Episode #102: James Yamanaka, Area Director, North Asia Area, British American Tobacco

James Yamanaka is currently the President of BAT Japan. Mr. Yamanaka has had a truly global career, he started out at Deloitte in Consulting, then moved on to work in the Telecom industry and then started at BAT and his career has mostly been at BAT. Mr. Yamanaka is a 4th generation Japanese American; he grew up in California, started his education in the US but ended up going to Business school in London. 22 years ago, Mr. Yamanaka was working with BAT as a client in the Middle East and transitioned to working at BAT 18 years ago. His time at BAT has taken him across the world and he has worked in London, Germany, Sri Lanka, back to London and then to Denmark and now Japan. Mr. Yamanaka grew up in a heavily Japanese area called Torrance in the state of California in the U.S. When Mr. Yamanaka found out about his posting to Japan, he felt both worried and excited. He was excited to be closer to his Japanese roots and to find out where his ancestors came from. Although, Mr. Yamanaka is ethnically Japanese he hadn’t lived or worked in Japan prior to his posting with BAT.

Mr. Yamanaka talks about improving engagement with his staff. He tries to achieve good engagement by trying to talk to his employees across the organization and goes 2 or 3 tiers below in rank and asks for feedback maybe about 4 times a week from his staff members. He follows a list and makes sure the organization is on the right track and doing the right thing, and secondly, he tries to ensure through these meetings that they are not missing anything vital. Sometimes, he also sits in into other teams’ meetings and listens in. Mr. Yamanaka emphasizes that they treat BAT as an outlier company and as a company that has over 20 nationalities in their staff, BAT prides itself in being in a unique position compared to other multinational companies. Many other companies tend to be very heavily Japanese with a few expatriate staff at the higher levels. BAT has a large foreigner population, not all are expats and has a lot of foreign staff at the junior levels as well. He says that due to this outlier position, their recruitment strategy differs from other organizations, and they have accepted that they are an outlier company and thus recruit differently. He says that if you come to BAT, you can experience leaving Japan without actually leaving Japan.

Advice to someone coming to Japan for the first time, someone who doesn’t speak Japanese and has not been to Japan would be to do the typical things, such as reading some books about the formalities in Japan, listen to the cultural things, try to read a real “yes” versus a yes that’s said to you just to be agreeable. Someone who has been brought to Japan is usually in Japan to make some change, Mr. Yamanaka says that identifying a team that is willing to work with you to make that change will make a large difference. Learning Japanese would certainly help to work in Japan. Mr. Yamanaka says that he understands the cultural nuances as he is ethnically Japanese and recognizes the culture from his family back home. Mr. Yamanaka also says that as an ethnically Japanese person, the expectations of him with regards to learning the language are higher, yet this wouldn’t be the case for most people, and they should learn Japanese if they are able.