ABSTRACT
Nothing seems more obvious to the Westerner than the enormous difficulty of doing business in Japan. But nothing quite so baffles the Japanese as to hear a Westerner say this. “How can this possibly be?” they'll exclaim. “Just look at all the Western businesses that lead in their markets in Japan: IBM and Citibank, Coca-Cola and American Hospital Supply, Swiss chocolates and Mars bars, Levi's jeans and McDonald's hamburgers. And there are any number of smaller foreign companies that are leaders in their market in Japan: the Swedish maker of specialty robotics, for instance, or the midwestern manufacturer of analytical instruments. Provided the product and the service are good, all it takes to do business in Japan is to do it the Japanese way.”
