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“I am American, I don’t know any better,” Shimo explained. But if Shimo did it wrong, it wouldn’t matter as much. The Japanese man feared a loss of face if he made a mistake in judgment. in Torrance, recalled how on one occasion a Japanese citizen asked him to help a status-conscious group of Japanese executives line up correctly for a picture at a golf tournament. Shimo, a vice president with Honda International Trading Corp. “The president was going to San Diego, and they would come to me and ask, ‘What is a good restaurant in San Diego?’ ”Ĭedrick M. “It was anything from renting a car to arranging for a plane,” recalled the executive, 41, who grew up in San Diego.

Steven Ikemura, a former officer with the Industrial Bank of Japan in Los Angeles, said that, in addition to his financial duties, he fielded such a diverse array of requests from the Japanese that he sometimes felt like a handyman. “It’s for friends and family.”ĭespite their numerous differences, the Japanese may feel close enough to the nikkei to seek guidance that they would be embarrassed to ask of other Americans. “I tell them most (Americans) don’t work on weekends,” said Nomiyama, who works at the company’s Seattle office. She added: “There was a lot more bowing between Japan-born local employees and the Tokyo staff than between me and the Tokyo staff.”Īt Mitsui, Nomiyama said he has to resist the attempts of his supervisors to get him to spend time on weekends cultivating potential customers-an unpaid work contribution that Japanese employees make routinely. “Those from the outside tend to be more outspoken than someone in Japan,” explained Kathleen Kumagai, 34, a former assistant vice president with the Industrial Bank of Japan in Los Angeles.

One obvious source of puzzlement to the Japanese is the decidedly non-Japanese behavior of the Japanese-Americans. According to scholars, many Japanese back home blamed the nikkei for the hostile reception they received here and looked upon them as the dregs of Japanese society.Įven today, noted Yuji Ichioka, a UCLA history professor and author of “The Issei, ' a new book named for the early immigrants, Japanese who are in this country on business see their American cousins almost as “kinds of freaks.” Most Japanese-Americans are descended from farmers who fled to this country in quest of a better life, starting at the end of the 19th Century. The Japanese and the nikkei long have viewed each other through a curious cultural lens. “Now I guess they all wear European shoes,” said Miyakoda, who oversees Sumitomo’s personnel department from the San Francisco headquarters. Today, with Japan’s emergence as a financial superpower, such jokes seem quaint. “If you heard the shoes squeak, you’d say, ‘He must be from Japan.’ ”

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The soft-spoken Miyakoda, who started out as a bank teller in the 1950s, recalled that the Japanese-Americans at Sumitomo used to crack jokes about their supervisors’ poorly made footwear. Yet if Japanese-Americans in this country have made great economic progress, the Japanese employers here have done even better. The Santa Monica native, 61, declared with obvious pride: “The name of Sumitomo in a Japanese household always had prestige.” Yet for all the insights that Japanese-Americans have to offer Tokyo-based employers in the United States, they rarely are granted real power within such companies. Japanese supervisors may even expect their Japanese-Americans-or nikkei -employees to make personal sacrifices that they would not demand of other Americans. At the same time, they may be confused when the Japanese-Americans don’t act Japanese-even though some, such as Nomiyama, are third-generation Americans.

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life as how to scold an errant employee or arrange for a car rental. The Japanese may rely on their American cousins to explain such diverse aspects of U.S. “Whenever we tell Japanese that we’re Japanese-American, they say ‘No-you are American-Japanese,’ ” he said.Īs Nomiyama has found, to be a Japanese-American with a Japanese employer can mean navigating a tortuous path between cultures. They quickly learn that-despite appearances-he is from another world. export representative for Mitsui & Co., a Tokyo-based trading company, he often deals with Japanese citizens. Nomiyama is a Japanese-American, Stanford-educated, raised in Seattle. “They don’t understand why I don’t live with my parents to save money.” “They’re not used to someone being so independent, who cooks for himself, lives on his own,” said Nomiyama, 26. Only in his case, the most innocent revelations sometimes leave everyone bewildered. Nomiyama often builds rapport with clients by telling them a little about himself.