The dark side of a gaishikei
In this series of posts, I will try to expose some nasty things you can happen to see in a gaishikei.
My intent is not to give a bad image of a gaishikei but to show that it is not the paradise that some of you Japanese friends might think of.
What I will write now is only based on my personal experience. I will just state facts. Of course you might see those kind of things in any company and not only in a gaishikei, but again it is my real account of facts.
Episode 2
This is much more recent and happened after 2005.
This time it involves not a single employee but a more structured network. Something which led to involvement of Tokyo metropolitan police in this case.
The company had a marketing team, sales team, technical support team and Field service engineers as they were dealing with medical devices.
For some project, they had to source antibiotics for some evaluation/trials with some university. The marketing team was in charge of this and the orders were going through our procurement department.
So every time in the project some antibiotics were needed the marketing team, together with the sales team prepared a form and submitted it to the procurement to order the products.
As the project was quite long it became quite a routine.
But somehow it went wild. Quantities of orders of antibiotics increased and increased, but still nothing was stopped, no questions asked.
It was finally discovered that the antibiotics had been used for some darker intent.
Few staffs from marketing and sales were getting the boxes of antibiotics and were shipping them somewhere. Their shipping base was the underground parking lot of our building.
It was rumored that they had been selling them to shadowy trading companies to export them maybe to North Korea or other countries where such supplies are limited.
I do not know all the details and do not know how all finished. I believe anyway that there was a breach of compliance in all the processes involved. Having so many peoples involved in signing an order sheet means you dilute responsibilities and this is the typical way of Japanese companies. Even in a gaishikei, if it has been so long in Japan (in our case few decades) it becomes very Japanese, and you might get such cases.
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