Japan and Me
Japan and me : a long-lasting story of friendship
Baudouin Contzen
Managing Partner
Action Consulting
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My first contact with Japan goes back to 1982. Then a 4th-year student in engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique de Bruxelles (Université Libre de Bruxelles – ULB), I had applied for a summer internship with the International Association for Exchange of Students for Technical Experience (IAESTE) and I was lucky enough to get a 7-week internship with Denso (then Nippondenso), a leading supplier of advanced automotive technology, systems and components for all the world's major automakers, in Kariya (Aichi Prefecture), not far from Nagoya. At that time, Nippondenso employed about 28,000 employees world-wide and had a sales turnover of around 2.8 billion EUR. Thirty years later, Denso is a giant employing 132,000 employees in 30 countries and has a sales turnover of around 30 billion EUR. Fascinated by the way Japanese engineers were able to robotize production, I had specifically asked for an internship in that domain and joined the Production Engineering Department where I conducted a study on the weldability of high-density electronic components on printed circuit boards (whose results were incidentally confirmed two years later in a paper published in the Japanese Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering by Panasonic). The internship had also allowed me to visit 7 out of the 8 manufacturing facilities of Nippondenso in Japan, as well as factories at Toyota, Sony, Kubota and Suntory, and thanks to my Section Head, Koichi Fukaya, to my coach, Takeshi Aoki, and his boss, Mitsuhiko Kawamura; and to their colleagues of Section 1-2 (Kenji Kitabatake, Shigeru Harashima, …), I was able to discover some of the wonders of Japan (what I call “the other side of the coin”). Besides letting me discover their professional environment, they invited me to visit their homes and meet their families, and we travelled together to various places in Japan (including at Ise, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Himeji and Hiroshima). A wonderful experience, which fuels my plea for more international internships and intercultural exchange! 
This was the starting point of a long-lasting story of friendship. Soon after my internship, Fukaya-san and several of his colleagues stopped in Belgium during a professional trip to Europe, and I later had the pleasure of welcoming in Europe several honeymooners (including Aoki-san and Kitabatake-san). Fukaya-san, who in the meantime had become Denso’s President & CEO, even took the time in his extremely busy time schedule to have lunch with me in 2003 while in Frankfurt for the Motor Show. I returned to Japan on holidays with my family during the summers of 1984 and 1985 and travelled with a Japan Rail Pass all over Japan from Sapporo (Hokkaido) to Beppu and Oita (Kyushu) and from Fukuyama to Kanazawa (and even to the island of Sado). While in Tokyo, I was lucky enough to stay at the old Belgian Embassy in Tokyo (with H.E. Ambassador Marcel Depasse), a delightful villa with a magnificent garden in Kojimachi, which was replaced in 2008-2010 by the “Belgium Square” building, or at the Residence of the then Representative of the European Union in Japan (H.E. M. Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst, father of the future Princess Laurentien of The Netherlands). Throughout my many stays in Japan, thanks to the kindness of Japanese people, language was never a real problem although the use of English was by then (and still remains today in many areas…) not widely spread (especially in less touristic areas). During my internship at Nippondenso in 1982, I was sharing a small apartment in one of the company’s dormitories with a blue-collar employee who would not understand a single word of English. I still remember my very first sentence in Japanese to get two pieces of bread for breakfast at the company’s restaurant: “Pan niko kudasai” ! And I quickly learned to recognize a number of Japanese ideograms (kanji) and to use a number of key sentences to find my way and travel throughout Japan… In fact, during the period 1984-1988, while working as a Sales Manager for the Energy Division of CMI-Cockerill Mechanical Industries, I also frequently travelled to Japan for meetings with such companies as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Mitsubishi Corporation, Fuji Electric, Sumitomo Corporation, Chiyoda Corporation, etc. I also visited Tsukuba Expo in 1985 with the then President of the European Commission, the Luxembourgish Gaston Thorn. After graduating from INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France) with my MBA in 1989, I continued to travel all over the world both for my profession as a management consultant in strategy and organization and to fulfill my thirst for discovering new horizons during my leisure time (102 countries and territories so far…). Last June (2013), I was lucky enough to return to Japan for the 15th time and had the chance, after a short stay in Tokyo and around Mount Fuji, of meeting again Aoki-san and his family in Nagoya, and to admire the Daimonji Gozan Okuribi in Kyoto on August 16th with Kitabatake-san and family, before continuing my holidays in Kyushu (Kumamoto, Mount Aso, Miyazaki, Kagoshima,…) enjoying hot springs (onsen), an erupting volcano (Sakurajima), and delightful cuisine. 
Allow me to finish this short article with the same waka that I had chosen as a conclusion of a report I had written in 1982 upon my return from my summer internship in Japan. 
Shikishima no |