>>41071420In Japan, businesses are usually run not based on merit and who is best for the position, but on seniority. The longer you’ve been with the company, the more weight your words have. You could be like the world’s foremost expert on something but your opinion on it would be ignored in favour of some guy with less than a quarter of your experience whose been there a few years longer than you have. It’s why the CEOs of most Japanese companies seem borderline retarded; they’ve been there the longest so everyone just agrees with them and it’s expected by everyone that their opinion is the closest to respect purely because they’re the most senior. It’s a holdover from how their culture operated for hundreds of years before WW2. Look at Gamefreak and TPC. They’re still run by all the same people since they started, so even if a new up and coming employee has ideas and skills that would improve everything tenfold they don’t get any recognition because they simply haven’t been there as long as the people currently in charge. Gamefreak in particular has stagnated completely because of guys like Masuda and Ishihara, even when their claims are demonstratively wrong like all their stuff about mobile being the future it doesn’t change anything. They’ve been there the longest so they know best.
The few Japanese companies that ditch that mentality usually do really fucking well though, but that’s super unlikely to happen with anyone in the Pokémon machine.
