The Changing Landscape of Service in Japan, An Interview with Tarō Akabane
Back when I was in high school in the early 2000’s, a friend showed me a wallet called “the magic wallet”. It is still a popular concept with many manufacturers putting out models. The one I had was made in Denmark, in beautiful brown leather, which aged quite well.
The magic wallet was a sure-fire party trick, with elastics keeping the two sides of the wallet together in such a way, that when you put a note of currency in between and folded the wallet over it, it would ‘magically’ strap the money inside. I must admit I never quite understood how it worked.
The wallet was minimal, and encouraged a reliance on cards, as it didn’t hold much more than could be spent through a day on the town. With card-based payments being prevalent rather early on in Denmark, this wasn’t a problem at all.
However when I moved to Japan a couple of years later, I realized that I needed a bigger wallet to keep up with the ad-hoc cash demand that everyday life here still throws at you.
Fast forward 3–4 years to 2018–2019, when the payment service PayPay launched as a collaboration between Yahoo Japan and the telco SoftBank, and the game is rapidly changing.
Now, although not all merchants in my area is on board with cashless payments yet, I can do some shopping runs with only my smartphone. We’re still not at a place, where I can confidently go to a new shop and expect to pay with PayPay or similar, but we’re getting there.
This change in the Japanese services landscape was at the heart of my conversation with mr. Tarō Akabane from the design agency and media house Concent Inc. in Ebisu, Tokyo. We had a chat online, but I have visited their offices many times in the past. Ebisu is a charming Tokyo neighborhood, with a knotty web of streets, basement shops and creative buildings. It’s a neighborhood that keeps on giving, and is a far throw from the hustle and bustle of Akihabara or Harajuku.
Mr. Akabane is somewhat of a veteran in the service design field in Japan, as he has been promoting the discipline and practice through client work, organizing domestic conferences, sharing insights from foreign conferences and supervising translations of core works like “Designing for Service”, “Make It So” and “Good Services” since 2010.
His career is typical in Japan, in the sense that he came to the field without a specific education for it from university. Rather, he is applying his liberal arts studies more generally to the opportunities that the workplace has provided along the way. Specifically in the case of mr. Akabane, this means he has moved from sales, to editorial and direction to service design and creative leadership consulting.
As we talked, it was clear that he saw a connection between his studies and his work, through the changes in attitudes within Japanese society. Having finished his education with courses in media studies, gender studies and cultural studies, he is well-positioned to join and assist Japanese companies as they navigate a society which is increasingly (however belatedly) taking the contribution of women, for example, seriously.
As I myself have been studying and practicing service design too, it often strikes me how entangled the practice of service design is in other, larger agendas like organizational design and business culture. How an organization works has a huge impact on the kinds of services said organization is able to come up with, develop and deliver consistently. Mr. Akabane told me, that this insight manifests itself in Japan, in the way companies tend to be good at drawing up visions of what they want to achieve, but fail to approach them in a nimble or agile way. Concretely, the kind of agility needed generally allows organizations to prototype and iterate. But instead, rigid organizations have traditionally fostered rigid project processes.
But change is happening.
Mr. Akabane and Concent inc., experience this first hand, in the kind of projects they are commissioned for. While in the past they received many projects for new service development, where they were actively participating in and contributing to each step of the design process, recently they are more focussed on training of large teams. As mr. Akabane noted with a disarming chuckle, there is a certain infatuation with everything new and foreign in Japan. Some would perhaps try and trace the historical roots of this apparent trait, but presently it has the peculiar effect on Japanese organizational development, that otherwise beneficial concepts and new practices are pushed aside when a new one arrives. This can frustrate efforts to anchor approaches to innovation such as service design, as this gives way in budgets to projects and trainings in ‘circular design’, ‘people-centric design’ and ‘teal organizations’ etc. Although these concepts are not necessarily (or at all) mutually exclusive, they do vy for the same constrained budgets and attention in teams, which puts a strain on agencies like Concent inc., to get well-versed enough in the new lingo, to continue the conversation without sounding inconsistent.
Buzzwords fighting for attention is hardly a new thing, and although mr. Akabane’s team gets to do fewer hands-on projects overall, there is a silver lining to this shift in project types from outsourcing to training. As he points out, it shows that companies are getting serious about anchoring the design process in-house. A client was quoted to have said how it just makes sense to take it in-house, because service delivery doesn’t end with implementation, but has to be continually monitored and improved upon. This is ultimately a good thing, not just for service quality, but also for the broader design community, as demand for professional designers would increase — something which is surprisingly sorely needed in Japan.
A survey from 2020 by the Japanese design agency Goodpatch, the only Japanese agency listed on the Tokyo stock exchange, show this increased need in striking numbers:
The graph shows how surveyed Japanese companies think about their design capabilities, particularly in relation to the size of their current design teams. With over half of the companies wanting to increase the size of their design teams, even during corona, when they might be excused for doubling down on what has worked in the past.
More than being good news for designers looking for employment, the graph also tells the story of a Japan which, finally, is ready to embrace well designed user-experiences more broadly.
This is a point which we will probably touch on much more later on in this series, because it strikes at the heart of the misalignment between expectations towards Japanese design and service prowess, and the reality on the ground. Mr. Akabane iterated his view of the point, by saying that the Japanese are good at formalizing services and executing with high-quality, yet are lacking in ability to look at services in terms of how each step is adding value to the customer experience. This conception of good service, which can be summed up in the Japanese omotenashi (from motenasu, which according to the Japanese online dictionary Weblio translates to “entertain; be hospitable to somebody; offer (one’s) hospitality to somebody; make somebody welcome”), works well in a product-centric economy, or “Goods-Dominant Logic” setting, according to mr. Akabane. But in a Service-Dominant Logic, where taking feedback from customers, empathizing and adapting accordingly in an agile way is paramount, Japanese firms are not entirely up to speed.
The same can be said of the public sector, where, in my own experience of interacting with Japanese municipal authorities, the services do of course actually lead you to the desired outcome, and staff are careful, diligent and polite, but the flow of the service itself, compared to many of the other user-experiences we go through in our daily lives, can feel inefficient and outdated — sometimes comically so.
Mr. Akabane is quietly optimistic about the future. Things are improving, and an interest in change is palpable. That’s why he keeps contributing to the Japanese body of knowledge within the more intangible design fields, even though it is niche, and often provide less in terms of concrete answers to Japanese issues. A case in point is the book ‘Good Services’ by Lou Downe from the UK. The Japanese Amazon reviews are not as praising as the US and UK counterparts, because the Japanese readership expects a silver bullet to their woes — a high bar for a book which is decidedly grounded in the UK policy landscape and experience, he said.
Instead, mr. Akabane hopes, people will use the books as a point of departure to reframe how they conceptualize and approach good service in the Japanese context. There’s no right answer, so people simply have to employ their skills and lived experience to deliver on their vision.
By living in Japan, and working and discussing with people contributing to changing the Japanese service landscape, it is fascinating to uncover the hidden issues which are in some sense holding Japan back from achieving its potential. In too many discussions on this subject, Japanese culture is brought up as a convenient excuse for not being able to do this or that. But I honestly don’t see the contradiction between digital transformation, and delivering experiences grounded in Japanese culture including social norms and aesthetics.
For example, I don’t believe that cash payment is necessary to sustain Japanese service culture — the rapid uptake of services like PayPay is a great example of that. On the contrary, in my favorite local bakery, I experience the same attentiveness and diligent execution.
So if digital payments is not a problem, what are the points of tension in the changing Japanese service landscape? I look forward to exploring this further as I continue this series.
Thanks for reading.
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