Japanese in Brazil

Press, 5 March 1982, Page 14

Japanese in Brazil

From “The Economist,” London

The Japanese-looking businessman in a neat',' dark suit peddling Jatco coffee harvesting machines from Addis Ababa through Nairobi to Dar Es Salaam is part of a relentless export drive — by Brazil. He is one of the 750,000 “nissei” (second generation) Japanese in Brazil, the first of whom went there in 1908 as meek replacements for ■ Italian labourers. The Japanese were the first to farm profitably in the Amazon jungle. Japanese business methods are as much of a fad in Brazil as in America. Emigre Japanese businessmen have prospered in Brazil for two generations. Their biggest enterprises are ' Cotia, which pioneered agricultural cooperatives in Brazil, and Banco America do Sul. Without the market gardens of the Japanese ethnics and the Cotia co-operative that sells their produce, many Brazilians could find themselves eating more rice and beans than they

care to, instead of a wider diet including the poultry and eggs in which Cotia specialises. Cotia has sales of S6OOM a year, and 6000 members, most of them Japanese ethnics. Many of the 30-year-olds were children of American fathers and Japanese mothers during the occupation of 1945-52. Banco America do Sul, says the bank’s president, Mr Fujio Tachibanp, is twice as profitable as Brazilian banks double its size. The bank has 95 branches and 6000 employees, and its thousands of individual shareholders, none with more than a 1 per-cent stake, are almost entirely of Japanese descent. The bank’s workers are picked as young as possible, and can expect to spend their whole working life in the company, retiring on full pay. Brazil’s most recent Japanese immigrants — big companies like Toyota, Honda, NEC and Sharp — have often hired nissei Japanese. Some of these firms have preferred Cal-

ifornia’s Asian ethnics when manning their American plants. Professor Yuichi Tsukamoto, a consultant for Sharp, says that what are now dubbed Japanese management methods work smoothly elsewhere. Japanese companies are getting good results from •all their workers in Brazil, where the gap between management and labour has always been wide. Workers at NEC’s Sao Paulo factory impressed their Japanese managers by drawing up a chart showing how long each of them spends in the lavatory each month (ranging from five and a half hours to an uncomfortable nil). NEC last year set its workers some specific aims: to reduce faults in its' telecommunications products by 50 per cent; to increase productivity and profits by set percentages; and to get at least one suggestion on improving the company’s performance from each worker. All these targets were met ahead of schedule.