Episode #265: Japan Can Be Brutal In Sports And Business

We recently had a blatant example of poor sportsmanship here in an American Football game between two traditional University team rivals. It gained massive media coverage because it was unusual. I think it is pretty clear to everyone that Nihon University American Football coaches Inoue and Uchida told linebacker Miyagawa to injure the Kansei Gakujun University Quarterback. In their press conference they said he misunderstood their orders. Probably what they meant was injure the Quarterback, but not so blatantly that it has gone viral. Sports in Japan is still feudal in some areas and violence toward players is tolerated by the institutions because they want to win and gain prestige. Isolated incident you may be thinking? Think again.

Do you remember a few years ago when the Sakuranomiya High School basketball captain chose death by suicide, rather than face another demeaning day of 30 slaps in the face from his Coach Komura. The coach “got results” so his coaching methods were accepted for eighteen years at that school. Eighteen years baby!!! The leadership of that school were quite okay with the coach slapping students in the face thirty times a day. How could that be?

That’s just high school right. No!

How about when Japanese Olympic Judo Coach Ryuji Sonoda was described as a “sadist” in the Japan Olympic Committee’s investigation of Judo coach violence. This came to light only after the protest of elite female Olympic athletes complaining about his violent methods of instruction,“our dignity as humans was disgraced”.

Women’s volleyball here in Japan is legendary for the defending diving drills, that are repeated with a ferocity and frequency designed to break you mentally and physically to supposedly toughen you up. Recently we have had professional sumo athletes getting bashed with baseball bats, killing one. In other cases, coaches and seniors used beer bottles and TV controllers to injure the junior athletes in their care.

Why? Where is this coming from?

Military drill sergeants were sent into the school system from the 1920s to toughen up the younger generation, so they could become cannon fodder for the Empire. This wasn’t one or two schools. This was a coordinated effort to use violence on entire generations of the young. Japanese officer violence towards new conscripts, entering the Imperial forces from the late 1930s, was designed to mould youth for death or glory for the Emperor. Brutalisation was at the core of the instruction.

I have been doing Japanese traditional karate for 46 years and have seen plenty of sempai using violence on kohai in Japan, under the pretense of strengthening their spirit. It is all about power. They call it tough love to confuse those on the receiving end. There is no love involved here, just tough beatings.

Of course there are plenty of cases of demonic coaches and brutalisation of juniors in education and sports in the West too. Japan being Japan though, has codified it, institutionalized it, at scale. Watch carefully. The leaders of the organisations involved, always unite against the victims, until public pressure makes them go after the perpetrators. This is the 21stcentury. It would be good if educational and sports organizations here joined it.

In the postwar period, the sempai-kohai or senior-junior system kept these harsh realities going for students doing sports. You must obey your coaches and your school seniors. This is straight out of the feudal samurai code of total obedience. These are not samurai warrior philosophers though. These are nobody ego maniac adults with power and younger spotty faced megalomaniacs, who have seized control of you, because they are higher up the hierarchy than you, by dint of age and stage. A perfect training ground for the leadership realities you will face perhaps, when you enter a big Japanese company?

In Japan, bosses slapping subordinates who made errors has only gone out of style in the last five minutes by the way. Power harassment was a term you never heard of in Japan until very, very recently. No wonder everyone in companies is so scared of doing anything new or different, if the penalty is a smack across the ear from the boss and a sharp tongue lashing.

Risk aversion is rampant in Japan because of these factors. That means if you want to get innovation here, you need to work hard on creating the environment for innovation to succeed. The key is how you see mistakes. If there are errors which warrant severe punishment, shaming and perhaps even personal violence, then don’t expect too much innovation to emerge. If on the other hand you teat mistakes as part of the learning process and people are encouraged to learn from it and try again, then this old feudal style of running organizations here will change for the better. Remember the leader determines the culture, so you need to define what is your attitude to mistakes and errors. If it is zero tolerance then you will create a certainty of culture, but is that culture going to produce the creativity you need to succeed?

In some high risk environments, we want zero failure rates and we cannot tolerate mistakes, because the consequences are so terrible. But there are few companies in this situation. The majority are still killing innovation through their culture and mindset. This is good. Well it is good, if your can outmaneuver these rivals because your culture is creating innovations that give you an edge in the marketplace. Perhaps worth thinking about, next time something goes wrong at work!