"They are the losers in battle. When you meet with them, they give all kinds of excuses. They blame the government; they blame the weather!" Masayoshi Son, the founder and boss of Softbank, Japan's third-biggest telecoms operator, has little patience for the risk-averse managers of the country's sluggish industrial behemoths. Entrepreneurs like him "don't give excuses for how tough the battle is, and how tough the handicap is-we always fight." Japan is unfriendly to entrepreneurs. Like the rest of Japanese society, its businesses have traditionally placed a premium on harmony, which in practice has meant propping up weak firms and making it harder for new, more efficient competitors to rise.
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