Hitozukuri

by JOLYON BARAKA THOMAS

In 1932, Matsushita K?nosuke, the founder of Panasonic, had an epiphany. On visiting the headquarters of the religion Tenriky?, he was inspired by the sense of collective commitment he witnessed there. In a subsequent speech to Panasonic employees, Matsushita laid out a new guiding philosophy for his fledgling corporation: ‘Human beings need both material and spiritual prosperity. Religion guides people out of suffering toward happiness and peace of mind. And business, too, can contribute by providing physical necessities required for happiness. This should be its primary mission.’ (This translation is from the Panasonic website; all translations that follow are my own.) For Matsushita, work was none other than a ‘holy pursuit’ (sei naru jigy?).

Matsushita later attributed the stunning financial success of his corporation to this 1932 epiphany. He equated corporate flourishing with improvements in national standards of living, and he conflated Panasonic’s ascendancy with global salvation. For him, everyone benefited when people had been trained to work indefatigably for a collective mission.

In a speech on 21 April 1961, Matsushita pushed the idea further, impressing upon his employees that their job was to ‘make people before products’. Panasonic certainly made goods, the corporate magnate acknowledged, but the company also made the assiduous individuals who manufactured its cutting-edge electronics and marketed them to the world. By extension, Panasonic sales teams ‘made people’ (hitozukuri) in another sense, using skilful marketing to form the very consumers who dutifully purchased Panasonic’s wares.

As a corporate ethos, Matsushita’s hitozukuri concept was groundbreaking, and over the years many other corporations borrowed his philosophy and leadership style. But the concept of ‘making persons’ achieved even broader reach as national policy. Just a year after Matsushita’s epochal declaration, Japan’s prime minister Ikeda Hayato adopted hitozukuri in 1962 as a guiding principle for his administration, describing the concept as ‘gaining trust from the world by valuing morality, cultivating virtue, loving the nation and its people, and developing skills and techniques.’ As this rather ambiguous definition reveals, the hitozukuri slogan was both vague and inspiring. As politics, it made for a good soundbite, but as policy it was difficult to explain. Its outcomes were impossible to measure, and the phrase also did not translate well: members of Ikeda’s cabinet struggled to find a suitable English rendition as they prepared for a diplomatic trip to the United States in 1962.

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