All too often in recent months, the headlines on the business pages of Japan’s newspapers have been of the unwelcome kind, with the previously good reputations of such household names as Toshiba, Mizuho Bank and Olympus suddenly in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.
It’s falsified construction data for schools and hospitals on one day, components for tens of millions of vehicles that are potentially life-threatening and deliberately manipulated profit reports the next. The headlines hint that fraud, a failure to act and good old-fashioned lying are endemic at Japanese companies that might previously have been considered upstanding members of this nation’s corporate community.
Scandal, mismanagement and financial shenanigans are a fact of business life in any nation, of course, but Japan seems to have suffered more than its fair share in the last couple of years.
The question is why so many companies here have been caught up in crises that were, in every case, avoidable had the appropriate checks been in place or if the correct countermeasures had been taken swiftly.
“To my mind, Japan’s corporations are today paying the price for the lost 20 years that started when the bubble burst back in the early 1990s,” said Makoto Watanabe, a lecturer in communications and media at Hokkaido Bunkyo University.
“The situation they are reaping now is the result of a combination of drastic cost-cutting with the retirement of the ‘baby-boomer’ generation of workers and a failure by companies to replace them with equally skilled employees,” Watanabe told The South China Morning Post.