English version of Japanese business book comes to USA

— -- The English version of Japan's best-selling business book of 2007 that was originally written as a textbook for seventh- and eighth-graders goes on sale in the USA on March 6.

Should Problem Solving 101 sell well in the USA, author Ken Watanabe will pull off a rare recent instance of transferring business advice from the world's second-largest economy to the largest. That was fairly common two decades ago until the Japanese economy faltered and U.S. executives soured on many things Japanese.

In a phone interview from Tokyo, Watanabe says he has no idea how Problem Solving 101 will sell in the USA, and his U.S. publisher, Portfolio, has delayed a book tour until a flop is out of the question. Soon after its U.S. launch, the book is expected to roll out in Britain, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Italy, Indonesia, the Netherlands and Thailand.

It has sold nearly 370,000 copies in Japan, according to editor Hiromi Maesawa of Japanese publisher Diamond, benefiting not only from its popularity at companies such as Otsuka Pharmaceuticals and Mitsui, but from a snowball of publicity from newspapers, TV and the magazine equivalents of GQ and Vogue. It was even plugged by Junichi Okada, a member of a popular boy band.

The book came out just as many Japanese were casting doubts on "hypercapitalism, and everyone was looking into a purposeful way to live," Maesawa says. "It became a social phenomenon."

Watanabe says he wrote the book in response to a national drumbeat of Japanese criticism about its education system that emphasizes rote memorization. Other Japanese books about problem solving had been written for the business market, but Watanabe made it simple for middle-schoolers. That simplicity struck a chord with business.

Watanabe went to school in Japan until the eighth grade before moving to Greenwich, Conn. He went on to an economics degree at Yale, a Harvard MBA and a job as a McKinsey consultant. He says U.S. schools don't focus on memorization and are much better at teaching critical thinking but still fall short in the discipline of problem solving.