CARLOS GHOSN COLLIDES WITH JAPANESE CULTURE. AGAIN! by John Crawford

Never. Never, get between the Japanese culture, and ‘Loss of Face’.

The nation considers itself a ‘Samurai Culture’ and even your most humble Japanese public servant, or clerk at Nissan, considers themselves a Samurai at heart.

What do you think drove perfectly intelligent pilots to wilfully commit Hari Kiri during WW2 to become Kamikaze and crash their planes into American warships? They were sacrificing their lives to their country and their culture.

And so we come to Nissan’s court case to claim $91 million from Carlos Ghosn, for the ‘humiliation, loss of revenue and fraudulent activity’.

This is nothing more than Nissan and the justice system attempting to put a brave face on the fact that Ghosn, skipped custody, escaped the vicious Japanese justice system, and fled the prospect of being kept under house arrest for years, if not a decade – and punishing the man who (in their eyes) brought shame on the company (which he saved from disappearing into oblivion).

Hiroto Saikawa

This court case is going nowhere. It’s a display of ‘samurai justice’, to avoid ‘Loss of Face’ – a most serious consequence for Japanese culture.

And the person, perhaps unwittingly, driving this pursuit of Ghosn is the now-disgraced former CEO of Nissan, Hiroto Saikawa.

The fact that the rest of the educated and knowledgeable world outside Japan knows and understands this fault-line in the Japanese culture, does not seem to dissuade them from ‘trying it on’. Yes, they live in 'a bubble'.

I’m sure they know this court case is futile, but the Japanese have to do something to bring dishonour on the man who ‘shamed them’.

John Crawford