Today’s business slang is “Sougou-shoku” and “Jimu-shoku”.

“Sougou-shoku”is defined as “Professional” and mainly occupied by male until 1980’s.

On the other hand, “Jimu-shoku” is the jobs such as booking meeting rooms, filing the documents, and serving coffee and tea to the “Sougou-shoku” business professinal persons, occupied by female.

However, since the equal employment act more and more women started to work as a professionals.

At the same time a lot of office work were done by IT instead of human beings and each employee began to book meeting rooms online, started to keep documents and meterials online, and book the business trip online.  As a result, a lot of jobs previously done by “Jimu-shoku” disappeared.

But, still there is certain disparity between male and female.

I hope real equal society realize as soon as possible.

Today’s business slang is “Shuntou”.

“Shuntou” literally means “Spring Fight” and is the discussions to decide new salary from every April between Company and labor.

“Base up” (BEA) of this year is expected to be beyond 5% because price increase of last December was 4.1%.

Large companies such as Suntory declared 6% of salary increase, but such as high level of increase can be realized only by large companies.

I hope that both Russian invasion into Ukraine and Covid-19 will end as soon as possible and that economy recovers soon.

Today’s Japanese business slang is “Mono-iu-Kabunushi”.

As mentioned in the previous lesson, no one made objection at Japanese stockholder meeting previously.  Therefore, they were called “Shan-shan Soukai”.

After bubble economy collapsed, in order to strengthen Japanese companies, holding stocks among group companies with each other was stopped.  As a result, foreign institutional investors became the shareholders of Japanese large firms.

They make objections and proposal to the board of directors in order to raise stock price in the short term.

Thus, foreign institutional investors are “Mono-iu-Kabunushi (Speaking sharesholders).”

Japanese companies are facing to global economy and can not survive without real competitive strengths.

Today’s business Japanese is “Shan-shan Soukai”.

Japanese large companies kept stock with each other within group companies (Keiretsu) and did not object against other company’s business.

Therefore, the shareholder meeting was called “Shan-shan soukai” and no body object against company’s decisions.

“Soukai” means “annual shareholder meeting” and “Shan-shan” is the sound of peace, meaning no objection.

However, foreign investors started to object to company’s decision and the situations began to change.

Today’s business Japanese is “BEA”.

“BEA” is the abbreviation of “Base Up”, meaning salary increase of all employees by fixed %.

“BEA” is decided based on the increase rates in prices by the negotiations between company and union.

“BEA” was 2-5% in high growth period and bubble economy period, but after 2000 many companies have rejected “BEA” because of the recession.

There is another salary increase besides “BEA”.  That is ”Regular salary increase” based on ages and years of service.

This year Japanese government requests Keidannrenn to increase salary by 5% because of big increase in prices.

Let’s pay attention to “Shuntou　（Annual wage talks)” in 2023.