Public Relations in Japan

Evolution in a Culture of Lifetime Employment

Tomoki Kunieda, Koichi Yamamura, Junichiro Miyabe, Yamamura Koichi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351797740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Despite its rapid economic development, Japan lacks a large public relations industry and its role is viewed very differently from its Western counterparts. PR functions are handled predominantly in-house and a degree in a PR field is not a hiring requirement for those agencies which do operate. Mainstream PR history focusses entirely on its organizational aspects, and there are no Japanese PR "gurus" defining the field.

1 History in brief

Koichi Yamamura, Seiya Ikari, and Takashi Kenmochi

Until the early days of industrialization in Japan, there was a fairly high mobility of factory workers. Such mobility caused uncertainty and inconvenience to employers trying to retain a constant labor force. To counteract the mobility of workers, management policies gradually shifted toward keeping workers for a longer time. By the beginning of the 20th century, larger enterprises were starting to develop management policies such as various welfare benefits and company housing at nominal rent. The labor shortage after World War I further accelerated such trends. As a regular employment system, accepting a considerable number of new graduates fresh out of school every spring took root. People without prior working experience were thought to have high potential for nurturing loyalty toward the company (Nakane, 1970/1998).

The employment system was further strengthened by additional devices such as a seniority payment system and retirement payment. The development of the bureaucratic structure of business enterprises during the second and the third decades of the 20th century and the strong influence of the military system during World War II further strengthened the shift toward a lifetime employment system. The labor union activities during the post-World War II period further encouraged the familism-oriented management style, welfare services, and extra payments supplied by the company (Nakane, 1970/1998).

The familism in Japanese companies and their preference for new graduates who can be easily molded into the company’s corporate culture is quite different from the purely contractual relationship between employer and employees that is based on the evaluation of professional skills. There are signs of changes to this labor practice in Japan to this day, such as the large-scale discharge of employees by large companies during economic downturns in the 1990s and 2000s and an increase in mid-career employment since the 1990s, but lifetime employment still influences various aspects of labor practice as the underlying philosophy of major Japanese organizations.

Public relations in the early days

Today in Japan, public relations is called kouhou. The word, in its original meaning, means to “widely notify,” and it represents only a part of public relations’ functions. The first appearance of the term can be traced back to the May 9, 1872, issue of the Yokohama Mainichi Shimbun, the oldest daily newspaper in Japan. The term was used to denote advertisement or announcement (Kitano, 2009).

Many newspapers were born during the late 19th century and the early 20th century, and in response, many press agencies that handle domestic news were born. Some of them were backed by the government, and one of their main tasks was to convey government-released documents to newspapers and government officials stationed in the regional offices (Yamamoto, 1981). These press agencies were the first organizations to systematically engage in the publicity business.

The first Japanese organization to set up a kouhou department was the South Manchurian Railroad (Mantetsu), although it was established overseas. The company was founded in 1906. Japan obtained the right to manage railroads in Manchuria (the northeastern part of today’s China) as the result of its victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Mantetsu set up a kouhou department in 1923, and from the early 1920s, Mantetsu had an office in New York for the introduction of capital and technology as well as provision and collection of information (Ogawa, 2008). According to Cutlip, the railroad industry was among the first in the United States to use the term “public relations” (1995). Mantetsu had close contacts with the US railroad industry (Ishii, 1997), and it had opportunities to study public relations from the US railroad organizations (Yamamura et al., 2014).

One of the purposes of Mantetsu’s public relations activities was to inform Japanese in the home country that Manchuria was a frontier land with enormous opportunities and to encourage them to emigrate. The other was to guide Japanese in Manchuria to live in harmony with local people. Mantetsu’s publicity activities included inviting a group of journalists from the United States to Manchuria; inviting storytellers, painters, and opinion leaders from Japan to introduce Manchuria through their work; holding Manchuria Exhibitions at various locations in Japan; producing movies on Manchuria; and publishing magazines (Ogawa, 2008).

In 1932, Japan established a puppet regime, Manchukuo, in Manchuria, and Japanese undertook the administration. The Manchukuo government set up a kouhou-sho, a public relations department, to jointly engage in public relations activities with Mantetsu. The kouhou-sho published a research journal on propaganda and public relations, and Harold Lasswell’s Propaganda Technique in the World War and Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels were listed in the journal as references (Matsumoto, 1938/1981).

Within Japan, in 1932, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Army jointly but informally set up an information committee. In 1937, the committee officially became the information division of the Cabinet Office, and the division controlled the collection and dissemination of information for both inside and outside of the country. By the time Japan entered World War II in 1941, there was a propaganda machine in place (Tobe, 2010).

As Japan’s economy boomed during World War I, big corporations needed to retain experienced workers. They employed various employee relations tactics, including the seniority wage system and lifetime employment. These systems became the icons of Japanese-style employment practices. The largest textile company in Japan at the time, Kanebo, was hiring female workers in their early teens, and the company built schools for the workers and taught reading and writing, mathematics, and sewing. In 1903, it published an in-house magazine called Kanebo no Kiteki [The whistle of Kanebou]. The magazine’s stated goal was to share information with everyone in the company from the president to female factory workers (Nihon PR Kondankai, 1980). Although it had been widely believed that Kanebo no Kiteki was the first in-house magazine in Japan (e.g., Ikari et al., 2011), a recent discovery of an older in-house magazine is introduced in chapter 4.

The concept underlying such employee relations was that a company was a community and employees were expected to devote themselves to the prosperity of the community. In return, companies treated their employees as family members (Hazama, 1996). This kind of company-employee relationship was ubiquitous in Japan until the 1970s; since the 1980s, as financial capitalism took over industrial capitalism, it started to gradually fade away (Dore, 2000).

Introduction of PR from the United States in the post-World War II era

Defeated, Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Forces in August 1945. In an effort to democratize Japan, the Allied Forces urged the formation of labor unions, which led factory workers to eagerly engage in the union movement. Labor disputes boiled up in every corner of the country, and the labor-management relationship was the worst in the history of Japan. Two management organizations were established in the late 1940s to help revive the economy. One was Keizai Doyu Kai [Japan Association of Corporate Executives], and the other was Nihon Keieisha Renmei (JFEA) [Japan Federation of Employers’ Association] (Ikari et al., 2011). Keizai Doyu Kai was an association of young executives in their 40s with a progressive mindset. They advocated the introduction of management councils that included labor unions as its members (Yamamura et al., 2014).

JFEA’s mission was to plan and practice ways to bring about a healthy labor-management relationship. JFEA sent its first management delegation to the United States in 1951 to learn how to improve the labor-management relationship. During the visit, the members of the delegation learned the concept of public relations. However, as their concern was primarily the improvement of the labor-management relationship, their proposal upon returning from the United States was primarily the adoption of human-relationship-oriented labor-management practices, such as employee suggestion systems, publication of in-house magazines, and management training focusing on human relationship with their subordinates – a mere portion of the public relations concept (Nihon PR Kondankai, 1980).

Dentsu, the largest advertising agency group in Japan and the fifth largest in the world today, also played an important role in introducing the public relations concept to Japan. Founded in 1901, the company managed both wire services and advertising until it divested the wire service business under the war-time government policy in 1936. The company had branches in Manchuria before World War II and was engaged in radio advertising. At the time, radio advertising as commercial media did not exist in mainland Japan. Hideo Yoshida, who later became the president of Dentsu in1947, learned about public relations and began studying it (Ogura, 1976). In February 1946, Dentsu announced the six company policies that included the introduction and popularization of public relations as one (Kitano, 2014). Around 1955, as Japan entered the era of rapid economic growth, marketing was introduced from the United States as a mass sales promotion technique. Dentsu, as an advertising agency, spearheaded the efforts to popularize marketing in Japan. Books written by Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Waste Makers (1960), were translated into Japanese and became best-sellers. Packard criticized marketing as playing with the deep psyche and the depletion of natural resources. He also noted that in the United States, public relations was conceived as one of the marketing techniques. Packard listed unhealthy marketing practices that tried to take advantage of consumer psyches, but some in the advertising industry in Japan tried to promote these practices to advocate the concept of marketing (Yamamoto, 1994).

The US-led General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (GHQ) was another path for public relations to make an entry into Japan. GHQ and its branches began providing suggestions to Japan’s national and local governments, starting from 1947, to install public relations offices. Each ministry and local government tried to understand GHQ’s intention and what public relations was. One by one, they established the public relations offices (Nihon PR Kondankai, 1980). Various names in Japanese were assigned to these offices as translation of public relations; eventually, they converged into a Japanese word kouhou. As the Japanese government did not have the mindset and systems to seek input from citizens, kouhou offices disseminated information from the administration or, at best, surveyed public opinion (Yamamura et al., 2014).

The assignment of kouhou as the translation of public relations caused many Japanese to misconceive public relations even to this day. The word public relations was also used, in particular, among marketing people. As foreign words are difficult for Japanese to pronounce they are often abbreviated. PR, or its sound representation in Japanese, became a common term in the context of marketing, however, often meaning self-promotion. Whether it was called kouhou or PR, certain aspects of public relations such as two-way communication, mutual understanding and trust, were lost in translation.

(Yamamura et al., 2014, p. 67)

In November 1949, GHQ authorized Ms. Day to engage in public relations activities (Nihon Keizai Shimbun as cited in Morito, 2008). The agency, Georgia Day and Associates, was the first public relations agency on record (Morito, 2008). Only nine PR firms were known to have existed in the 1940s and 1950s. Among them were Falcon Advertising and PR founded in 1952 by an American Rose Falkenstein; Japan PR, founded in 1958 by a second-generation Japanese American; and Hill and Knowlton, which opened its office in Tokyo in 1958. It is unclear how long Georgia Day and Associates existed, but it did appear in Dentsu PR’s internal newsletter in 1968 (Morito, 2008).

1960s: public relations as a marketing function

The 1960s saw Japan’s economy burst into full bloom. The rise of consumerism was foreseen in 1959 when the phrases “consumption is a virtue” and “consumers are the kings” became buzzphrases. Increasing demand for television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines drove Japan’s economy in the early 1960s. In the late 1960s, color television sets, automobiles, and air conditioners took over this position. Consumers began to feel they were in the middle class, as they could afford these durable consumer goods. It was in 1968 that Japan’s GNP became the second largest in the free world, paving the way for the country to be one of the leading economic powers of the world.

Alongside the economy, mass media also grew. Newspapers increased the number of pages. Many weekly magazines were launched. Publicity caught attention as a marketing tool, and newspapers, radio, and weekly magazines became vehicles of publicity. It was in this decade that full-scale public relations agencies were born. In 1961, Dentsu established the Dentsu PR Center (currently Dentsu Public Relations). In a decade-to-decade comparison, the largest number of PR firms were born in the 1960s. This trend spilled into the next decade until 1973 when the oil crisis changed the business environment (Morito, 2008).

In the 1950s, public relations activities were handled by the general affairs department, but in the 1960s, many corporations set up public relations departments as an independent function (Kenmochi, 2008). One newspaper reporter said that “mass media welcomed corporate publicity activities as it helped them increase the volume of articles” as his recollection of the 1960s (Morito, 2010).

Public relations industry organizations, both in the public and private sectors, were established in the 1960s. In the private sector, four public relations firms that were engaged in international PR formed the Japan PR Society in 1964. Later in 1975, domestic-focused agencies formed the PR Work Japan Society. These two organizations merged in 1980 to form the Public Relations Society of Japan, which is still active today. In the public sector, the Japan Public Relations Association was formed in 1963 to assemble and support the public relations departments of the national and local governments (Yamamura et al., 2014).

1970s: criticism of corporations and the establishment of the kouhou departments

In the 1970s, Japan was polluted with by-products of mass production. It was a consequence of unparalleled rapid economic growth. Sensational headlines such as “Drop Dead GNP” decorated newspapers as they accused big corporations of lacking social responsibility. Corporations faced severe social criticism for their role in the destruction of human lives and peaceful living.

Pollution was not the only thing that corporations were criticized for. The oil-shock-related price hikes, dual pricing, land price speculation, drug-induced diseases, and harmful food products all led to severe criticism of corporations. They were viewed as not fulfilling their social responsibilities. It became a common understanding that there was a need to monitor corporate activities and protest against corporations that had not fulfilled their social responsibilities. Consumer activism in Japan gained momentum to an unprecedented level (Kenmochi, 2008). The consumerism movement in Japan was also influenced by the overseas movements. From time to time, newspapers and TV reported the consumer movements and the anti-war movements in the United States and the students’ demonstrations in France. The Japanese followed suit with a slight time lag. The rise of consumerism in Japan can be interpreted as a sign that the citizen, as a layer of the society, was being formed in Japan (Yamamura et al., 2014).

People became highly aware of social issues surrounding them. Suddenly the public became important to corporations. The number of corporations setting up sections responsible for dealing with consumers grew substantially in the 1970s. Many companies set up specific sections under the umbrella of public relations to handle complaints and inquiries from consumers. Mass media rushed to companies that caused environmental pollution. These companies were suddenly busy handling media inquiries. In the 1970s, the importance of public affairs was recognized, and certain corporations set up departments and sections focused on dealing with the communities and environmental issues (Ikari et al., 2011). There were certain executives who thought that corporations would need to bear increased social responsibility. For most corporate executives, howe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the culture of lifetime employment and the history of Japanese PR
• 1 History in brief
• 2 The democratization of Japan and the introduction of American PR
• 3 Public relations by a local government: 150 years of Tokyo’s PR
• 4 The history of internal communications in Japanese companies
• 5 (Under-) development of the PR industry and profession
• 6 A tale of two professionalisms: human resource management (HRM) and the PR function of Japanese companies
• 7 Impacts of crises on public relations 2007–2017: the “Lehman Shock” and the Great East Japan Earthquake
• 8 The current situation of corporate public relations in Japan: an attempt to assess comprehensive public relations activities from eight aspects
• Concluding remarks: how general are we?
• Appendix 1 Glossary of key terms
• Appendix 2 Chronology of PR in Japan 1861–2017
• Appendix 3 Note on Japanese employment practices
• Index