Boy Meets Co-Worker

Like many Japanese executives, the heads of Mitsubishi like to consider their workers one big happy family. The combine's 260,000 employees are scattered among 27 member firms that make everything from diodes to diapers, but they can sing the company song, vacation at company resorts and enroll in Mitsubishi-sponsored haiku-writing and flower-arranging courses. Yet for years Mitsubishi executives have stewed over an insult to the ideal of togetherness: some 80,000 Mitsubishi workers are unmarried.

After a year of investigation, a top-level executive committee is now offering a combination of technology and tradition to close the gap. Mitsubishi's giant IBM System/370 Model 165 computer has been put to work making matches. For 8,000 yen (about $30) a Mitsubishi worker can get the names of as many as ten employees of the opposite sex best matched to his or her own talents, traits and concept of an ideal mate. Eight courtship counselors, most of them wives of Mitsubishi executives, guide candidates in making final selections. "Mitsubishi boys and girls spend a lot of time and money in search of their future husband or wife," says Hiroyuki Ito, a former Mitsubishi insurance executive who heads the mating effort. "We aim to cut that unnecessary wandering to a minimum."

Some 260 employees have taken advantage of the service since it began two months ago, and a dozen couples are in initial stages of courtship. So far there have been no weddings. Arranged marriages represent a persistent tradition in Japan--one recent study estimated that 20% of matches in Tokyo are still put together by parents--but company counselors insist that they exert no pressure on employees to marry their printout partners. Mitsubishi executives do admit that they value such intramural mergers. Says Ito: "When the wife shares the same corporate frame of reference with her husband, she can only understand him more and help achieve for him a higher degree of performance and efficiency as an employee."

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