When Mitsuko Tottori has been named the new head of Japan Airlines (JAL) in January, caused a shock wave throughout the country’s business sector.
Not only was Tottori the carrier’s first female boss, she also began her career as a member of the cabin crew.
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 the fact that she once worked at Japan Air System (JAS), a much smaller airline that JAL bought two decades ago.
“I didn’t know about an alien mutant,” Ms. Tottori laughs as she speaks to me from Tokyo.
In short, she did not belong to the elite group of businesspeople that the carrier used to appoint to its most important position.
Of the last 10 men to hold the position, seven were educated at the best university in the country. Ms. Tottori graduated from a much less prestigious all-women’s college.
With Tottori’s appointment, JAL joined the ranks of 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.
His 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 aircraft while landing.
Japan Airlines Flight 516 caught fire after colliding on the runway at Haneda Airport in Tokyo.
Five of the coast guard plane’s six crew were killed and the captain was injured. However, within minutes of the collision, all 379 people on board the Airbus A350-900 escaped to safety.
The airline’s rigorous training of flight attendants has suddenly come into focus.
As a former flight attendant, Ms. Tottori learned firsthand the importance of aviation safety.
Four months after becoming a flight attendant in 1985, Japan Airlines was involved in the deadliest plane crash in aviation history, which killed 520 people on Mount Osutaka.
“Each member of the JAL team has the opportunity to climb Mount Osutaka and speak to those who remember the accident,” says Tottori.
“We also display aircraft wreckage in our safety promotion center, so instead of just reading about it in a book, we look with our own eyes and feel with our own skin to learn more about the accident.”
Although his appointment to the top job came as a surprise, JAL has changed rapidly since it went bankrupt in 2010 in what was the country’s biggest-ever business failure outside the financial sector.
The airline was able to continue flying thanks to major state financial support and the business underwent a comprehensive restructuring with a new board and management.
His savior was the then 77-year-old retired and ordained Buddhist monk Kazuo Inamori. Without his transformational influence, it is unlikely that someone like Ms. Tottori could have become leader of JAL.
I spoke to him in an interview in 2012. He didn’t mince words, saying JAL was an arrogant company that didn’t care about its customers.
Under Inamori’s leadership, the company promoted people from front-line operations, such as pilots and engineers, rather than bureaucratic positions.
“I felt very uncomfortable because the company didn’t feel like a private company,” Inamori, who died in 2022, told me. “Many former government officials used to put golden parachutes into the company.”
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 for almost a decade to increase the number of female bosses in the country.
It now aims for a third of leadership positions in large companies to be held by women by 2030, after not being able to reach the target by 2020.
“It’s not just about the mindset of business leaders, but it’s also important for women to have the confidence to become managers,” says Tottori.
“I hope my consultation will encourage other women to try things they were previously afraid to try.”
