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The Most Demanding Japanese Consumers and Their Implications.
(From Journal of Japanese Trade & Industry (JJTI))
Byline: Hatakeyama Noboru
More than 10 years ago when I was the Vice Minister for International Affairs at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), now the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Jack Welch, the then President and CEO of General Electric Company (GE) kindly visited my office. He said something like as follows. "The Japanese market is not closed but it is a bit different from the others in that Japanese customers are quite demanding. Our company has two of the most demanding Japanese customers, Japan Air Lines (JAL) and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). But by responding to the demanding from those customers, we have found out our company has become a market leader."
Those most demanding customers of Japan may have also nurtured Japanese competitive manufacturers. This is said to be one of the reasons why Japan has a big trade surplus every year. In the case of the service sectors, including finance, security and transportation, Japanese suppliers could not become competitive because the customers for those services were not able to be demanding due to the severe restrictions imposed upon the types and kinds of services to be supplied. In the agricultural sector as well, consumer voices could not play a big role in improving its competitiveness because very few options were available due to the severe restrictions on imports of many agricultural goods. Of course even in the case of manufacturing, the competitiveness of Japanese car industries and digital home appliance industries might not have been derived from demanding Japanese customers in the first place. They have become competitive through exposing their products to international competition. Therefore, we have to recognize that the demanding Japanese customers have not necessarily been the whole reason for the international competitiveness enjoyed by Japanese manufacturers. However the demanding customers of Japan have played a big role in strengthening the economy, especially the parts and components industries.
The question then arises as to why Japanese customers are demanding.
Answering to this question, there is an interesting hypothesis as follows. There were four classes in the feudal society of Japan; the warrior (samurai) class was ranked as the highest ...
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