The CEO decided to apply for the internship program without any consultation. There was a stony silence and a feeling of “apprehension” in the company when it was announced.

Q.Why did your company decide to take on interns? What did you aim to achieve?

Although we are engaged in business involving overseas transactions, some employees were quite apprehensive about doing business with foreign nationals. For example, even if the content of the business is basically the same as that conducted in Japan, employees were hesitant to take on the work after merely hearing the words “China” or “America”. Therefore, I decided to change this inward-looking situation. When I announced that the company was going to accept a foreign intern, many in the company objected. However, I really believe that this was the correct decision, even though the necessity had to be explained and implemented against the will of some people.

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Our goal is to import products from Vietnam to Japan. I realized a very important thing when we encountered an “unexpected pitfall”.

Q.What kind of internship did you run? What difficulties did you face and how did you resolve them?

As the intern was a graduate from a university specializing in international trade in Vietnam, the objective of the internship was to import and sell products from Vietnam in Japan. The intern created a website and sent out hundreds of inquiries to companies in Vietnam. However, she received absolutely no response and her motivation declined by the day. After discussing what might be problem, we realized that we needed to send an entirely difference type of inquiries, and determined that we should search for “companies that sold products popular in Japan in countries such as Vietnam” instead of searching for “companies that would sell Vietnamese products in Japan”. Although we lost quite a lot of time, we learned the importance of communicating in a careful manner. As the Japanese language often omits the subject of a sentence, we made efforts to provide explanations by combining conversations, pictures and written explanations in order to prevent communication problems and achieve mutual understanding.

The uneasiness with dealing with overseas companies by the company employees disappeared when our intern took the lead in new business.

Q.Comparing before and after the internship, what effects did it have on you, your employees, or your organization?

As we now have a steady outlook of imports of products from Vietnam, back orders for several types of products, purchasers and regular customers, we feel that we are currently on the right track. This is a new type of business for the company and we were most surprised that a student from overseas could achieve such a great outcome. As a result of her efforts, we have developed a program for the importation of overseas products and we plan to adapt this to other countries in order to further develop our entry into overseas markets. Our primary objective for applying for the internship program was to address the uneasiness felt by our Japanese staff. While I think that the personality of the intern played a large part, the company experienced a dramatic turn around to the extent that some staff members have stated that they wish to visit Vietnam next year and some wish to assist our overseas business. There is now a welcoming atmosphere in the company whereby it is hard to believe that any of the staff member objected in the first place. This has all been achieved through the positive efforts of one intern from overseas.