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Does Japan’s deteriorating film industry offer lessons for Japanese companies?

Blogs from Satoshi Ishizaka

This article on the success of the Oscar-winning Korean movie “Parasite” also explores the major reasons why Japan’s film industry is deteriorating. Decades ago, the whole world was raving about Akira Kurosawa’s movies, the Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Kagemusha, etc. But after that, except for Anime cartoons, there have been very few internationally successful Japanese movies.
Akira Kurosawa’s movies were so successful because he himself studied Western films and adapted best practices of the time to create his Japanese movies in the most internationally impressive way. He also adapted some stories from Shakespeare for his movies.
“Adapting the best practices from the world in order to show what’s so cool about Japan.”

I believe that should be the attitude when we explore the Third Way corporate culture in Japan. Adapt the best practices from the world in order to optimize what’s already so internationally cool and competitive in Japanese society. That’s exactly what Kurosawa did and was the major success factor of his films. Korean directors are now doing the same while Japan’s film industry is becoming much more inward-looking and deteriorating.

What is still not understood and accepted by the majority of the Japanese people is the fact that Japan’s working conditions clearly look like worker exploitation in the eyes of the international community. Even today, older Japanese people live with the nostalgic memory of Japan being the only rich super power in Asia and therefore, they can not even imagine that Japanese workers’ conditions are bad in comparison with other countries. As this article shows, many people in the film industry make only 200,000 JPY a month. Even the government-sponsored Cool-Japan initiative only increases profit for marketing companies, not individual artists. This pathetic worker exploitation is what’s bringing down Japan’s film industry.

I think the situation is the same in the corporate world as well. Many business men and women are just hard-working, loyal people and have little notion about their pay-level. They are trained to be grateful and patient and obedient. But their living standard is not rising, actually it's getting worse in most cases, yet they still work very hard, very long and very patiently. They sacrifice so much for so little. They are constantly tired, their budget is limited, and their future looks grim. How can we expect them to be energetic and creative enough to transform their organizations and make themselves globally competitive and attractive?

While Japan still has much to offer to the world, Japanese individual workers are exhausted, sucked dry, and afraid to be soon tossed out onto the side road. How can we stop this worker exploitation of which most Japanese are not even aware? How can we invest much more in people’s individual creativity and organizational innovations? How can we adapt the best practices from the world yet maintain what’s good from the Japanese approach? What do you think the Third Way should be?

By Satoshi Ishizaka

Link to the Article
https://www.vox.com/world/2020/3/3/21158315/parasite-oscar-south-korea-japan-film-bong-joon-ho