departments. The
assignee immediately feels at ease, knowing
that our staff intimately understand their
situation and concerns. We also recognize
the necessity of communicating clearly and
easily with Japanese HR personnel and local
vendors.
We welcome all inquiries regarding our
relocation and support services.
Luxury Living in Tokyo | Special Advertising Section
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Real Estate Services &
Consulting
Century 21 SKY Realty
Tel: 03-3585-0021 Fax: 03-3585-0399
www.c21sky.jp
www.century21japan.com
From personal experience, we know that it’s
not easy moving halfway around the world
and then trying to find a comfortable place
to live, while dealing with a foreign culture.
It helps to have a friend, someone to
guide you through the process. Someone
you can trust, who understands the local
customs. That has been our service model for
more than 20 years.
When people place their trust in us, it
makes our work all the more rewarding. We
enjoy finding perfect matches for people,
and we look forward to helping you find your
ideal living space in Tokyo.
Residential Properties – We have developed
an extensive database of quality properties
in central and suburban Tokyo, including
economical apartments, spacious homes for
families and luxury residential high-rises.
Our bilingual agents are skilled at helping
people find the ideal location to accommodate their lifestyles.
Commercial Properties – We help businesses find room to work. We have a vast
computerized inventory of commercial and
office space not only in central Tokyo, but
also throughout most of Japan. We provide
assistance with searches, financial analyses,
lease negotiations, lease language, documentation and market research.
Colliers Halifax
Tel: 03-5563-2111 Fax: 03-5563-2100
www.colliers.com
Established in Japan in 1952, Colliers Halifax
has over 50 years of experience in all aspects
of domestic and international real estate. We
provide leasing, investment, property management and project management services.
As the pioneer of Tenant Representation
and real estate consulting, we introduced
transparency and lease renegotiation to the
Japanese market. Our global operations allow
for the application of the best of Western
and Japanese practices in leasing and investment transactions, and nationwide portfolio
management.
Our clients are leaders in their respective
industries. They select Colliers Halifax based
upon our knowledge and clear stance on representing their interests. Clients continue to
work with us over many years based on the
results we repeatedly achieve on their behalf.
Colliers Halifax staff are bilingual, salaried professionals focused solely on client
representation. We increase information flow
and maximize value to the client. Our team
has worked together for many years and has
much more experience than is common in
the real estate community in Japan.
We add value well in excess of our fees.
For further information on our capabilities
and how we can improve your real-estate
investment holdings or lease situation, we
can be e-mailed at [email protected]
or contacted through the information
listed above.
Eastern Noel Realty
Tel: 03-5459-1605 Fax: 03-5459-1606
www.enr.co.jp
Eastern Real Estate, the predecessor to
Eastern Noel Realty, commenced its business
in 1962 as a pioneer in developing apartments for Europeans and Americans residing
in Tokyo who were associated with overseas
embassies, as well as assisting expatriates of
many foreign corporations in locating residences in Tokyo.
Such responsibilities and experience
of Eastern Real Estate have been further
expanded by Eastern Noel Realty, which
offers comprehensive real estate services that
go beyond just development and brokerage
services for those who reside in or own premium residences.
Thus, we are proud of what we feel distinguishes us from other agents and management companies in that we make proposals
only after studying the needs from every
angle in order to apply methods that will
provide the highest level of satisfaction for
each and every customer.
It is always foremost on our mind to build
partner relationships of trust and understanding with our customers that will last
for decades, based on a vision that focuses
on much more than simply the immediate
bottom line.
Eastern Noel Realty believes that the
bonds of trust that are created in this
manner are our most important assets,
representing the most significant product
we can offer.
Mibu Corporation
Toll free: 0120-700-086
Tel: 03-3486-1133 Fax: 03-3486-1700
www.mibucorp.co.jp/english
Mibu Corporation handles properties in highend residential areas such as Minato-ku,
Meguro-ku, Ohta-ku, Setagaya-ku, Shibuya-ku
and Shinagawa-ku, which have proven to be
very popular neighborhoods for our foreign
customers through the years.
From renting your first apartment or condominium and buying your first home, to
purchasing your first residence for retirement
in a resort – or even investing in your second
home – our unitary Management System
enables you to progress through each stage of
life with confidence.
We also can provide a range of properties
for office space and investment purposes
or commercial land in the business districts
of Shibuya-ku and Minato-ku. Our newest
undertaking involves selling resort apartments in Okinawa.
Please feel free to contact us; we will be
more than happy to provide you timely advice
and purchase options that get you to the next
stage in life.
SIHM Incorporated
Tel: 03-3470-4737 Fax: 03-3470-4740
www.sihm.co.jp
SIHM Inc. was established in 1974, and
stands for Systematical Interior and Housing
Management. At the very beginning, we
started with interior decoration work ordered
by several foreign embassies such as the
Canadian, Australian and the U.S. Embassies,
just to name a few; and in just a few years,
we have expanded our business to include
housing real estate for foreign expatriates.
Since those early days, we have been providing real estate for both satisfied owners
and foreign tenants. SIHM has been successful in planning the total project, including
feasibility studies, architectural design, and
making the arrangements for tenant and
property management.
We are now handling over 500 listed apartments and houses that SIHM has designed
and has been engaged in total project
coordination.
We are also the insurance agent for Ace
Insurance. We provide primarily for fire
insurance, personal property comprehensive
insurance and personal liability insurance.
Please feel free to contact us for more information, at any time.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 71
By Nicole Fall / FDI Portfolio
Courtesy The Boeing Company
Joining the
Budget Jet Set
Here is another good reason to
avoid Narita. Jetstar Airways Pty
Ltd has launched its inaugural
flights to Sydney from Osaka,
with a campaign offering flights
from just ¥20,000 return fare.
Qantas Airways Limited’s
value-based airline begins
operations in Japan on March
25, connecting Osaka-BrisbaneSydney daily, later adding routes
between Nagoya-Cairns and
Osaka-Cairns on August 2 and
September 8, respectively.
While the ¥20,000 offer was
a limited launch gimmick, with
average fares more likely to
cost travelers ¥60,000, Jetstar’s
debut in Japan marks a
significant rite of passage. It is
the first international airline
to sell discounted flights in
a playing field dominated
by domestic carriers offering
similarly priced fares.
Jetstar is a wholly owned
subsidiary, headquartered in
Melbourne, Australia. The airline
was launched in May 2004 and
flies to 22 destinations, mainly in
Australia. Jetstar is expected to
bring greater profitability to the
routes once occupied by Qantas.
The launch timing is
impeccable. International travel
out of Japan hit record highs
of around 18 million people in
2006. This trend is predicted
to continue as baby-boomers
hit retirement age and spend
their personal savings on selfindulgent activities such as
travel. This is compounded
by the growing numbers
of price-conscious Japanese
picking travel dates outside the
traditional vacation periods to
save on cost.
Mobile Tours
Nothing beats firsthand experience. Think about
it. You would not learn to swim from a manual,
much less establish a mobile phone-related business
anywhere without first visiting Japan, arguably the
world’s leading country for such technologies.
Expediting any fact-gathering mission is Mobikyo
K.K., through its tour-arm Mobile Intelligence
Japan, offering weeklong guided studies geared for
visiting international entrepreneurs, businesses and
public bodies interested in gathering know-how
and meeting key players in the Japanese mobilephone industry.
The twice-yearly public tours are jam-packed with
as many as 25 sessions, trend talks and networking events giving international delegates firsthand
experience of the market. Unpublicized benefits
could include a business deal. “We’ve been running
this service for three years; and without fail, participants either strike up deals among themselves
or with some of the companies we introduce them
to here in Japan,” comments Lawrence Cosh-Ishii,
representative director of Mobikyo.
In 2006, public tours cost around ¥500,000,
excluding transportation, accommodations and
other expenses; and these are also supplemented
with private, targeted visits arranged for individuals
and companies looking for specific information or
introductions in Japan. (The next tour is scheduled
for May, although the fee is set to rise somewhat
this year due to demand.)
Mobikyo also runs Wireless Watch Japan, an
online media site with over 130,000 monthly visitors as of October 2006, and organizes the Mobile
Monday Tokyo monthly networking event.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 73
Traveling with Coach
Coach is really celebrating.
Last year was the 65th year of
the brand’s establishment, and
March sees the 10th anniversary
of its Ergo collection of
accessories.
Coach Japan Inc. has become
the fastest-growing imported
handbag and accessory brand
in Japan. It moved from 5th
place in 2001 with under 3%
market share, to the numbertwo position capturing 9% in
fiscal 2005. The New York brand
is aggressively expanding its
market share, and hopes to
achieve 15% by fiscal 2009; and
over the next 4-5 years, it could
eventually realize at least 180
Coach locations in Japan if its
regional potential is tapped.
Coach currently has around 130
doors, including eight flagship
and 11 factory stores.
Fashion analysts classify Coach
as an affordable luxury brand,
meaning its entry price points
are around 40% lower than
a typical European high-end
label’s. This is a smart market to
dominate. The Japanese luxurygoods market is mature and
experiencing a slow-down in
sales due to the weak yen and
competition from newly popular
categories, including leisure,
personal care and home décor.
The Ergo line has expanded
over the past decade, from a
small collection to a wide range
of leather and signature print
Coach fabric bags.
Triple Five Address
Hip Hop-styled fashion and lifestyle brand Triple
Five Soul has opened a flagship store in Tokyo’s
youth district, Harajuku.
The two-story, 900ft2 retail space made of wood,
steel and glass marks the brand’s first dedicated
store in Japan, following its expansion into the
market in 1997.
Triple Five Soul, Inc. was established in 1989 out
of a small location in New York City, selling handsewn hooded tops and velour tracksuits – and, back
then, catering mainly to the rap community. Today,
the brand is distributed in 17 countries, including
the U.S., and sells items such as laptop bags and
sweaters – all featuring the label’s distinctive graffiti-style logo.
74 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
“Being that Japan is a key link in Triple Five Soul’s
international community, the Harajuku store opening serves not only as a key to our expanding retail
presence in Asia, but [also] to our overall global
perspective,” says Troy Morehouse, CEO.
“From an image perspective, Tokyo represents
the gates to the East for us,” he adds. “And having
this retail cornerstone to the Japanese marketplace
will only augment our growing presence within the
exploding Asian marketplace.” Tokyo is the center
of youth culture in Asia; Japanese street fashion is
followed by youths from Hong Kong to Singapore.
By investing in a dedicated Triple Five Soul flagship store sends out a powerful marketing signal to
trendsetters throughout the region.
FDI Portfolio
Black Cat
Sport-fashion has become a key buzzword in the
style industries, a term that marries fitness merchandise with catwalk glamour.
PUMA Japan K.K., a wholly owned subsidiary of
PUMA AG, is launching at the end of March its first
dedicated store to the category in Japan, inside
Tokyo Midtown, called PUMA – The Black Store
Tokyo. The Roppongi location will focus on collaborations between designers and the German brand,
and include the yoga-inspired line Nuala, designed
by former supermodel Christy Turlington, and PUMA,
by Japanese designer Yasuhiro Mihara.
The concept behind sport-fashion is stylizing form
and combining function, allowing wearers the
opportunity to look fashionable while exercising or,
conversely, to appear sporty even if they have not
been to a gym in years. “Consumers are looking for
not only fashion and sportswear, but [also] a brand
that successfully fuses sports taste with fashion,” comments Tamaki Yamaguchi, PR manager, PUMA Japan.
Collaborations between the large sports brands
and the lesser-known talent is generally a win-win
situation for all concerned. The deals give established
equities street credibility, while providing younger
brands the ability to innovate with larger budgets.
Spa Refinery
High-end men’s spa, The
Refinery, launches its first
door on March 30, targeting
gentlemen searching for
sanctuary along with a shave.
The seven-year-old British spa,
co-founded by former banker
Laith Waines and investor Omar
Fadli, has three locations in
London. For its first international
launch, The Refinery has
finalized a collaboration
agreement with Japanese
makeup artist Shu Uemura, who
is taking a private stake to open
the 4,000ft2 spa inside Tokyo
Midtown. According to reports,
the men’s-only The Refinery has
cost an estimated £1.5 million to
launch. “While the number of
barbers has declined due to the
popularity of unisex hair salons
in Japan, barbers are now being
rediscovered by fashionable
young men,” observes Tatsuya
Kimura, general manager of
The Refinery Japan, Inc. “We
will combine the comfort and
atmosphere of a gentlemen’s
club with the vitality and sense
of well-being of a health spa to
provide a one-stop grooming
emporium for men.”
The Refinery Japan will also
focus on introducing the spa’s
eponymous skincare product
lines to Japan, before targeting
the rest of Asia.
Please contact FDI Portfolio’s Nicole
Fall at [email protected] if you have
ideas for this column.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 75
Japan’s Love-Hate Relationship
with the West
In this age
of globalization, it is very
important for
Western leading nations to
understand the
sentiment and
resentment
of Non-Western nations toward
Western industrialized nations.
For Westerners and nonWesterners alike, the society of
nations has always been a Westcentered one. The lingua franca
has dominantly been English.
During the 19th century, the
hegemonic West could ignore
the existence of non-Western
marginal regions. If the Western
powers recognized them, it was
to make the regions colonies.
It is true that Japan was able to
join the League of Nations after
WWI. But that did not mean that
industrialized Japan had become
a part of the Western world.
There has always been asymmetry in the intercultural relations
between Western metropolitan
and the world’s marginal portion.
It was inevitable that late-developing nations harbored ambivalent feelings of love-hate toward
the more-advanced Western
nations. The Japanese and other
Asians admired the latter as
models for modernization, and
76 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
yet hated them for being colonizing imperialistic powers. Such
ambivalence was particularly
strong among the Japanese
during the period when the country was trying hard to catch up to
the West. Japan indeed waged an
anti-imperialist imperialistic war
in 1941.
As chair of the Department
of Comparative Literature and
Comparative Culture at the Tokyo
University Graduate School, I
have analyzed many aspects to
intercultural relations between
Japan and the Western World.
The results are gathered in the
book written in English entitled,
Japan’s Love-Hate Relationship
with the West (Folkestone, UK:
Global Oriental, 2005). I have
tried to look at the problems
from both sides, using literary
materials of various languages. I
am not an ideological historian,
and my textual approach is essentially humanistic. Americans now
understand this kind of ambivalent feeling when they admire
and envy the good quality of
automobiles made in Japan, as
some of them also harbor a feeling of hate precisely because of
that good quality.
I am somewhat an outsider
to Western Japanese Studies.
However, the worth (if it exists)
of my book comes precisely from
t
SNAPSHOT
u
Born in 1931, Sukehiro Hirakawa is
a doyen of intercultural relations and
Professor Emeritus of Tokyo University.
He has taught in Japan, France, North
America and China, and famously is the
Japanese translator of Dante’s Divine
Comedy. Among his extensive writings
is an important contribution to The
Cambridge History of Japan (Vol.5, 1989),
analyzing the Western impact and the
Japanese response.
the fact that, as a cultural historian, I am not a part of American/
Japanese studies. Over the past
60 years, most academic historical
works on modern Japan written
directly in English are by those
who have studied in the Englishspeaking world. They have
naturally shared certain common
attitudes and values with their
Western masters, predecessors
and colleagues.
It seems that I am an exception;
and former British Ambassador
to Japan Sir Hugh Cortazzi, in
his review appearing in Asian
Affairs, immediately recognized
this characteristic of mine. In
my book I have emphasized the
importance for Westerners to
study not only life and thought
of the Orient, but also those of
the Occident, from Japanese
points of view. Let me quote, by
way of example, a case of ominous chain reactions often over-
By Sukehiro Hirakawa / Behind the Book
Courtesy The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan
日本と西洋との愛憎関係
looked on the Anglo-Saxon side.
Westerners know Kipling’s poem,
“White Man’s Burden,” but very
few people know that Kipling’s
idea provokingly gave birth to
Tokutomi Soho’s idea, “Yellow
Man’s Burden.” Tokutomi’s selfassertion was little known. After
Japan’s victory over Russia in
1905, Tokutomi recommended his
fellow-countrymen to bear the
burden of other Yellow Asians, as
they were now trying to liberate
themselves from Western colonial
rule. Japanese oligarchs, respecting the West-centered status quo,
did not like Tokutomi’s idea, but
the Japanese people at large
liked it. Tokutomi later became
the most influential of the ideologues who led the Japanese
nation into that catastrophic
Greater East Asian War.
Though I am a made-inJapan professor, I am an
internationalist. I dedicated my
book to the greatest of Japan
interpreters, George Sansom and
Arthur Waley.
このグロバリゼーションの時代に大事なこ
私は問題点を明確にするために、
多くの言
とは西洋先進国が非西洋の国民が西洋に
葉で書かれた文献を用い、
両面から一つの
対して抱いている二面的な感情を理解する
同じ問題を眺めた。
私はイデオロギーが先
ことであろう。
行する歴史家はあまり信用しない。
私のア
西洋人にとって国際社会とは西洋中心
プローチは人文主義的で、
心理を探ること
の社会であった。
世界の共通語は英語であ
に努めた。
アメリカ人も今ではこの種の愛
った。十九世紀、西洋人にとって外国交際
憎共存の心理がわかるのではないかと思
とは西洋人同士の交際が主であった。覇
う。
メイド・イン・ジャパンの自動車が優秀
権的な西洋は、
西洋以外は無視することも
だと、
米国人も感嘆し羨ましくも思うが、
同
できた。
そこへ日本が登場し、第一次世界
時に腹も立ち、
ジャパン・バッシングも起こ
大戦の後には国際聯盟に参加した。
しかし
る。実はそれが典型的な愛憎関係の心理
日本は近代化して産業大国となったとはい
なのである。
え西洋の一部となったわけではない。
その
私はメイド・イン・ジャパンの教授で、私
後、
西洋にとっても非西洋の国々との対話
の書物の価値も私が西洋の日本研究に属
の重要性は次第に意識されはじめたが、
し
さないアウトサイダーであるからだと思う。
かしそのような非対称的な文化間の関係
私は本書で西洋人は東洋の生活思想を研
の中では、周辺的な非西洋諸国と世界の
究するだけでなく、
西洋の生活思想を日本
中心としての西洋との間には愛憎関係が
人の視点から見ることも大切だと説いた。
生じるのは不可避的である。
日本にとって
西洋人はキプリングが「白人の重荷」
を説
西洋という存在は重くのしかかるものだっ
いたことは知っている。
しかしそれに刺戟さ
た。
このアンビヴァレントな感情は日本が
れて徳富蘇峰が
「黄人の重荷」
を説き、
それ
西洋に追いつき追い越せと努力してきた時
が大東亜戦争の思想となった連鎖反応は
代に特に強かった。西洋列強は文明の先
知らない。歴史は双方の文献を読み、
テク
進国として憧れの対象であると同時に植
ストに密着して読み解くことが大切だ。私
民地主義帝国として脅威の存在でもあっ
は西洋の日本研究者としてはサンソムとウ
たからである。
ェーリーを尊敬している。私はその二人に
私は第二次世界大戦の敗北後、東京
大学に創設された比較文学比較文化大
拙著を捧げた。
私は日本製の学者だが、
学
問上の国際主義を奉ずる者だ。
学院課程の出身で、後にその主任教授を
つとめた。上に述べたような西洋と日本
との文化的接触点で発生した問題を、西
洋へ留学した日本人や来日した西洋人な
どを中心に調べ多くの書物を日本語で書
いてきた。私はまたJapan’s Love-Hate
Relationship with the West という書
物を英国のGlobal Oriental社から出版し
た。
それが多少評判となったので外国特派
員クラブへ招かれて講演した。
その書物で
平川祐弘氏: 昭和六年生。東京大学名誉教
授。
比較文学比較文化の学問をインターカル
チュラル・リレーションズの研究に発展させ
た。
日本、
フランス、
北アメリカ、
中国でも教え
た。
ダンテ
『神曲』
の訳者としても知られてい
る。
おびただしい著書の中には
『ケンブリッジ
日本史』
第五巻の執筆もある。
「西洋の衝撃と
日本」
の分析が数多い。
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 77
By Gabrielle Kennedy / Business Profile
N
ot even the truly food-challenged can dispute that
Japanese cuisine is among
the best in the world. High in protein, low in fats and sugars; from
the haute to the home cooked,
it is a cuisine worthy of all the
accolades.
Yet, still, for an expatriate more
used to the morning papers accompanied by a bowl of granola sprinkled with dried cranberries than
grilled fish, natto and miso soup,
the local fare can miss the mark
(despite its undisputed nutritional
value). When cravings for bagels
and falafel, 100% fruit juices, pita
bread or tortillas hit, Alishan Pty.
Ltd., one of the earliest importers of organic and natural health
foods, has been delivering gastronomic solutions to our front doors.
John Bayles and his wife, Fay
Chen, started operations in Hidaka,
Saitama Prefecture in 1987 with
Tengu Natural Foods, a then-smallish mail-order service for hungry
expatriates. Back then, vocabulary
like organic, certified and natural
were deemed something alternative or hippie by the mainstream.
“Soy cheese, whole grains, beans
and rolled oats were impossible
to find,” Bayles recalls. But as
fear of genetically modified (GM)
produce spread – and interest in
a macrobiotic diet, vegetarianism,
veganism, as well as low-carb, high
protein diets flourished – percep-
tions flipped. “Suddenly there was
a real demand for dry goods like
nutritional yeast, quinea and cous
cous,” he says.
Today, in most of the more
dynamic neighborhoods of Tokyo,
stores stock a good variety of
natural and organic products.
To keep up, Alishan has had to
grow and diversify, which meant
participating in huge trade fairs
like FOODEX JAPAN – as well as
increasing imports and storage
capacity, and introducing a new
distribution arm that was able
to reach the biggest supermarkets and the smallest speciality
stores. That expanded operation
is housed in the Alishan Organic
Center, a huge post-and-beam
style American barn that comprises
dry, refrigerated and frozen storage warehouses, office space, a
shop, a café and an event space.
Combined, Alishan is growing
at 30% per annum, and wants to
keep the focus on maintaining
an intimate relationship with its
growers and exporters from the
U.S., Thailand, Australia, Sri Lanka,
India, Italy, Germany, Denmark,
Spain and the UK. “I know the zip
codes of them all, though,” Bayles
beams. “We want to stay more
vertically integrated than the competition … with none of the usual
middlemen or subcontractors.”
Beyond the branded products
and street-side café, Alishan does
Gabrielle Kennedy
Growing a Healthy
Business
John Bayles traded stockbroking for
organic food.
very little advertising and prefers
to avoid marketing gimmickry. The
industry did hit rough times in the
West after tricks like exaggerated
labeling were used to convince
gullible consumers into thinking
that what they were buying was
organic. This has been reduced
everywhere by the introduction
of regulations. The Japanese
Agricultural Standards only allows
its leaf symbol to be attached to
produce that has been grown in
compliance with the Ministry of
Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries’
guidelines for organic foods.
Plus, customers who buy organic
food are a demanding and discerning bunch. “They are a certain
type of person,” says Bayles, “…
extremely knowledgeable and full
of questions.” It is providing that
customer core with clean good
food and supporting small farmers worldwide that makes his days
satisfying and all the complications
of importing foodstuffs into Japan
worthwhile. “It is easy to make
money,” he says coyly, admitting
that in an earlier life he worked
as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch.
“But it is much harder to make
money and have fun.”
Gabrielle Kennedy is a freelance writer
based in Amsterdam and Tokyo.
March 2007 / ACCJ Journal / 79
Miraculous
Microbubbles Keep
Getting Better
A
lot has happened recently
in microbubble research,
reported initially in this
column in June 2005. These
extremely tiny bubbles of oxygen,
ozone and other gases – a few
millionths of a meter in diameter
– are turning out to be even more
useful than anyone realized.
Dr. Tetsuya Kodama, assistant
professor at Tohoku University in
Sendai, and his team at the university’s Biomedical Engineering
Research Organization are looking for ways to use microbubbles
to help cure cancer, dissolve blood
clots, and perform drug and gene
therapy with unheard-of precision. Originally, Dr. Kodama and
his team were trying to use microbubbles to enhance the contrast
in 3D ultrasound imaging, helping direct the ultrasonic waves to
focus with greater concentration
on the part being imaged. With
developments in microbubble
construction, he has branched out
to utilize the bubbles in actual
drug delivery.
“Our aim now is to introduce
therapeutic molecules, such as
genes and cancer drugs, into specific sites non-invasively,” Kodama
said. “To that end, we’re developing a new kind of high-throughput ultrasound device and investi-
80 / ACCJ Journal / March 2007
gating the mechanisms of molecular delivery, along with developing
effective therapeutic molecules.”
Microbubbles are so small they
can, with a little prodding, move
through the walls of blood vessels. Their surface properties can
be adjusted so that they bind to
only certain types of cells, and
they can be made durable enough
to last for long periods of time in
the bloodstream. Once inside the
tissue, the bubbles can be popped
using an ultrasonic pulse, and the
desired drug or gene released, a
few molecules at a time, directly
into the cells.
“When we pop the microbubbles with ultrasound, the collapsing bubbles generate shock waves
and a kind of liquid-jet impact,”
he explained. “These pressures
induce transient membrane
permeability in the surrounding
cells, and thus the therapeutic
molecules – such as cancer drugs,
plasmid DNA, etc. – can enter the
cells and go to work.” The shock
waves create minute openings
in the walls of the blood vessels,
allowing the release of pharmaceutical agents, in precise doses,
into the surrounding tissue. The
concentrated focus of the ultrasonic beam means surrounding
tissues are unaffected.
Robert Cameron
In Case You Missed It / By Robert Cameron
Dr. Tetsuya Kodama makes microbubbles
perform miracles.
With this level of control over
where and when the therapeutic
agents get introduced, doctors
may soon be able to offer targeted, personalized diagnostics
and therapy, using more powerful drugs, yet with far less side
effects since the drugs would be
activated in only a tiny portion of
the body. Such procedures could
be done safely, cheaply and noninvasively by using a transducer
on the patient’s skin, or a catheter
threaded into a blood vessel.
A similar technique using
microbubbles and ultrasound has
been developed to dissolve blood
clots, and testing has already
reached the clinical stage. Some
researchers think procedures
could someday be performed
in ambulances, with portable
ultrasound equipment clearing
up blood clots from the coronary
arteries of heart-attack patients,
for example.
Ultimately, researchers envision
having a drug – entirely nontoxic
and inert – circulating through
the body, inside microbubbles,
until a doctor activates it with a
precisely focused ultrasonic beam
from outside the patient’s body.
Robert Cameron is a freelance writer
based in Tokyo.

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