In sharp contrast with older Japanese, many in the under-40 generation reject the basic values of mass production society (see "Japan's New Face," page 5). The overwhelming majority of young Japanese disdain both the concept of lifetime employment and the idea of working in manufacturing industries. Even among engineers and computer scientists, the majority seek employment in softer fields such as fashion, media, finance, insurance, and real estate. "When college students go out looking for a job, they want to avoid the three Ks -- kiken [dangerous], kitsui [hard], and kitenai [messy], so manufacturers are having a hard time," asserts Hosei University's Kiyonari. "These days even the NECs and the Fujitsus are being avoided by new workers because kitsui is there."
Yet what may be a challenge to traditional mass-production companies, Kiyonari believes, also offers opportunities to smaller, design-oriented companies. At Nuno Corp., a Tokyo textile company, there has been no problem recruiting new workers. Most of Nuno's six-person permanent staff is under 30, and all are women.
Reiko Sudo, Nuno's 37-year-old founder, believes her company -- which produces unusual textiles and garments -- naturally appeals to a generation turned off by the monotony of Japan's mass-production-dominated society and attracted to more traditional, artisan-based values. She knows these sentiments from personal experience.
Before launching Nuno, Sudo was a successful designer for Kanebo Ltd., one of Japan's leading textile companies. She was well respected, well paid, and increasingly alienated. "What I designed sold like hotcakes, but at Kanebo I didn't feel it was connected to me," the designer said in her tiny showroom in Tokyo's fashionable Roppongi district. "The businesspeople took care of things, but I felt empty. I felt part of a process but not responsible."
Sudo found her way out in 1982, when she met a designer named Junichi Arai. One of the pioneers of Japan's burgeoning textile-design industry, Arai used computers to design new textures and structures, most owing their inspiration to traditional Japanese design. He also invented new kinds of blended materials, for instance, laminating layers of oxidized titanium and nylon film to make what he called Titanium Lamé Silk.
Arai's genius, however, did not extend to business management. So Sudo, with financing from a friend and her contacts in the interior- and architectural-design industries, launched Nuno as a means to market and manufacture Arai's techniques and her own designs. At the same time she also established close ties with a series of small family workshops -- most with fewer than a dozen employees -- in Gumma Prefecture, a traditional artisan center 75 miles north of Tokyo. But Sudo's innovations did not stop there. To keep her technically complex products from being too expensive, she decided to sell directly to the public, cutting out the layers of distributors that can double the retail price of garments. She set up her own direct retail distribution through her Tokyo shop, with showrooms in New York City and Los Angeles. She also launched a wholesale business by selling her fabrics to other designers and interior decorators. Today each channel accounts for roughly half the company's more than $1.5 million in sales.
"The only way we could survive was to change the structure of the textile industry itself," Sudo explains. "I wanted to avoid the system of wholesalers, trading companies, and retailers that jack up the price of everything. I wanted an honest price, so I could sell a quality product."
To Sudo, such breakthroughs -- in design, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing -- are critical not only for Nuno, but for Japan's textile and garment industry. Once Japan's foremost sector for exports, textile industries suffered a trade deficit in 1988, mostly due to imports from lower-wage Asian nations. To survive in the future, she believes, the old mass-production psychology of not only the textile companies, but also of Japan's entire industrial system, must change.
And Sudo, like other creators of the new Japan Inc., is confident that it will change. After all, she reasons, if a woman who thought of herself as an alienated artist can build one of Japan's most lionized young fashion companies, a changing of her nation's industrial guard may very well be taking place -- even if few in the West, or even Japan, recognize it.
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JAPAN'S NEW FACE
Changing Attitudes toward work, self, and society
Of all the factors contributing to the shift toward a new Japan Inc., the most surprising may be the changing values of the country's young. The sort of work force that drove Japan's mass-production manufacturing machine is vanishing. Today's young people express attitudes so profoundly different from those held by their elders that they call themselves shinjinrui, the new race.
Raised in the affluence and Western influences of the 1970s and '80s, Japanese in their twenties reject the postwar generation's scale of values -- service to country first, company second, family third, and self last. Job and nation have slipped. Individualism, long considered un-Japanese, has arrived. And that, Japanese observers believe, bodes well for companies such as Matsuda R&D, Nuno, and Suzuki Sogyo, which emphasize innovation and individual creativity.
Some evidence:
* Shinjinrui differ radically from the previous generation in their attitudes toward self and society. Surveys indicate that among Japanese in their twenties, the aim for individual fulfillment is more important than making a contribution to society as a whole. The priorities of their parents' generation are reversed.
* Contrary to Western stereotypes and the characteristics exhibited by their own parents, fewer Tokyo young people identify work as the center of their lives than do their New York City and Los Angeles counterparts.
* The jobs that built the old Japan Inc. are out of favor. Now high among career preferences listed by college students are trade, medicine, banking, and hotels and travel. Placing low: industrial manufacturing, including high tech.
* Lifetime employment, long the great lure of the giant companies, is rapidly losing its appeal. According to a government study, only 29% of Japanese 20 to 29 years old plan to stick with one company throughout their working lives, in contrast to 70% of Japanese aged 55 and older.
