Teamwork Archives - understand-culture

People Before Products

Mono o tsukuru mae ni hito o tsukuru. Make people before making things. Panasonic attributes these words to its founder, Matsushita Kōnosuke. The company gives no date or place for them.

In February 2022, Panasonic’s newsroom reprinted a message by its group CEO, Kusumi Yūki. He wrote that the company should make the fullest use of the talent that society has entrusted to it, and so strengthen its competitiveness. This, he wrote, is what he believes the founder meant by making people before making things.

Red Beard

Kurosawa Akira’s film Akahige (Red Beard) opened in Japan on April 3, 1965. It is based on Yamamoto Shūgorō’s Akahige shinryōtan. A young doctor, Yasumoto, has studied medicine in Nagasaki. He comes to live as an apprentice at the Koishikawa Yōjōsho, the shogunate’s clinic for the poor in Edo. Its director is known as Red Beard.

The film database eiga.com describes the story as the bond between the director and the young doctor. In its synopsis, Yasumoto resists the director at first and slowly comes to respect him. The cast is led by Mifune Toshirō and Kayama Yūzō.

The Regeneration Factory

Nomura saisei kōjō, the Nomura regeneration factory, was the name for the baseball manager Nomura Katsuya’s skill at reviving players who had struggled elsewhere. The sports magazine Number calls the pitcher Tabata Kazuya its finest product. Tabata came to the Yakult Swallows from Daiei. In his first season under Nomura, he started 25 games and went 12 and 12. In his second, he went 15 and 5.

Nomura later said, as Number reports: Tabata ni kagirazu, puro yakyū senshu wa honno hitokoto no adobaisu de kawaru kēsu ga ōō ni shite aru. This is true not only of Tabata. A professional ballplayer is often changed by a single word of advice. Mostly, Nomura added, it is because the player’s earlier thinking was wrong.

The Stable’s Mother

In a sumo stable, the stablemaster’s family and all the wrestlers “eat rice from the same pot” and “live under one roof,” as an article on nippon.com puts it. The article calls the stablemaster’s wife, the okamisan, probably the most important person behind the scenes. She manages the money, arranges the parties of supporters and deals with patrons. She also serves as mother to every wrestler and teaches them manners.

Group Action

Students of Nippon Sport Science University perform shūdan kōdō, group action, at the university’s physical education demonstration. Long lines of students march, turn and pass through one another’s lines. TV Tokyo explains that a diagonal crossing needs exact spacing, stride and timing, or the performers collide. In one show in Abashiri, reported by the Hokkaido Shimbun, 103 students took part.

Japanese Wikipedia credits Kiyohara Nobuhiko, a professor emeritus of the university, with researching and developing it. The students are volunteers and train three days a week for five months. According to TV Tokyo, the practice reportedly began in the university’s dormitories as a way to learn omoiyari, consideration for others.

Paying the Colleagues Who Cover

For childcare leave that begins on or after January 1, 2024, the Japanese government subsidizes employers that pay an allowance to the colleagues who take over the work of the employee on leave. A leaflet of the labor bureaus explains the subsidy. It generally pays three quarters of the allowance, with a limit of 100,000 yen a month for twelve months.

The leaflet calls these colleagues shūi no rōdōsha, the workers around the person on leave. A separate part of the same subsidy supports hiring a replacement.

Fourth-Year Gods

Yonen kamisama, sannen tennō, ninen shimin, ichinen dorei: fourth-year students are gods, third-year students are emperors, second-year students are citizens, and first-year students are slaves. A 1991 paper in a bulletin of Kagoshima University cites the phrase as a way in which the hierarchy of university sports clubs was mocked and criticized.

The sports magazine Number used a short form in a headline that rejects it: Yonen kamisama, ichinen dorei de wa nai. It is not fourth-year gods and first-year slaves.

Forms in Judo

In judo, kata are set forms practiced in two roles, tori and uke, and the Kōdōkan asks that both roles be performed. The Kōdōkan writes that kata are something every holder of a dan grade should master, and that they are an important condition in the standards for promotion. A Nippon Budokan guide to judo lists the nage no kata, the forms of throwing, for the second dan.

Predicting Danger

In kiken yochi kunren, hazard prediction training, a small group talks through the dangers hidden in a workplace or a task, using illustrated sheets or the work itself. The Japan Industrial Safety and Health Association describes how it ends. The group confirms the danger points and key actions by pointing and calling them out, and solves the problem before work begins.

The association presents the training together with its zero-accident campaign, which began in 1973 with the support of the Ministry of Labour. The campaign’s final goal is zero accidents and zero illness.

Punishing the Whole Team

In 2022, the Japan Student Baseball Association banned Kanaashi Agricultural High School in Akita from outside games for three months, after bullying within its baseball club.

In draft disciplinary standards, the association itself named the problem of rentai sekinin, joint responsibility. Punishing a team for one member’s violation, it wrote, imposes a penalty on members who did nothing wrong and has been called unreasonable. A President Online article notes that in recent high school baseball, when there is no organized involvement by several members, punishment as a rule stays with the members concerned.