Japan Death of a Manager

By Guy D. Garcia

In his sixth week as managing director of the Hanshin Tigers baseball team, Shingo Furuya, 56, ended a phone call to his wife Akiko with the word sayonara (goodbye) instead of his customary oyasumi (have a good night's sleep). Sensing something wrong, Akiko summoned a taxi and sped 300 miles from the family home in Ashiya, in southwestern Japan, to his hotel in Tokyo. By the time she arrived, early on the morning of July 19, Furuya had leaped from the staircase outside his eighth-floor room to the garden 92 feet below.

In a narrow sense, Furuya's suicide was simply the act of a deeply despondent individual no longer able to cope. But his death can also be seen as a painful parable about how seriously many Japanese managers view responsibility and how they deal with failure. While many Americans feel little company loyalty and switch fairly easily to another firm when confronted with a setback, the Japanese tend to regard a job as a lifelong proposition and judge themselves entirely in the light of how well they do it. For some Japanese, especially those in their late 40s or older, failure to perform is equivalent not only to letting down the company but also to undermining their reason for living. "They are middle managers wedged between tremendous pressure from above and disrespect from below," says Kenshiro Ohara, a psychiatrist and an expert on suicide at Hamamatsu University. "Younger Japanese are much better at setting their own goals and managing stress."

The Japanese have traditionally viewed suicide as an honorable way of responding to failure or showing devotion to country; witness the phenomenon of seppuku, or ritual disembowelment, in the 17th to 19th centuries, and the kamikaze pilots of World War II. Assuming the blame and resigning is also a deeply rooted practice, even when the person in charge may not have made the mistake. In 1985, for example, Yasumoto Takagi stepped down as president of Japan Air Lines after one of his company's jets crashed into a mountainside, killing 520 people.

Furuya had been agonizing over his negotiations with the team's star players: Randy Bass, a bearded American slugger who led the Osaka-based team to victory in the 1985 Japan Series, and Masayuki Kakefu, a fierce third baseman once known as "Mr. Tigers." The ball club sacked Bass last month after he overstayed his leave in the U.S., where his eight-year-old son was being treated for a brain tumor. Kakefu, whose game had suffered because of injuries, wanted to retire. To make matters worse, the Tigers were at the bottom of their six-team league.

The nature of the job may also have taken its toll. Japanese managing directors, unlike general managers of U.S. teams, seldom arrange trades or put together rosters. Yet they are held responsible if the team fares badly. They usually have no background in the sport and are employed directly by the large corporations that finance the teams. Furuya, who had worked since 1955 for the Hanshin Electric Railway Co., the Tigers' owner, oversaw operations at Koshien Stadium before being appointed managing director. Furuya was "too earnest, sincere and had too strong a sense of responsibility," observed noted Sports Commentator Shinya Sasaki. "His title was managing director, but he was just another middle-class manager forced to shoulder heavy responsibility without being given authority to make a decision."

On the day Furuya died, the Tigers were scheduled to play the Yomiurim Giants in the Tokyo Dome stadium. They went ahead with the game, but not before Manager Minoru Murayama declared the team wanted to win at any cost, in memory of Furuya. They lost 1-0.

With reporting by Seiichi Kanise/Tokyo