A Dose of Boot Camp

Kiotsuke! The Japanese drill sergeant called his platoon to attention so earnestly that his voice broke and the whole outfit burst into laughter. There was nothing for the sergeant to do but grin and bear it. For this was no ordinary bunch of boots, supposed to tremble at a drill instructor's every whim. The 70 young men in ill-fitting fatigues who stumbled through close-order drill at an army camp near Tokyo were all employees of the Tokyo Mutual Life Insurance Co. Their Taiken Nyu-tai (draft experience) was scheduled to last exactly three days.

Such short doses of military life, offered free of charge to private companies, began as an army promotion to dress up the public image of Japan's all-volunteer Self-Defense Force. In six years of operation, Taiken Nyutai has not notably boosted army recruitment. It has instead become accepted as a corporate personnel-training institution. Last year 80,000 new employees from 1,500 organizations were farmed out for a taste of boot camp. This year 100,000 are expected to enroll--including 29 Tokyo office girls.

The military insist that the program has a payoff for them. "The more people come to share the barracks life with our troops, the more deeply will our organization be understood," says General Shoji Wada, commander of the central Japan military district. Company executives see an even more practical gain. In army camps, says Toshio Shiba-yama, director of Tokyo Mutual, "young people are bound to learn something about the vital importance of team work." This spring, for the third year in a row, Japan Air Lines sent its new crop of employees to an artillery camp. Company President Shizuma Matsuo calls it "an exceedingly effective means of inculcating a right kind of corporate esprit de corps." Last week 40 new workers of Iwasaki Electric Co., soldiered with the First Airborne Group.

A Pleasant Tension. The temporary trainees are generally enthusiastic about basic training--perhaps because their "army" life is uncommonly pleasant. They do get lectures on the organization of the Self-Defense Force; they also get a minimum of marching and exercise with wooden bayonets. Their drill instructors are completely out of character. "We have to be sweet to these people," complained one sergeant. "After all, they're only civilians."

"It's wonderful to be in a military establishment," says a young graduate of the First Engineer Brigade. "I put on the military uniform, cap and boots for the first time in my life, and right away I felt a pleasant tension within myself." Says another: "The importance of being constantly polite and alert is easy to understand, but so hard to practice. That is one vital lesson I have learned." Such comments are particularly convincing to Japanese executives. To them, Taiken Nyutai training, brief as it is, seems sorely needed. "Japanese youth today," says one, "look like bamboo without a joint."

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