dude i am going to go insane i need people to stop posting iwata anecdotes amidst widespread industry layoffs. he was a better ceo than most but he absolutely was acting in accordance with japanese regulations and laws when it came to operating a behemoth of a corporation. you're a goddamn fool if you think any japanese company wouldn't mass fire people if they could. capitalism is a global disease.
As someone's who's brought up that example myself in public before, agreed 100% that's the nuance that pretty much all non-Japan specialists miss when trotting old anecdote out. What Iwata did stood out within the context of the global games industry, but not so much within the domestic one, which is a good testament to the protections that exist in this country to prevent these sorts of situations.
An additional wrinkle I'll add, though (I know Erica knows this, this is for anyone else reading this), is that as good as those protections are in principle, as far as I'm aware (and certainly experienced), they only apply to formal, full-time employees, a class of people that's diminishing on the whole as the years go on. A significant part of the working class in Japan these days now consists of a mixture of part-timers and contractors/freelancers, which might sound similar to anywhere else, but Japanese companies have been inclined for decades to prioritize such people for hiring when possible precisely because they have fewer legal protections and can be cast aside more easily. (This dynamic is also a huge part of why the representation of women in the Japanese work world lags behind most other developed nations; their entry points and promotion prospects are stymied by the jobs that tend to be circumstantially afforded to them.) There are very, very good reasons with Japan's often unhealthy corporate culture to go freelance or contractor in particular, but as with other countries, it comes with its own prices to pay.
Furthermore, the protections and the cultural expectations surrounding them also don't particularly extend into any foreign branch offices for Japanese companies. Those offices can and do take disproportionate weight for problems originating at the mothership and I myself have seen this take place within my own sphere in the last year, in addition to having jobs delayed on extremely short notice.
I bought a Japanese biography commissioned on Iwata soon after his death by former classmates of his and read enough anecdotes about how he treated workers during his time at Nintendo that, on the whole, from what we know, I agree that he certainly seemed less ghoulish than his contemporaries. But at the end of the day, the credit ultimately has to go to the legal system preventing layoffs from even being a feasible temptation in the first place and at that point, that's not a particularly high bar to meet morally.
