The Atami Conference and the new sales system: a reform that began with “Matsushita was at fault” (1964)

The apology that changed the system

The remarkable thing about the Atami Conference was that the man at the top admitted fault fully, in front of a crowd. But tears and apology alone do not change commerce. What set Konosuke apart from an ordinary manager was that, right after the reconciliation, he returned to the front line himself and backed the emotional thaw with a reform of the system — cutting the dependence on long-term promissory notes and translating it into concrete mechanisms: one region, one distributor; direct sales by division; a new installment plan. Bowing his head and re-forming the structure can be seen as a single, continuous motion.

The ideal of co-prosperity thus went beyond four characters on a card and took root in the system as a structure in which maker and dealer shared the profit. The prototype of keiretsu — that Japanese commercial custom — can be said to lie here. The irony is that the sales-network mechanism Konosuke built at this moment had, some thirty years later, turned into a burden. The impasse of keiretsu-store distribution that the 1993 Morishita regime could not deal with was also a question about the shelf life of the very mechanism once assembled at Atami.