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Comment by thematrixturtle | Hacker News Reader

This applies to most all major Japanese companies. There have been two notable cases of non-Japanese execs rising to CEO, Carlos Ghosn of Nissan and Michael Woodford of Olympus, and both ended up as cautionary tales of what happens when you refuse to be just a pliable figurehead and try to effect real change.

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> non-Japanese execs rising to CEO

To note, naturalized South East asians do raise to CEO. Son Masayoshi is of Korean ancestry for instance.

When you say “non Japanese” I suppose you mean “westerner that doesn’t naturalize”. Which makes me realize, I genuinely don’t know how many US CEOs have kept a foreign nationality while helming a huge company in the US. I’d assume not a lot.

Masayoshi Son is 3rd-generation Korean-Japanese. For all practical purposes he's Japanese, and he naturalized in 1990.

Son is just a founder. Nothing weird to be a CEO. It's hard to find other asian examples except some industry (for example, pachinko for historical reasons).

There’s a combination of few “big” companies being founded recently, and the stronger attractiveness of China and Korea to young founders I assume, but Japanese-Korean ventures will naturally have a fair share of Korean CEOs (Lotte from the top of my head)

I would also assume entertainment business has also a number of them, but they might also not put it forward for image reason.

I think some cultural relativity is needed to tamper that, the US has a generally open minded idea of what it means to naturalize (both legally and culturally). There's also a pretty number of big companies founded or run by first generation immigrants in the US.

> Son Masayoshi is of Korean ancestry for instance.

Korea is East Asian. Southeast Asia consists of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Add Howard Stringer (CEO of Sony, 2005-2012). He's pretty close to a cautionary tale, but that time period also included a major earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster as well as the 2008 credit market collapse.

Also Howard Stringer.

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