text: These things also frustrate younger Japanese. And indeed when I posted the list on Twitter, many people replied, “I’m Japanese, and I feel exactly the same way.”
  If Japanese companies made more of an effort to address these recurring issues rather than thinking of them as just being the concerns of non-Japanese workers, they could create a better environment for everyone.
  Alex: I remember once including in an article I wrote that having more diversity in higher positions could help with innovation. One of the responses I got was that companies like Toyota and Nintendo were really successful globally, despite having pretty homogenous workforces.
  Rochelle: That's actually not true with Toyota. Sometime between 15 and 20 years ago, Toyota, which is one of my clients, told me that they realized there was no way they could staff their global operations relying solely on Japanese expatriates. So, they created detailed internal plans for how they were going to train their non-Japanese employees around the world to understand the Toyota Production System and the Toyota culture, and give them the necessary work experiences, so that they could give key posts to non-Japanese. Now they have overseas factories that for years have had non-Japanese managers running them. They've even brought a lot of non-Japanese employees from their foreign operations to occupy high-level posts in Japan.