A Daily Samurai Duel

Japan is set apart from other industrial societies by its remarkable homogeneity. The boss and his employee share much more than a common heritage; they have many of the same points of view. TIME Correspondent S. Chang spent a day each with President Toshihiko Yamashita, 61, of the giant Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., and Yoshinobu Saito, 29, one of the firm's 1,600 sales engineers. His report:

Matsushita President Yamashita earns $333,300 a year, and Saito makes $12,900. But except for age and experience they seem almost interchangeable. The differences between them stem mostly from the less formal, Westernized style of Japan's younger generation.

Yamashita, the soft-spoken chief executive, wears conservative business attire and lives in the rolling hills outside Osaka in a graceful seven-room house with immaculately pruned shrubbery. Trim and athletic, he favors a traditional Japanese diet. His breakfast that day consisted of grilled fish, rice and bean-paste soup.

Saito, the young, eager sales engineer, wears more modish togs and lives three miles away in a $62,500 four-room house that also has a well-cared-for garden. Saito bought the house two years ago with his own savings, plus loans from his company and bank. Despite monthly house payments of $152 and an additional $1,810 deducted from his yearly bonus to pay off the mortgage, he still saves 15% of his salary. While Saito likes Japanese food, he started his day with a Western-style breakfast of coffee, bread and two hard-boiled eggs.

Both men's fathers were working-class, and both ended their formal educations with technical high school, where they learned their first phrases in English. After graduation, each went to work for Matsushita—Yamashita in 1938, and Saito in 1970. Neither has ever worked for any other company.

The chauffeur called for Yamashita promptly at 7:50 a.m. in an indigo Mercedes-Benz limousine. His wife Kikuko, 57, accompanied him outside his house and bowed farewell. Acknowledging this ritual with a nod, Yamashita climbed into the back seat. He greeted his driver by saying: "It's going to be another hectic day."

Saito's departure for work at 6:40 a.m. was not quite a photocopy. Etsuko also bowed at the front door, but then Saito hugged her and chased her playfully around his tiny gray Mitsubishi Minica 360. Once in the driver's seat, he called out to his spouse: "Another busy day!"

When they arrived at work, the two men followed entirely different routines. From 8:20 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Yamashita attended more than a dozen conferences, most of them to hand out citations to the company's most productive employees and to discuss the future direction of the company. Like most Japanese executives, Yamashita puts a high priority on communications between top management and the rest of the organization. Said the president: "You simply could not or would not make any important decision without first achieving a consensus within your corporation."

So much of Yamashita's day was taken up by discussions with employees that only 32 minutes were left for reading and desk work. The president usually has a business lunch. On this day, it was with the visiting Ambassador from Madagascar and his wife.