What Zelda soup tells us about corporate Japan

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For anyone grabbing lunch in Japan, the themed temptation beckons from Lawson convenience store refrigerators: branded Zelda: Kingdom Tears hearty salmon and fresh clam chowder.

For those who don’t have the last $70 yet Zelda game — claimed by some to be the greatest of all time and an easy seller of 10 million copies in its first three days — a $3.26 bowl of hero-labeled soup that (sort of) appears in the game is an inexpensive entry point for some valuable Nintendo magic.

Lurking in his recipe, though, are hints of a major shift in how Japanese companies might start thinking about talent, its value, and its portability.

Cross-marketing a new game with food isn’t unprecedented, and Zelda chowder, of course, is simmering somewhere near the bottom of Nintendo’s efforts to leverage its intellectual property beyond games where Mario, Link (hero of the Zelda series), Donkey Kong and others built that gigantic brand equity. But now it is part of a significantly larger project. In recent months, the Super Nintendo World attraction has opened at Universal Studios Hollywood, following one that opened two years ago in Osaka, while a third construction buzzed in Singapore.

In April, The Super Mario Bros. Movie premiered in the United States. It has since grossed more than $1.2 billion at the global box office, dwarfing the performance of every other theater offered this year. Nintendo has been saying for a few years that it wanted its IP to work more, and very clearly, there’s still a lot to do.

When asked about it in a recent interview, Shigeru Miyamoto, the 70-year-old genius behind the world’s most adored idols nintendo pantheon, said: “Nintendo is like a talent agent. We have many more entertainers in store. . . we have various options [for using them].”

Miyamoto is no stranger to mid-interview bon mot – see “a delayed game is ultimately good, a rushed game is forever bad”. But this seemed to signal something more psychologically substantial: the admission that Nintendo is in show business and plays by the rules of show business. A company that had once primarily contemplated the value of its intellectual property in terms of the product it could move is now judging the independent value of intellectual property itself (and its responsibility to maximize it) in the context of an entertainment industry global massive and multifaceted.

This change of perspective is not unique to Nintendo. A rather less abstract version is unfolding elsewhere in corporate Japan and with people rather than pixels. Japan’s historically frigid job market has been thawed by a shortage of human capital, diminishing expectations of a lifelong job, and the actively growing allure (for some) of a career that progresses through multiple companies.

In a recent article, which cited data from government and academic sources, economist Jesper Koll identified “unprecedented attrition rates” from elite young Japanese bureaucrats who once might have expected to see their entire careers working for the government. The number of those quitting at age 20 has more than tripled since 2014/15, while those quitting at age 30 have more than doubled over the same period.

These are early days, but people are moving more fluidly between mid-career companies. And like the competition to secure them intensifiesmore transparently measurable value is placed on the talent, experience and portability of both.

This process, and the realization that a company’s ability to do business must be contextualized in a large external labor market, requires a significant mental leap for many Japanese companies. Many are accustomed to the idea of ​​having nearly all of their needs met by hiring graduates en masse and retaining them through a combination of habit and loyalty.

But it looks like it’s coming to an end. Nomura’s senior executives recently revealed to the FT that last year, and for the first time in the company’s history, it made more mid-career hires in Japan than it did with graduates. Other brokerage firms, they said after asking around, were fast approaching the same tipping point. In some industries, like IT, the crossover is long gone. If, as seems increasingly likely, this model becomes prevalent throughout corporate Japan, the mind-shift – from acquiring a bulk consignment of ore to buying a finished product at a market – will be historic. All, in effect, will become talent agents.

leo.lewis@ft.com