The world's third largest economy and one of the most sophisticated and advancedcountries is a notorious underperformer on the international stage. I was reminded of that by Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike. She was a guest speaker at a foreign chamber event,drawing a capacity crowd. She is whip smart, charismatic, and knows how to charm thecrowd. She speaks Arabic fluently and her English is simply excellent. Yet, She chose toaddress the assembled chamber members in Japanese, not in English. What anopportunity missed to show Tokyo and Japan's internationalism.
Having been a diplomat, I know how these events are totally scripted beforehand, sonothing can possibly go wrong. The event featured a series of questions from the directorof the chamber to Koike. These questions were all vetted prior to the events. So Koike hadcomplete knowledge of what she was going to be asked.
They are all softball questions anyway, which made them easy to handle. The foreignchamber is never going to get aggressive with the governor of Tokyo. So Koike wasamongst firm friends. Yet, she switched to Japanese after making some flawless off thecuff comments in English at the beginning. This included cracking a joke about channelthree on the headsets were receiving the translation in Arabic. That was witty and said toeveryone, she was a very confident person in dealing with foreign languages. At the end,she switched back to perfect English again. More witticisms followed and then sheelegantly glided out the door.
Why didn't she do the whole piece in English? She obviously had the ability.Yes, it was onthe record, and there were members of the Japanese media there recording hercomments. So by speaking in Japanese, she could play to the broader populace of Tokyo.Here is our governor, effortlessly dealing with foreigners, type of thing.
You may have noticed that the governor of Tokyo does not want for attention. Here was anopportunity to work on the non-Japanese media, to work on the Japanese fans andboosters in the room. Projecting Tokyo as a truly international city was always a stretchunder her long reigning predecessor, Shintaro Ishihara.
Because he was so parochial in his views, Koike is a breath of fresh air in that regard andcould have played an effective role of evangelist for Tokyo, speaking directly to the foreigncommunity. She distributed some very high quality books on Tokyo, to the audience, whichwere first rate exemplars of the sophistication of the capital.
She could have worked the room and converted everyone to fandom, but she chose toretreat into Japanese. She could have chosen to make her main remarks in English, andthen answer the questions at the end in Japanese or rely on simultaneous translators? Iknow from my own public speaking experience in Japan, in Japanese, that the questions atthe end can be difficult to follow at times. However, she had simple options to get aroundthat issue, which she chose not to exercise. Why?
We see it again and again. Japan's scared to step out. Soft power should be a tremendousadvantage for Japan, but it consistently decides not to take it up. koike's luncheon event isyet another example.
The conservative bureaucrats in the governor's office were no doubt laser focused on howeliminating all risk was important. Speaking English is risky, so let's not do that. What aboutthe upside? I guess that this was a non contest between balancing some degree of riskand achieving a much more positive result. As we know in Japan, mistakes are not allowed,and the best way to avoid a mistake is to do nothing different or new.
Isn't the time we started to work on this, construct? In our companies, we need to embracechange, to allow failure as a learning process to have our BHAGS, our big hairy audaciousgoals, which take us out of our comfort zone. Leaders like Koike would be fantastic rolemodels for the country, if they choose to play that role. They choose not to and so Japancontinues to fly under the radar. When will Japan be ready to become a player on the worldstage in international business or global relations?
Don't hold your breath in anticipation of anything changing too soon. When the best andthe brightest decline the challenge.
