Brand Japan
Five ways to rebuild Japan’s brand equity in the 21st century
Tokyo 2020 2021
In September 2013, Tokyo was chosen as the host city for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games.
Six decades earlier, the first Tokyo Olympics were held in 1964, marking the triumphant reemergence of Japan as a nation and a brand, barely twenty years after losing the war disastrously with not one but two atomic bombs on its soil.
Tokyo 2020 was supposed to be, not the return to the past, but the beginning of a new era for Brand Japan on the global stage.
However, in March 2020, four months before the start of the Games, the unthinkable happened. The world stopped. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Japanese government were forced to postpone the event until further notice.
The IOC and the Japanese government couldn’t help themselves. They had already raked in millions of dollars from numerous sponsors around the world. Despite the majority of Japanese citizens being against the event happening in Tokyo in 2020 or 2021, Thomas Bach, the IOC boss, and Shinzo Abe, then the prime minister of Japan, pretended that the pandemic was over, forcibly deciding to hold the event in July 2021.
This, like many, was a capitalistic decision. By the summer of 2021, they argued that the pandemic would be under control and safe enough for the Olympics to take place, with hundreds of thousands of tourists flocking to Japan and in attendance.
COVID had other plans.
Tokyo 2020 became Tokyo 2021, an Olympic event that wasn’t.
When Kengo Kuma, Japan’s most prominent living architect, designed the Japan National Stadium, he painted the stadium seats with multiple colors to create the illusion of a full stadium even without every seat filled. This technique is known within the architecture field and Kuma applied it years before the pandemic. This design detail turned out to be a stroke of genius as the stadium, unwillingly, was empty.
God has a dark sense of humor.
The Miracle
Less than 20 years before the Tokyo 1964 Games, Tokyo had been burnt to the ground with 1,665 tons of bombs on the city.
The Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, was “the single deadliest air raid of World War II, greater than Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki as single events.” It is said that more than 100,000 people died overnight, with countless more not just in the following weeks and months but years with lasting impact of both physical and psychological damages of war.
To see a country rise from its ashes in less than two decades was nothing short of a miracle. Hosting such a major international event was the best branding opportunity any nation could have to prove its presence and might to the world.
Japan did rise to the occasion. To this day, Tokyo 1964 remains one of the two most successful branding executions any nation had in history. The other? The American flag on the moon in 1969. A topic for another essay.
Image vs. equity
“Your country is amazing.”
A random customer support guy from Verizon told me. I was on the phone trying to resolve a billing issue and he asked me, after reading my last name, if I was Japanese. He talked about One Piece, a Japanese manga series, in more depth than I ever could. He went on to talk about a couple of other topics about Japan with a level of passion and knowledge that was honorable. I didn't mind this small talk with a stranger as he was complimenting my motherland.
“How many times have you been to Japan?” I asked. “Oh, I wish!” said the guy on the other end of the line.
As a Japanese, I’m obviously biased but Japan has a lure, an aura, and an image about itself that attracts this kind of affection. It ranked third on the list of the best countries for travel and tourism in this year’s World Economic Forum’s Travel & Tourism Development Index (TTDI).
Around the first Olympic Games in Tokyo in the 1960s, many Japanese businesses such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Sony, Panasonic, and so on, started to expand internationally. That fueled Japan’s growth as well as its presence in the world. During the second half of the industrial 20th century, Japan succeeded in monetizing around the world what it produced.
For over four decades from 1945 to the late 1980s, Japan rapidly and then steadily grew its brand image as well as equity around the world.
That equity started to erode with the burst of Japan’s economic bubble in the late 1980s.
Japan’s neighbors and competitors
Around this time, neighboring countries like China and South Korea started to threaten some of Japan’s strongholds in key industries. China grew its economy by becoming the world’s factory while South Korea imitated Japan’s success in the automotive and electronics sectors.
Japan did manage, and still does, to hold its dominance in the automotive industry, with Toyota, Honda, and Nissan giving Germany a run for its money.
However, in electronics, companies like South Korea’s Samsung, Taiwan’s Foxconn (locally known as Hon Hai), and China’s Tencent replaced Japan’s Sony, Hitachi, and Panasonic as global leaders.
This Industrial Age was then followed by the Internet Age, in which the US gained tremendous wealth and advantages over most countries. This is where Japan has struggled.
China, in addition to becoming the manufacturing juggernaut for the world, developed an advanced mobile economy, with close to 90% of the population using mobile payments. In Japan, according to one survey, about 44% of respondents still use cash. China’s software industry has given us TikTok, Temu, and SHEIN, much to the US’s disdain. In South Korea’s case, it’s successfully elevated its global relevance in the entertainment business with K-Pop.
As Japan’s power declined in manufacturing, its international relevance spread to more cultural territories: cuisine, anime, gaming, karaoke, and so forth. Emoji may be the biggest and most ubiquitous invention from Japan of the past quarter century.
The problem is, that although Japan may have managed to stay relevant culturally on a global scale, its economic might in the world has slipped away.
“Japan needs to rebuild its presence abroad,” says Masayoshi Amamiya, the Former Bank of Japan Deputy Governor who is a key figure in determining the interest rates, referring to the weakening yen. Japan’s brand image is much stronger than its brand equity.
Japanese and foreign economists and government officials suggest various legal, financial, and digital transformations to jolt its stagnant economy. They are not wrong but many aren’t talking about simpler and more basic mind shifts.
They aren’t talking about them because they are cultural, intangible, and potentially threatening to men.
Here are five barriers to break through in rebuilding Japan’s brand equity.
1. Seniority custom (年功序列)
The seniority custom gets serious starting in middle school in Japan.
A seventh grader—the first year of middle school in Japan—is supposed to refer to an eighth or ninth grader as “Senpai,” or “Senior Fellow,” and use a more respectful language to upperclassmen. Not only does this extend into colleges and workplaces, but it gets more emphasized as people gain more experience. It gets reflected in titles and salaries regardless of their capabilities.
This kind of rigid hierarchy did serve Japan well in making the nation one of the powerhouses in the world in the 20th century. Formalities, processes, and disciplines were strictly followed, creating the kind of economy, industries, and organizations. Also, Japan’s social welfare system is far more functional than the US, protecting elders.
In the political, economic, and corporate organizations, however, Japan needs to break its stubborn adherence to the age-based seniority custom.
And that means older men giving up power and giving seats, positions, and opportunities to younger folks based on capabilities, not on seniority.
2. Patriarchy (男尊女卑)
This leads to another stubborn, unspoken cultural custom in Japan: patriarchy. There is even a phrase: “Male respect, female inferiority.”
This isn’t unique to Japan. It is a global problem. Even in the world’s most powerful nation, the United States, we have yet to see a female president (this could change in November). In the gender gap report by the World Economic Forum in 2024, Japan ranked 118th among 146 countries and the lowest among the G7 industrialized nations. Germany ranked 7th, the highest among G countries, and the US 43rd, not the ranking to be proud of.
Like the seniority custom, it’s older men who hold the key to breaking the patriarchal culture in Japan. For Japan to gain its brand equity in the 21st century, it needs to start with gender equity.
3. English (英語)
Even though almost every Japanese person learns 10 years of English—three years in middle school, three years in high school, and four years in college—very few people can speak English effectively in Japan.
Teaching a language is not a quick fix. It also is potentially expensive if we are talking about years of lessons and tutoring. However, I also believe that the barrier isn’t as high as it used to be, with a myriad of tools, apps, and platforms available to learn and teach English at low cost, if not for free.
In 2007, I took my first trip to China for work. It was to teach a creative workshop, organized by a NY-based non-profit called the One Club, to 500 students gathered from all around China. Most of them had never stepped out of China. However, a good amount of them spoke, not fluently but well enough to be able to communicate. At the end of the 5-day workshop, select teams were to present their work on stage and I was so impressed that many presented in English with confidence.
You wouldn’t see this in Japan, unfortunately. Japanese perfectionism gets in the way here also.
The language barrier is more mental and psychological than one might think.
4. Storytelling (ストーリーテリング)
Japan has produced some fantastic storytellers such as Akira Kurosawa and Haruki Murakami. It also has a unique storytelling culture with writing forms like haiku.
However, in Corporate Japan, this all falls apart. Japanese meetings and presentations are just so painful to watch. There is so much emphasis on form and process, not on content and story. Japanese business people are more focused on providing information, and not enough on conveying intention.
No matter how much technology advances, humans still make decisions based on emotion. Entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs knew how to use the power of storytelling over technology to build a business.
Many Japanese companies are capable of producing things. They need to also focus on conveying things more effectively.
One caution, though: when you look up the word ‘storytelling’ in Japanese, in addition to “telling a story,” it also lists “telling a lie” as its definition. There are many effective storytellers like Steve Jobs, Dr. Martin Luther King, and John F. Kennedy. Then, there are also the likes of Adam Neumann, Elizabeth Holmes, and dare I say it, Donald Trump.
5. Decisiveness (決断)
Here’s a joke about Japanese business culture I heard a long time ago:
“When you ask a “Yes or No” question to a Japanese businessman, what’s the answer you get?”
When I ask this, almost no one gets it right. The answer? “Or.”
This is a joke of course but it does reflect some of the tendencies of what it’s like doing business with Japanese companies.
I believe decisiveness in any organization’s or nation’s future equity. I see this quality in some leaders like Mr. Tadashi Yanai, the founder/CEO of Uniqlo and with whom we work, or Mr. Akio Toyoda, now the chairman of Toyota Group. Over the past two decades, they’ve made some bold decisions, and lo and behold, they have become two of Japan’s most successful and globally influential companies.
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For Japan to regain and grow in the 21st century, changes in economic policies and analog processes could help. However, changes in mindsets can and will make a far greater impact on Japan’s future—and its brand equity.
Thanks for reading. Please hit reply with any feedback, thoughts, or questions. I’d love to hear from you.
I love the comprehensive analysis and the five strategic takeaways. As a Japanese Brazilian, it provided me with insights into ethnic behaviors while inspiring me to look at Brazil from a realistically positive perspective.