Yesterday, I wrote about Nippon Professional Baseball’s professed “reason” for adopting a pitch clock: allowing the establishment to both publicly disrespect the players union and serve as an excuse for March’s World Baseball Classic quarterfinal exit – Japan’s worst finish to date.
In that post, I mentioned that Japanese organizations are incredibly slow to adopt new things, something that surprises many visitors to the country, who expect a nation constantly aspiring to stay on the cutting edge of technology – a description that fits South Korea far better than Japan.
There are at least three reasons for “Japan speed”: a requirement that traditions carried forward from predecessors be properly respected, that no one within the organization takes sufficient individual responsibility to easily be held accountable, and that subgroups often do not play nice with each other, often pursuing their own selfish interests over that of the whole enterprise.
Paying one’s respects
Unless under extreme pressure, Japan’s innovation model is to make continual improvements to established ways of doing things, a practice known as “kaizen” that superficially respects the achievements and efforts of those who tackled the same issues before and pays homage to their vision by not saying, “Sorry, what we’ve been doing for years has been a waste of time.”
I often tell guests on my guided history tours of Tokyo that politeness in Japan demands a set of complex rules, and Rule No. 1 is never criticize rules. Doing so implies disrespect to not only those who follow the rule in question but to everyone who ignores the rule but pays lip service to it.
Japanese organizations are often capable of executing their core competencies with amazing quickness and efficiency once routines and failsafe procedures are established and everyone understands their roles: Trains run on time and garbage is collected in a timely manner. But getting to that point can take forever.
Since last year, Major League Baseball has handed the responsibility for organizing its Japanese events to its longtime promotional partner, the Yomiuri Shimbun’s Sports Operations Department. Instead of decreasing the workload for MLB in New York, it led to numerous daily online meetings with staff in Tokyo to confirm the most trivial details of Yomiuri’s operating plans.
“It was like, you guys can handle this, why are you always bothering us with this stuff,” one MLB executive said at 2025’s season-opening series between the Dodgers and Cubs.
Safety of the herd
When something needs to be done in Japan, every box that might conceivably be an issue must be checked and everyone in the room must sign off on each item it so no individual is accountable for failure. That doesn’t mean scapegoats won’t be found, however.
During my time at Yomiuri’s English department, publisher of the Japan News – formerly called the Daily Yomiuri, I realized that in addition to competence as a reporter, one’s advancement within the company depended on one’s skill in deflecting blame onto potential scapegoats.
My fall from grace there was fueled by a story I wrote when then under-fire Swallows manager Shigeru Takada announced one afternoon he was not about to step down, with the team president confirming there was no plan to replace him. The Yomiuri website ran exactly the same story.
Unfortunately, the Daily Yomiuri had then abandoned all its editions but the first with a 6:30 pm deadline. So when Takada announced around 9:30 pm that he had already decided to quit earlier that morning, every sports page in the country with a deadline from 10 pm had that as their lead story, while ours was “Takada: I’m not stepping down.”
Our story apparently led our editor to be the butt of jokes throughout the building, and she was not one to take it without getting her pound of flesh, so she settled on me, insinuating that taking Takada and the team president at their word, as every other early edition had done, illustrated my utter incompetence.
I was about 49-years-old at that time, and was not yet mature enough just to keep my mouth shut when dealing with abusive irate bosses, and told her she was full of shit. For the next few years, until Kyodo News came calling for me, harassing me was one of the daily chores she seemed to relish the most.
All for none and none for all
A third obstacle I see to forward momentum in innovation is Japan’s group dynamics, where loyalty to a group is unquestioned and the goals of that group outweigh every other consideration. This has repeatedly been seen in Japanese history, most famously when the imperial army and imperial navy competed ruthlessly for domestic political status to the clear detriment of the nation.
As one IJN admiral once put it to a colleague in response to the post-World War I arms limitation treaties, “Our job is defending the navy, not Japan.”
Thus even bodies like NPB that would benefit incredibly greatly from increased mutual cooperation between their member organizations in media and licensing have a great deal of trouble doing so in any meaningful way, ostensibly out of fear that changes to the system will alter the balance of power and influence.
So changes that would be of huge benefit to Japan’s baseball business are often set aside as a threat to the status quo and the maintenance of acceptable mediocrity.
Japanese organizations are famous for their ability to plan out operations – think Pearl Harbor – but the lack of cooperation between groups leads to incredibly poor strategic planning. Japan’s historic solution on the national level has been for the government to create cartels and assign competing companies and agencies shares within those cartels a certain share of the market or budget.
It sometimes works well. In the 1960s, cartels of auto and electronic manufacturers led to exponential economic growth. But just as often Japan’s grand plans are not a comprehensive strategy, but rather a random stitching together of the component groups’ various agendas.
As a result, Japan’s “grand military strategy” in Asia in the 1930s was for the army and navy to each pursue their own goals, and that only came about after the fear of the army and navy both osing domestic political influence in Japan pushed Japan toward war with Britain and the United States. Herbert Feis, in his classic study “The Road to Pearl Harbor,” hypothesized how this all played out.
Locked in an unwinnable war in China for nearly three years by the summer of 1940, and suffering from crippling economic sanctions during the great depression, Japan’s obvious solution was a negotiated withdrawal that cut Japan’s losses. According to Feis, such a withdrawal, would have been political suicide for the army. Barring that, the only option was to seize the Dutch East Indies oilfields, which meant an even more suicidal war with Britain and the United States – that the navy accepted for fear of surrendering political influence in Tokyo to the army.
Blessed mediocrity
Thus it is that NPB continues to drag its feet toward a future, because few of the 12 teams have any interest in change that might risk their status relative to the other teams.
Sadaharu Oh, a vocal advocate of expansion to 16 teams, can shout till he’s blue in the face, but nothing will ever come of it. Nor will NPB address the need to develop more talent in order to make its leagues more competitive, or quit the current posting agreement to force a better one from MLB.
Good column
Reminds me of Frank Gibneys observation
“Japan is a country that travels at 35 miles per hour”
Japan works together only in those rare instances when it is life and death, and someone with a powerful message like Sakamoto Ryoma or Ikeda Hayato is there to convince the parties involved to cut the crap and move forward.