A Hard Day's Night

As soon as Kotaro Nohmura, an executive director of Taiyo Kogyo, an Osaka tent manufacturer, arrives home from work at nearly midnight, he looks in on his four children.

They are asleep, just as they were when he left for work at 7:30 that morning. A few fond glances are usually the only contact Nohrnura, 37, has with his two sons (7 and 4 months) and two daughters (5 and 9) during the week. Like most Japanese executives, his day starts early and ends only after a long night of business entertaining. Nohmura earns $51,000 a year before taxes, which enables him to house his family in a four-room apartment in the outskirts of Kobe, a port city. Six days a week, he gets up at 7 and eats a Western-style breakfast prepared by his 32-year-old wife Sanae. Then he is out the door and into a Toyota Crown sedan, which he drives 40 minutes to his company's head office in a bustling section of Osaka (pop. 2.6 million).

Each Monday morning at 8:30, Nohmura and 100 co-workers assemble for chokai, a corporate pep rally, where they kick off the week by reciting twelve company creeds. (No.

7: "Once you've grabbed hold of a potential piece of business, never let it go, no matter what--even at the risk of your own life.") One piece of business that Nohmura is grabbing involves the $4 billion science and technology fair in Tsukuba in 1985. It will be needing giant tents to accommodate sightseers. The young executive is driven not only by his country's competitive culture but also by family ties. His father is the founder and chairman of the company, which had revenues last year of $106 million. "If I failed to do as well as or better than the rest of the people in the company, I would end up a laughingstock as an executive," he says. Nohmura spends most of his mornings at his desk in a cubbyhole office. He likes his small space, saying, "I can get almost everything I need without having to stand up every time." There he writes reports and discusses new tent designs with engineers. The executive almost never goes to business lunches, preferring a quick snack of a bowl of noodles at a nearby restaurant. He spends the afternoon making the rounds of local customers and inspecting tents being constructed. Then he calls it a day at about 5:30.

But Nohmura's work is far from finished. On a typical recent evening he first went to a meeting of the Osaka Jaycees, where he serves as vice chairman. He and fellow Jaycees discussed the national elections with a writer from an Osaka newspaper. The group's conclusion: more support was needed for conservative legislators.

Nohmura says, "I love these kinds of meetings. Politics, after all, is bound to have an impact on business."

After the Jaycees' session, Nohmura went on to his evening's business entertainment. He escorted a favored client and one of the client's associates to an elegant restaurant ($110 a person) where, seated on cushions on a tatami-covered floor, they dined on a twelve-course meal that included clear soup, sashimi and tempura. That contrasted with the group's next stop, a Western-style nightspot, where Cardin-clad hostesses poured liberal amounts of whisky and brandy. Cost for the after-dinner stop, which continued until well after 11 p.m., was $360. "I don't like entertaining," says Nohmura, "but it has become an institution. If you persist in being a reformer, you would go to pieces in business. That, naturally, is something I have to avoid--no matter what."

When Nohmura returned home, his wife greeted him at the door. Then over a quiet cup of green tea, the couple talked about the coming Sunday, when the whole family would be going out to the beach for a picnic. Sunday will constitute Nohmura's one day off. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.