Suddenly I was moved from the Latin American group to the North American group.
When I went to the advanced class in Spanish, I was turned around.
I couldn’t do a full-fledged job without studying English in earnest.
But American English was really too fast for me.
When I first arrived in Los Angeles, I remember feeling very comfortable with the clear sky.
However, I don’t remember my first business trip mission.
That is, American business was all decided in the United States. The staff in Tokyo was only a supporter.
In Latin America, even the person in charge was able to do business with his own ideas. I had some authority.
As a person in charge of the United States, I only connected the instructions from the United States to the factory. It was a very simple job.
However, by another route, the factory already knew the instructions.
Every day I wondered what my role was.
Perhaps even the senior manage couldn’t even say his opinion.
The local subsidiary in the United States was Toshiba America (TAI). The president of TAI was in the same class as the managing director of the Tokyo head office.
Each division belonged to it.
The year I was in charge of the United States, a man named Kennedy was hired as president of the medical department.
I heard that his annual salary was around 60 million yen. At that time, the annual salary of director of Toshiba would have been less than 30 million yen, so Kennedy’s annual salary was exceptional compared to the annual salary of Japanese executives.
For reference, my annual salary at the age of 29 was less than 3 million yen. On the other hand, the monthly salary of an American who came to teach English to Toshiba was 600,000 yen. The annual salary was 7.2 million yen.
When President Kennedy first came to Japan, I attended when he gave a presentation in English.
Somehow, he explained the poorness of Toshiba’s American strategy by giving an example. He also claimed that the product was hardly suitable for the American market.
He insisted that if we were to do it seriously, we would have to rebuild our strategy.
The director of the medical equipment division was listening to it, and he nodded to the unfamiliar English speech. And I was very disappointed to see him grinning and shaking hands with Kennedy. He was an elite graduate of Tokyo University.
He had the staff interpret what he was saying now, and I thought the business manager would have to ask a lot of questions.
The good thing about being in charge of the United States was that I was able to go to an exhibition attached to various medical societies in the United States.
The first time I went was the Radiological Society of North America in Dallas, Texas.