Across the Divide / Giving lobbyists a good name
Yoko Mizui Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
After the mass shooting at Virginia Tech university in which 27 students and five teachers were killed by fellow student Seung Hui Cho on April 16, the phrase "gun lobby" was being bandied about a lot on the Internet, usually with reference to gun rights groups led by the National Rifle Association.
"I'm sorry that the word 'lobby' has got such negative connotations here in Japan when we are planning to promote lobbyists as a good thing," said Rahma Kishida, who runs Leadership Japan, a company that specializes in training international business leaders. The company is scheduled to open a new program to train lobbyists at the end of this month.
"With this one-year program, we'd like to teach the practical know-how needed to become capable lobbyists, based on my own experience in Washington, D.C.," said Kishida, who worked in the U.S. capital as an international business facilitator and lobbyist for five years after getting her Juris Doctor law degree from Temple University School of Law.
In Washington, Kishida built up a network of connections in the business and political worlds. After staying in the United States for 14-1/2 years, she returned to Japan in 2001 and started her lobbying activities. She also taught international business skills at Japanese companies and Waseda University's Extension Center, while establishing Leadership Japan last November.
"When I decided to come back to Japan six years ago, I wanted to teach Japanese people what I had learned in the United States, including business know-how," she said.
"Although lobbying is not so well known in Japan, it is very influential in the United States," Kishida said. "Some say that lobbyists are the hidden power that drives U.S. policy. I regret to say that it's true that there are some lobbyists who use money to buy influence and do things that are harmful to society."
Besides offering seminars for international business, her company has already started a "Cultured English" program to help Japanese clients cultivate the English ability needed to flourish in an international business environment.
Kishida went to the United States against her parents' strong opposition after she graduated from a Tokyo public high school. "I was brought up in an entirely Japanese environment and I did not particularly like English. As a child, I had a strong sense that I was Japanese and was very attached to my country," she said. But she wanted to see a wider world and decided to go to the United States "as it is a country where people gather from around the world, and is of course the world's most influential nation."
She went to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated after five years--longer than normal as she took temporary leave to marry an American student that she met there. She took one more year to enter the law school as the admission test was very difficult. "I studied really hard for three years to get my J.D. [Juris Doctor] degree," she said.
While working in Washington, she noticed how some people's English was different from what she learned as a student. "I thought I was using fairly polite English, but I found that even politer English was spoken at formal occasions," she said.
Kishida, who acquired her English skills through hard work at the university, said she didn't study TOEIC preparation textbooks in Japan before she went to the United States. Before she entered the university, she studied English at a language school affiliated with the university. "When I was in the United States, I read English newspapers and watched TV programs a lot," she said. At first, she couldn't understand the articles as she didn't like to consult a dictionary. She skipped the words she didn't understand and guessed the meaning through context.
one day, I found that I could understand the articles fairly well," she said.
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This column features interviews with professionals who use English in their work.
(May. 18, 2007)