- author, Hi Mariko
- Roll, BBC News
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3 hours ago
The appointment of Mitsuko Tottori as the new CEO of Japan Airlines (JAL) has sent shock waves throughout Japan’s corporate sector.
Tottori is not only the first woman to lead the airline: she began her career as a flight attendant.
At the time, headlines used terms ranging from “first woman” and “first former flight attendant” to “something unusual” and “no way!”
One website even described her as “an alien” or “a mutant”, in reference to the fact that she also worked at Japan Air System (JAS), a much smaller airline bought by JAL two decades ago.
“I didn’t know it was an alien mutant”, jokes Tottori, in an interview with BBC News directly from Tokyo.
She did not belong to the elite group of businesspeople that the shipping company used to appoint to the most important position.
Of the last ten men to hold the position, seven were educated at the best university in the country. Tottori graduated from a much less prestigious college, reserved only for women.
With Tottori’s appointment, JAL has joined the ranks of less than 1% of Japan’s top companies that are led by women.
“I don’t consider myself the ‘first woman’ or the ‘first former flight attendant’. I want to act as a professional, so I didn’t expect to receive so much attention.”
“But I realize that the public or our employees don’t necessarily see me that way,” she adds.
Japan Airlines Flight 516 caught fire after colliding on the runway at Haneda Airport in Tokyo.
Five of the six crew members of the smaller coast guard plane were killed and the captain was injured. However, within minutes of the collision, all 379 people on board the Airbus A350-900 escaped to safety.
The airline’s rigorous training of flight attendants has gained international attention.
As a former flight attendant, Tottori learned early in her career the importance of safety in the aviation industry.
Four months after she became a flight attendant in 1985, Japan Airlines was involved in the deadliest plane crash in history, which killed 520 people on Mount Osutaka.
“Each member of the JAL team has the opportunity to climb Mount Osutaka and speak to those who remember the accident,” says Tottori.
“We also display aircraft wreckage in our safety promotion center. Instead of just reading about it in a book, we look with our own eyes and feel firsthand what this accident meant.”
While her appointment to the company’s top job came as a surprise, JAL has turned around quickly since it filed for bankruptcy in 2010 in what was Japan’s biggest business failure outside the financial sector.
The airline was able to continue operating thanks to extensive state financial support. The company also underwent a comprehensive restructuring, with a new board and revamped management.
JAL’s “savior” was Kazuo Inamori, a retired Buddhist monk, then 77 years old. Without his transformational influence, it is unlikely that someone like Tottori would have become JAL’s leader later.
In an interview with BBC News in 2012, Inamori did not mince words when saying that JAL was an arrogant company that did not care about its customers.
Under his leadership, the airline promoted and highlighted people in front-line operations, such as pilots and engineers.
“I felt very uncomfortable, because the company didn’t look like a private company,” Inamori declared at the time (he died in 2022).
JAL has come a long way since then — and the attention the company’s first female president now receives is hardly surprising.
The Japanese government has been trying for almost a decade to increase the number of women leading companies in the country.
The goal is for a third of leadership positions in large companies to be held by women by 2030 — the target that had been established for 2020 was not achieved.
“It’s not just about changing the mindset of business leaders, but it’s also important that women feel confident to become managers,” says Tottori.
“I hope my stance will encourage other women to try things they were previously afraid of.”
