When Mitsuko Tottori was announced as the new boss of Japan Airlines (JAL) in January, it sent shockwaves through the country’s business sector.
Ms Tottori was not only the airline’s first female boss, she had also started her career as a cabin crew member.
The headlines ranged from “first woman” and “first former flight attendant” to “unusual” and “no way!”
One website even described her as “an alien molecule” or “a mutant,” a reference to her work at Japan Air System (JAS), a much smaller airline that JAL bought 20 years ago.
“I didn’t know anything about an alien mutant,” Ms. Tottori laughed as she spoke to me from Tokyo.
In short, she did not belong to the elite group of businessmen that the carrier usually appointed to its top position.
Of the last ten men to hold this post, seven attended the best university in the country. Ms. Tottori graduated from a much less prestigious junior college for women.
With Ms. Tottori’s appointment, JAL has joined the less than 1% of Japan’s top companies led by women.
“I don’t consider myself the first woman or the first former flight attendant. I want to act as an individual, so I didn’t expect to get so much attention.”
“But I realize that the public or our employees don’t necessarily see me that way,” she adds.
Her appointment also came just two weeks after JAL flight attendants were praised for the successful evacuation of passengers from a plane that collided with a Coast Guard plane while landing.
Japan Airlines Flight 516 caught fire after colliding on the runway at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.
Five of the six crew members of the Coast Guard aircraft were killed and the captain was injured. However, within minutes of the collision, all 379 people on board the Airbus A350-900 had escaped safely.
The rigorous training of the airline’s flight attendants was suddenly in the spotlight.
As a former flight attendant, Ms. Tottori learned first-hand the importance of aviation safety.
Four months after she became a flight attendant in 1985, Japan Airlines was involved in the deadliest plane crash in aviation history, killing 520 people on Mount Osutaka.
“Every JAL staff member will have the opportunity to climb Mount Osutaka and talk to those who remember the accident,” Tottori said.
“We also display aircraft debris in our safety promotion center, so instead of just reading about it in a book, we see with our own eyes and feel with our own skin to learn about the accident.”
Although her appointment to the top job came as a surprise, JAL has changed rapidly since it declared bankruptcy in 2010, in what was the country’s largest-ever corporate failure outside the financial sector.
The airline managed to continue flying thanks to large financial support from the state, and the company underwent a major restructuring with a new board and management.
The rescuer was the then 77-year-old retired and ordained Buddhist monk Kazuo Inamori. Without his transformative influence, it is unlikely that someone like Ms. Tottori could have become JAL’s leader.
I spoke to him in an interview in 2012. He did not mince his words and said that JAL was an arrogant company that did not care about its customers.
Under Mr. Inamori’s leadership, the company promoted people from front-line operations, such as pilots and engineers, rather than from bureaucratic posts.
“I felt very uncomfortable because the company didn’t feel like it was a private company at all,” said Mr. Inamori, who died in 2022. “Many former government officials were given golden parachutes into the business.”
JAL has come a long way since then and the attention its first female president is receiving is not surprising.
The Japanese government has been trying to increase the number of female bosses in the country for almost a decade.
It now wants a third of leadership positions at major companies to go to women by 2030, after failing to reach the target in 2020.
“It’s not just about the mindset of business leaders, but it is also important that women have the confidence to become managers,” says Ms Tottori.
“I hope my appointment will encourage other women to try things they have previously feared.”
