Meet the SCCIJ Members

Meet the SCCIJ Members #17 – Hiroshi Suga, a Very Swiss Japanese Gentleman

Meet the SCCIJ Members #17 – Hiroshi Suga, a Very Swiss Japanese Gentleman

It was a postcard sent while camping near Lake Lugano that convinced Hiroshi Suga’s parents that they should send him to school in Japan.

Meet the SCCIJ Members #17 – Hiroshi Suga, a Very Swiss Japanese Gentleman

“I wrote asking for more money because I’d spent too much playing video games and pinball. But the Japanese I wrote in my postcard was so bad that it shocked my parents. That was my big mistake,” recalls Suga, chuckling at the memory.

Born and raised in Zurich to Japanese parents who had immigrated to Switzerland in the mid-1960s, he had attended local schools and Swiss German was effectively his mother tongue. His parents had moved to Switzerland so his mother could pursue her career as a soprano, his father use his language skills and they could both live a more cosmopolitan existence.

“Some Japanese people at the time looked at Switzerland as a sort of Shangri-La, and many intellectuals thought that Japan should follow the Swiss model,” explains Suga.

Meet the SCCIJ Members #17 – Hiroshi Suga, a Very Swiss Japanese Gentleman

Despite the fact that few people in Switzerland in the 1970s knew anything much about Asian countries or culture, Suga says his family encountered little discrimination when he was growing up. On the odd occasion he faced any racism from his primary school peers, Suga’s best friend in the neighborhood, “who was very strong and good at fighting,” would swiftly make his antagonists see the error of their ways in no uncertain terms.

Suga did feel isolated when he attended events organized by the Japanese Association of Zurich, such as the year-end bonenkai, simply because the other children knew each other from the international school they mostly attended. He also says he experienced more discrimination and bullying at school for being an outsider during a couple of years back in Japan when his grandfather had been unwell than he ever did in Switzerland.

Aged 14, he was accepted into a returnee-friendly junior high school in Tokyo, though Suga points out he wasn’t even strictly a returnee, having been born abroad.

Cool Japan

His father’s company, what is now DKSH, paid for flights to and from Tokyo, allowing the young Suga to spend school holidays back in Switzerland.

Most of the world’s video games were coming out of Japan in the early 1980s and Suga had early access to the latest releases in Tokyo’s game centers. This meant that by the time they reached Switzerland, he could show off his acquired expertise during his holidays, allowing him to win free playing credits, which he distributed to his impressed and grateful friends.

During these times, Suga could bask in the reflected glory of Japan’s growing coolness, thanks to the video games and companies like Sony. Yet despite recalling a tinge of pride at seeing James Bond, played by Roger Moore, sporting Seiko watches in the iconic films, Suga says he’s always felt more attachment to the country of his birth than to that of his ancestors.

A hard-boiled learning curve

After attending the International Christian University high school in Koganei, Suga applied only to the few universities that allowed the substitution of German for English in their entry requirements.

He went on to graduate from Keio, and afterwards received job offers from a bank and an advertising agency. Choosing the latter, he was soon given projects related to the agency’s overseas business due to his international background. However, this required working in English, in which he says his skills at the time were limited.

“Because these were international projects, I was on the phone and writing business letters in English every day. I became really interested in English and started to read hard-boiled detective novelists like Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon. I found the stripped-down language of the hard-boiled style, which concentrated on just the facts, translated well to business writing.”

Some of the standout moments from that period were returning to Switzerland on the European tours of jazz and blues artists such as B.B. King, Ray Charles and George Benson, when working with the tour sponsor.

That has been followed by a long stint in human resources, something that has left Suga somewhat concerned about Japanese firms’ chances of attracting the best international talent. “Japanese companies need to maintain a productive balance between tolerance and integration.”

Giving back

Already thinking about his plans for when he reaches official retirement age, “Undoubtedly, the main theme in my second career shall be Switzerland. After all, it is about time to give back what this beautiful alpine country has generously given me over the decades.”

For the last few years, Suga has been giving back in a small way to the Swiss community in Tokyo by taking on the role of Samichlaus every December, when he uses his five-language repertoire to communicate with the children as he hands out gifts.

Regarding his divided national loyalties, asked the acid test question of who he supports when it comes to football, his unhesitating answer is the “Nati.”

Text: Gavin Blair for SCCIJ.

Meet the SCCIJ Members #17 – Hiroshi Suga, a Very Swiss Japanese Gentleman

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