＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
1. What is a quota?
The term “quota” (Russian: Hopma, transliterated as Norma) became popular when people who had been interned in Siberia returned to Japan after World War II, and it refers to a standard amount of work that was given to them semi-forcibly.
In general, in the sales department of Japanese private companies, “quotas (goals)” are set. Those who achieve the quota are given “incentives” (bonuses, salary increases, promotions, expensive prizes such as overseas trips, etc.), and those who do not achieve the quota are given “penalties” (dismissal, salary cuts, demotion, power harassment, etc.).
2. Japan’s Excessive Quotas
However, the problem is whether the “quota” is appropriate and whether it is being properly managed.
There is hardly any department that can fulfill this checking function. Even in an internal audit (inspection), if the branch (sales office) is performing well, it is difficult to point out whether the quota is appropriate or whether it is being properly managed.
I think it is the same in normal companies that are not black companies.
I’ve heard of a thing called “suicide sales” in the life insurance industry. In order to inflate the number of “contracts acquired,” the insurer will buy more contracts in the name of a family member, at their own expense.
I’ve also heard that because the post office’s “New Year’s card sales quotas” are so high, people are trying to minimize their own losses by selling them early to “gift certificate shops.”
A major convenience store was once in trouble for imposing excessive sales quotas on its part-time employees for “ehomaki” (sushi rolls wrapped in ehomaki), and forcing them to buy back the products if they failed to meet the quotas – essentially a form of “suicide sales.”
<Added on 7/11/2019> News on “Inappropriate sales of Japan Post Insurance”
There was a news report that there were up to 93,000 cases of “inappropriate sales” in the five years up to March 2019, including cases where postal workers double-collected old and new insurance premiums in order to receive sales bonuses. It seems that “excessive quotas” were behind this as well.
<Added on 2019/9/14> News on “Inappropriate sales of investment trusts by Japan Post Bank”
There was a news report that Japan Post Bank had made approximately 19,600 inappropriate investment trust contracts with elderly people.
The bank is required to check the health status and understanding of the product twice, at the time of solicitation and at the time of purchase, but it seems that as many as 90% of the people neglected this.
It seems that the background to this was also “excessive quotas.”
3. I want an end to the fruitless “quota-ism”
Although it is different from out-of-pocket sales, there is also “new customer acquisition” sales by banks and credit card companies. Increasing the “number of new contracts” is the top priority for these sales, and since the only evaluation criterion is the “number of new customers acquired,” even if a contract is canceled soon after it is signed, it is “a matter of chance.”
This means that banks and credit card companies will likely end up losing money on the costs incurred in processing new bankbooks and credit cards.
Japanese police have quotas for “traffic enforcement” and “number of suspects arrested for routine questioning and minor offenses,” and there are frequent problems with fraud to make arrests look bigger. These quotas are the underlying cause of police officers going too far in trolling and fabricating cases.
I hope they stop this fruitless and harmful “quota-ism.” An effective solution would be to gradually raise the “product (or service) price” and change the company’s structure to one that can make a profit without imposing unreasonable quotas.
4. Product prices should be raised to appropriate levels to improve labor’s share of the labor share.
This may be a little off topic, but just as there is a well-established perception that German Mercedes is a luxury car, and therefore naturally expensive, shouldn’t Japanese automakers also establish the image that Japanese cars are high-performance, and therefore naturally relatively expensive?
Instead, they pursue “high performance at low prices” to the extreme, which is why Japanese cars are seen as cheap in the United States and other countries. This may be the influence of Konosuke Matsushita’s “Waterworks Philosophy.”
he water philosophy is a management philosophy that aims to make it easier for consumers to buy things by mass-supplying high-quality products at low prices, like tap water. However, this means that employees are forced to work extremely hard, which is unbearable.
The female new employee at Dentsu who committed suicide, a graduate of the University of Tokyo, also became neurotic due to excessive work.
Doesn’t this put the company (management) first, the customer second, and the employees third (or last)?
As exemplified by Nissan Motor’s President Carlos Ghosn, foreign executives receive astonishingly high compensation. Foreign managers in the J-League also receive extraordinary compensation, far in excess of their actual performance.
I think this was necessary when Japan was recovering from the depths of defeat and continued to produce “cheap, high-quality products” in order to compete with Western products and win the sales war.
China and South Korea are now waging a “price war” like Japan once did, but I believe it is time for Japan to put an end to this approach.
Do Japanese managers and employees need to change their mindset so that they can receive more “fair compensation and remuneration”? Raising the sales price of cars may lower sales, but I think this is better than having retaliatory tariffs imposed by the United States. Isn’t now the time to “adjust the pace”?
In other industries, if “product prices” were to be raised gradually, it would contribute to achieving the 2% inflation target set by Bank of Japan Governor Kuroda, and if inflation were to gradually increase along with that, we could expect a gradual increase in worker wages. If company managers continue to say, “If we raise prices, we won’t sell, so we won’t raise prices,” the problem will not be solved.
I think “tekitou” and “ii-kagen” would be better. The words “tekitou” and “ii-kagen” are generally used in a negative sense, but shouldn’t we reinterpret them in a positive sense, as “appropriate”?