LIVE TO WIN
Achieving Success in Business and Life
Victor Kiam
New York: Harper and Row, 1989
258 pp., $18.95
MY BRIDGE TO AMERICA
Discovering the New World For Minolta
Sam Kusumoto with Edmund P. Murray
New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989
340 pp., $19.95
Sadahei (Sam) Kusumoto and Victor Kiam may leave never met. Even if they shake hands at a Chamber of Commerce meeting or bump shoulders in the lobby of the Hilton, they may never wholly know one another. They are colleagues, for they do the same job, and they do it very well. But as for how they do it - and how they see the world around them - they come from opposite ends of the earth.
Both of them - they wouldn't mind if we called them Sam and Vic for short - are at the top of the league, Most Valuable Player award-winners in the business game, which - now that the cold war game has been called for lack of time - is the greatest game the world has to offer.
What they tell us about themselves is instructive. Sam was born in Seoul, a privileged member of Japanese colonial elite. His father, as the Ford dealer for the area, merited auto license plate number five - after the Governor General (number one), the chief of police, and so on. Sam's love affair with America - a heretical one at the time - began with the smell of new Fords. But his adolescence was shaped by the prewar Japanese military ethos, which could find no better use for him and his classmates than to prepare them to be teenage suicides - kamikaze pilots.
The Japanese defeat rescued Sam from the prospect of being a human sacrifice on the altar of the nation and transformed him at the same time from the privileged young man to a penniless refugee. In defeated Japan, Sam went to work as a houseboy on an American air base. This helped him get through college, taught him some English, and allowed him to buy film at the PX for his camera, (A photography buff, he was already using a Minolta.)
The Japanese entrepreneur
When Sam hit the streets looking for a job after graduation, he found one with Minolta. Kazuo Tashima, its founder, was a fellow Keio alumnus, and his family and Sam's were both from Wakayama. Tashima (KT) had begun Minolta as the Japanese-German Camera Company; in the postwar years its biggest sales were to American servicemen through the PX. Tashima was Sam's mentor for the next forty years.
Sam spent two years checking shipping documents and packing cameras in tin-lined wooden crates. Then he was sent to the United States to sell cameras there. In the fifties, he was part of the tiny Japanese business community in New York - young men, without much money, working long hours in an alien environment. But this alien environment was sweet: New York at the time was the glamour capital of the world, and the challenge of success in this environment
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