JAPANESE BUSINESS HONOR

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 89, 31 August 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

JAPANESE BUSINESS HONOR

THEII! STANDARDS NOT THE SAME AS OURS. Japanese business methods have been widely criticised, especially in the last few years, as lacking those standards of commercial honor which prevail among Occidental nations. A writer in the Atlantic Monthly says that the question most frequently put to him since his return from the Orient has been — "Why is it that the Japanese are so dishonest that they cannot even trust themselves, and have to employ Chinamen at the head of all their great business concerns?" He explains this almost universal impression by saying that the average tourist usually has business relations only with the branches of the three great banks established in the treaty ports. When he cashes his letter of credit he observes the singular fact that the money is being handled by a Chinaman instead of by a native. "The simple truth," says this writer, "is that these three banks—all of them, by the way, foreign concerns—are the only business houses in the entire empire so conducted. When Japan was opened and these foreign corporations in China sent their branches into the new field, they sent their Chinese compradores with them. "'Yet, while all this can be said, and should be said, in the interest of simple justice, it is nevertheless undeniable that in Japan the ideals of commercial honor and the methods adopted in the conduct of business are not what they are in the West, and there is much of which the Occidental may justly complain. "There is a historical reason for this. The fact that in the olden days in Japan the merchant was placed at the bottom of the social scale and the soldier at the top, while in China exactly the reverse was the case, fully explains why Japan has produced, a splendid soldiery, and has woefully suffered in her mercantile life, while the army of China has been the sport of the nations, though her merchants have attained a high place in the world of business credit, "But even though the 'cake of custom' is the hardest to break, its power of resistance has been already materially weakened by this wise policy of the Emperor; and the merchant is no longer the pariah of the realm. Prominent among those who by the Emperor's favor have risen from the social dust into places of highest honor is a family whose history is significant. "The Mitsui family of Japan have been called the Rothschilds of the East; but while the fame of the latter has gone abroad over the world the Mitsuis have remained practically unknown except to a few Western merchants who have had extensive dealings with the Orient. The European family owns its great renown to the fact that for a century there has been no slightest stain upon its commercial honor. "But its career, it should be remembered, has been passed in a world where business itself had been held in honor; while the Mitsuis, engaged in a pursuit utterly condemned by public sentiment for three centuries in spite of the demoralising influence of the social ban, have been trusted by Government and people alike, and have kept the honor of their name unstained. Now, thanks to the new .spirit animating the nation, they no longer stand so conspicuously alone."