Tokyo (dpa) – Japanese consumers are regarded as being extremely quality-conscious. For foreign manufacturers, even the tiniest flaw can turn out to be a barrier for selling their products in Japan.
Nowhere else in the world is a consumer so pampered when it comes to quality as in Japan, a place where customers really can be regarded as royalty. And correspondingly, Japanese firms proudly point to the high quality of their products and excellent customer service – until recently, that is.
Now, a series of scandals has shaken customers’ faith. After years of economic crisis, the legend of a “quality-obssessed” Japan has started to crumble.
A prominent example has been provided by Mitsubishi Motors. It has now come to light that for years the automobile maker had systematically and intentionally kept secret tens of thousands of customer complaints.
In another case, 14,000 Japanese fell ill after they drank bacteria-infested milk from the country’s leading dairy company Snow Brand. In the aftermath, it was shown that control regulations were ignored and that the expiry date was intentionally falsified.
And in late October, the head of the electronic company Sanyo announced his resignation after it was divulged that a subsidiary company had knowingly sold defective solar cell systems for years.
The business newspaper Diamond wrote after the Snow Brand scandal that this was only the “tip of the iceberg”.
Searching for answers, Merrill Lynch Japan chief economist Jesper Koll, in an interview with deutsche presse-agentur dpa, pointed to the recession. Forced to try to reduce costs, Japanese firms began saving money by cutting their quality control efforts, he said.
But it was not only in the private sector that quality control was reduced. This has also taken place at the state level, as seen in the atomic plant accident at Tokaimura in September last year.
In what has been to date the most serious nuclear accident in Japanese history, the operating company JCO also disregarded safety standards and for years this went unnoticed by the state supervisory agencies.
As was seen in the Snow Brand scandal, the directors at JCO demonstrated little sense of accountability.
“In the public sector it is always easier to cover things up,” Koll noted, while saying a root cause of the problem can also be seen in the basic structure of Japanese society. “The principle of authority is still firmly in place in Japan.”
The result is that people do not take the risk of opening their mouths and instead hold back, according to the “nothing seen, nothing has happened” principle. Koll says that this is a major problem, the result being that once mistakes are made, they do not get immediately corrected.
But the incidents had also shown “how corrupt corporate management is” and how managers “are only thinking of their own wallets”, Koll adds.
As an example, he cited the recent scandal surrounding dubious stock market transactions involving managers of the Japan’s largest retail store chain, Daiei.
On the other hand, sooner or later the consumer in Japan is not going to let himself be misled, Koll says. It was for example an anonymous telephone call which first uncovered the scandal at Mitsubishi Motors.
