Meghan Barstow currently is the President at Edelman Japan. Ms. Barstow is originally from Alaska and Japan and Alaska were strongly connected through the fishing industry and the airline industry, as many international flights land in Anchorage. The Japanese economy was booming when she was in high school, so she decided Japan was a good place to be.
Ms. Barstow first came to Japan exactly 30 years ago which was the obvious step as she majored in English Literature with a minor in Japan. She first came to Japan as a third-year university student, she studied at Osaka from Kansai Gaidai for her year abroad. Prior to university, she studied at a school in Middlebury with an immersive Japanese program prior to coming to Japan in her third year of university. She completed her degree back in the US before returning to Japan through the JET program. She was in Japan in a very rural area in Japan for 3 years for the JET program, she was an ALT teaching English for 2 years and the last year as a CIR working for the local government. She was the only ALT in that region, so it was a wondering immersive experience for her. After completing the JET program, she returned to Seattle in the US, and she again wanted to use her Japanese skills and she worked for Kyoga prefecture in the Business and Culture centre and later she also taught Japanese at a local public high school filling in for someone on maternity leave. After this she retuned to Japan again for her third round in Japan working as an editor creating business textbooks and English textbooks at Time Life.
At this time, she had many friends that were expats, and they were doing communications for automobile companies such as Mercedes and Reno and it sounded like many of the skills Ms. Barstow had such as meeting people, writing, editing, communicating but also strategizing. This led her to apply for a job in an English Language newspaper and that’s where her journey in PR started.
It can be hard to earn the trust of colleagues and especially as a foreigner coming in during COVID Ms. Barstow found this to be quite difficult in Japan. Ms. Barstow feels that Edelman is doing very well with regards to having female leadership and equity in the firm. Traditionally, you’ll find that more women are present at the junior levels and as you go higher up, there are less and less women. At Edelman, Ms. Barstow says that there are a lot of strong female leaders, and she has felt very supported by the female leadership at Edelman.
Ms. Barstow has found that Edelman is very creative in many ways, the team often call themselves entrepreneurial, by constantly thinking of new products, new evolved techniques, and new and creative ways to do things. She feels the staff is constantly learning and innovating. For creativity and one of their passions is to be constantly curious as every day is new, and she finds herself learning every single day. She feels to be creative; employees need to given freedom and time to become creative. At work, they have various working groups in various topics, such as an ESG group and an Olympic working group. Staff join these working groups based on their area of interest, for example someone interested in the environment, might join the ESG working group.
Advice that Ms. Barstow would give to someone coming into Japan would be that listening is very important and asking for feedback and spending time 1-on-1 with the staff. Building trust and understanding that change takes more time in Japan. She says that Japan seems contradictory to her that though Japan tends to seem a hierarchical country but in other ways it can be a country that is very bottom-up, so striking that balance is hard and navigating that as a foreign leader can be challenging as well. She ends on the powerful note that leadership is not about the leader but is the power of those who report to you because the organization is not about one person.
