Japan’s Firms Try to Battle Terrorism : Commerce: Companies are beginning to take steps to try to reduce attacks on their employees abroad.

TOKYO —  In a troubling indicator of this nation’s rise as a global economic power, more and more Japanese businessmen, aid workers and tourists are becoming targets of international terrorists and criminals.

This year alone, 17 Japanese have been murdered in Guam, the Dominican Republic, Thailand, Panama, Colombia, China, Pakistan, Saipan and the United States. Japanese consulates globally also reported 12,400 crimes and other problems involving Japanese nationals in 1990, almost a 50% increase from 1987.

In part, the growing number of Japanese crime victims reflects a boom in overseas travel. Japanese made 11 million trips abroad last year, more than double the number taken in 1985. More than 600,000 Japanese live overseas; 240,000 of them are expatriates (and their families) who work for Japanese companies.

Japanese travelers may be falling prey to criminals in increasing numbers in part because kidnapers have discovered that they can count on Japanese companies to pay ransoms in the hopes of getting their employees back safely.

Although Toshiba refuses to confirm it, newspapers have reported that the company paid $2 million in December to ransom two employees that guerrillas held captive for 111 days in Colombia’s mountains.

“Japanese companies have become so global, it is inevitable that these things will happen,” says Michihiro Okuhara, general manager of overseas security at Toshiba Corp. “Japanese have developed a reputation as being rich.”

That perception has been deadly for some, including:

* Takashi Ota, 45, a businessman whose body was found on a riverbank 40 miles outside Panama City on March 14. His face was disfigured with acid to delay identification. His employer, Citizen Watch Co., paid $700,000 in ransom after receiving a call from a person claiming to be a representative of right-wing guerrillas.

* A Japanese automotive engineer who was fatally shot in front of his home in Pakistan on June 16. The motive for the slaying is unknown. The engineer was working for a United Nations agency helping to coordinate aid for Afghan refugees.

* Kuniyoshi Ishii, an engineer sent from Japan to help install an electric generator in Saipan, whose corpse was found July 22 in his car, parked near a beach. His passport and $100 in cash in a bag next to him were untouched.

Japan’s growing foreign aid program, now the largest in the world, has also made Japanese workers prime targets for guerrilla groups purporting to fight “imperialism.” In July, 1991, three Japanese agricultural workers were fatally shot in Peru by Shining Path guerrillas, apparently seeking to undermine cooperative programs between Japan and the government of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.

Whereas many Americans overseas employ sophisticated security measures--the result of decades of experience with international terrorism--Japan is only now beginning to deal with the problem. And the lack of experience shows in the way that some Japanese companies have dealt with incidents involving their employees.

Citizen’s handling of the Ota case, for example, has been roundly criticized.

Panamanian police recently contended that Ota was actually strangled by a subordinate at Citizen Watch, who put a sleeping pill in his drink during a night of socializing. The employee, a Peruvian national, allegedly called the company pretending to be a guerrilla and kept the ransom after the company sent him to make the payoff.

“They didn’t even check to see if he (Ota) was alive before handing over the ransom,” says Toshiba’s Okuhara, who notes that the Citizen case and other recent incidents are belatedly spurring Japanese companies to take a harder look at safety procedures.

Japan also has a long way to go in educating its people to the dangers of overseas travel, experts say.

The Japanese, coming from a sheltered society, are unprepared for the crime rampant in many countries, said Masahiro Omura, deputy director of the Foreign Ministry’s division for the protection of Japanese nationals overseas.

The ministry has produced three videotapes for tourists and business travelers. One video--titled “Kidnaped: You Too Are a Target”--suggests that businessmen take different routes to work each day and teach their children to go with unfamiliar adults only if they display secret, predetermined codes, such as a picture of a certain flower.

A 230-page comic book, put out by the Japan Overseas Enterprises Assn., seeks to alert businessmen to common scams that Japanese travelers fall prey to.

The tract also advises travelers to avoid looking like tourists or calling attention to the fact that they are Japanese. The comic’s hero, a veteran overseas businessman, boasts that he never carries a camera and always keeps his Japanese passport at home.

To better protect themselves, Japanese executives have been advised to keep up to date on the location of global danger zones and to be ready to get out quickly.

Okuhara says 12 Toshiba employees were held hostage in Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait because the company was slow to inform its employees of the impending danger of the Gulf War. “The big U.S. companies and the (Japanese) trading companies had escaped a day earlier,” says Okuhara. “They had better access to information. We stuck around and got caught.”

After that incident, Toshiba created a four-man division to improve its international intelligence gathering and to keep in better touch with its 1,600 employees and their families posted overseas, Okuhara said. Toshiba is also making an effort to train its workers on common sense procedures for assuring personal safety.

“Since we are a manufacturer, we send out a lot of blue-collar workers who have never traveled overseas before,” he notes.

Circulating articles about recent kidnaping and murder cases also keeps employees cautious, says Okuhara. But companies must tread carefully.

“You want to get them scared enough that they will be careful,” Masaya Yamashita, director of the Japan Assn. of Overseas Corporations, says in a recently published interview. “But you don’t want to get them so scared that they refuse to travel.”

The growing danger of international assignments--added to Japanese employees’ existing concerns about health and their children’s education--has made such postings increasingly unattractive, Yamashita says.

Meantime, American and European companies are flocking to Japan seeking contracts to advise Japanese companies on security and crisis management.

International SOS Assistance Inc., a Philadelphia-based firm that chartered its own plane to fly its clients out of the Persian Gulf shortly before the Gulf War broke out, recently established a branch in Japan. It offers a special crisis insurance package that includes emergency plane chartering and health care services.

Controlled Risk, the London-based consulting company that successfully represented Mitsui & Co. and Toshiba in their negotiations with kidnapers, opened a branch office in Japan in May because of a rise in inquiries from Japan.

An executive who heads the Tokyo branch of the San Francisco-based Pinkerton agency says the business of offering Japanese companies training, advice and crisis management services could be worth $3 billion.

Still, the security experts say that, although there is great interest in their services, there are fewer takers than expected. “People keep saying, ‘It couldn’t happen to us,’ says Masayuki Aoki, president of SOS Japan. “There isn’t really a sense of crisis here yet.”

But some of the recent murder cases have hit close to home and have gone a long way toward shaking Japanese complacency. Specialty shops report brisk sales and rentals of bullet-proof vests.