TOKYO—When the maker of a well-known Japanese popsicle lifted the sales price for the first time in a quarter-century a few years ago, dozens of executives and workers bowed deeply in apology in a somber television commercial.
The company, Akagi Nyugyo Co., is now planning to raise the price of nearly three dozen other ice cream products. This time there’ll be no displays of contrition.
“We’re suddenly facing a tsunami of price increases” for materials, said marketing director Fumio Hagiwara. “We will raise prices in order to survive.”
Apologies have long been an important lubricant for smooth communication in Japan. Conversations between friends, neighbors and co-workers are littered with habitual apologies for trivial inconveniences, such as asking for an elevator door to be held open momentarily.
Businesses routinely apologize to customers, even for small issues such failing to answer the phone quickly. Train operators will broadcast apologies on platforms when train services are as little as a minute late. A price change would typically be accompanied by a serving of humble pie.
Now that the global wave of inflation has reached Japan’s shores—after around three decades of stable or falling prices—businesses have broken free of the “sorry” pastime.
When food company Yaokin Inc. raised the price for its flagship umaibo puffed corn snack by 2 yen—about 1.5 cents—to 12 yen in April, it published a message about the change on Twitter that might have seemed too blunt only a few months earlier: “We need to make a profit so that we can continue to ensure the survival of the snack industry.”
As if to acknowledge it was being less contrite than some might expect, it published a separate newspaper ad quoting a snack wholesaler: “This is no time to be wasting money on an apology ad.”
In a marketing firm’s survey about the umaibo price hike, almost 70% of people selected a response that read: “It’s kind of amazing that the price has never been raised before.” The snack first went on sale 42 years ago.
Yuko Ueda, a 41-year-old homemaker who was recently out buying a box of sushi for dinner, said the disappearance of apologies wasn’t surprising now that the cost of everything is rising.
“When prices go up, I would expect better customer service or better products rather than apologies,” she said.
Mitsuko Komeda, a 52-year-old owner of a beauty salon, said Japan’s relatively mild inflation rate of around 2.5% might mean businesses didn’t feel the pressure to apologize so much.
“Look at other countries. They’re raising prices much more,” she said.
Yasuyo Yamanaka, a 38-year-old accountant who was eating a bowl of noodles at Ichiyoshi Soba in Tokyo on a recent afternoon, said apologies help show businesses care about their customers, and foster loyalty.
“I believe this is a sense probably only shared by Japanese,” she said.
Apologies are an expected part of basic manners in Japan, where work colleagues might see you as inconsiderate if you don’t apologize for taking a vacation. That could mean you’re not invited the next time the team goes out for lunch together.
It’s even considered good manners to apologize for problems that aren’t your fault. In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, the head of the national soccer association said he was “deeply sorry for causing concern and trouble to others” by catching the virus.
Some management books tout the use of apologies as a weapon for success. A long-running manga series about a hapless policeman features a story line in which the main character gets recruited to a new job because of his skill at apologizing, developed through numerous screw-ups.
The change in etiquette for businesses this year is partly because companies no longer need to worry so much about looking like the lone bad guy, since nearly everyone is charging more.
“Companies had long been hesitant to raise prices” out of fear of losing customers to their rivals, said Tsutomu Watanabe, a professor of economics at the University of Tokyo. “But that is now changing.”
Some people are suspicious of stealth price hikes by businesses taking advantage of the movement of the herd.
“I understand costs for fuel and fertilizer have gone up,” said Atsushi Takashina, a 67-year-old retiree, while munching on snacks outside a Tokyo shopping mall. “But when it comes to food, I feel some are taking advantage of a general rise in prices to raise prices.”
Meanwhile, the governor of the Bank of Japan, who has been trying to stoke mild inflation for years to kick-start the economy, apologized recently after facing criticism for saying consumers were becoming more accepting of price increases. “It was not my intention to say” that, Mr. Kuroda said. “I apologize for the confusion.”
Companies are still making efforts to be sensitive. Instead of an apology, one go-to strategy when raising prices is to ask for customers’ “understanding.” Torikizoku, a chain of restaurants specializing in low-cost grilled chicken, recently raised prices and said it sought customers’ understanding as it faced “ever mounting raw materials and energy costs.”
Back in December, Ichiyoshi Soba, the Tokyo noodle restaurant, put up signs to show its remorse for raising the price of everything on its menu by 7 cents. “We’re really sorry to our customers,” it said.
President Kohei Yamamoto said his costs have already risen by nearly 20% since the December price change and are expected to rise further, forcing him to lift prices again at some point this year.
“There is no other choice,” he said, adding that it might be easier if his business was in a Western country where passing on higher costs to consumers is commonplace.
He said many of his customers regularly eat at his restaurant. “I am genuinely very sorry for them,” he said.
