Haruka Nishimatsu: The Japan Airlines CEO Who Took the Bus to Work

Haruka Nishimatsu was the president and chief executive of Japan Airlines (JAL) from 2006 until January 2010. He became internationally known in 2009 for an unusually modest style of leadership: he rode the city bus to work, ate in the staff canteen, removed the walls of his office, and cut his own pay to as little as about US$90,000 a year while the airline was asking employees to accept cuts. He stepped down as JAL entered bankruptcy protection in January 2010, so his story is both an example of shared sacrifice and a reminder of its limits.

Who Haruka Nishimatsu was

Nishimatsu was a long-serving JAL executive who took the top job in 2006, at a time when the national flag carrier was already struggling. Japan Airlines had grown into one of the world’s largest airlines, but it carried heavy debts, expensive pension promises, an ageing fleet and many unprofitable routes, some of them kept for political reasons.

When the global financial crisis of 2008 hit air travel, those weaknesses became severe. The airline needed repeated government support, and management asked staff to accept pay cuts and early retirements. It was in that setting that Nishimatsu’s personal choices drew attention.

The bus, the canteen and the open office

In January 2009 the American network CBS News profiled him in a short report that was later shared around the world. The details were simple but striking for the head of a major airline:

Public transport. He commuted to the Tokyo headquarters on an ordinary city bus.
Staff canteen. He ate lunch in the company cafeteria, where employees could approach him there with ideas or complaints.
No walls. He had the walls of his office taken down, so his desk sat in the open with staff around him.
Ordinary suits. CBS reported that he bought his suits at a discount store.
Time on the front line. He visited aircraft and talked with flight attendants and other front-line staff to learn what was happening on the ground.

He explained his reasoning to CBS through a translator:

“If management is distant, up in the clouds, people just wait for orders. I want my people to think for themselves.”
— Haruka Nishimatsu, CBS News, January 2009

Cutting his own pay first

The part of the story that travelled furthest was about money. When JAL cut wages to survive, Nishimatsu reduced his own salary as well, and CBS reported that in one year it fell to around US$90,000, a fraction of what chief executives of comparable companies in the United States were earning. Reports at the time said the cut brought his pay roughly level with, or below, that of some of the airline’s senior pilots.

The message was that leaders should share the sacrifice they ask of others, rather than protect their own position while staff pay the price. He told CBS that his wife had been startled when he told her about the pay cut.

In Japan, it is not unusual for executives to take symbolic pay cuts or to apologise publicly when a company performs badly, so Nishimatsu was building on an existing tradition. What made him stand out abroad was the contrast with the bonus controversies at bailed-out Western banks during the same crisis.

What happened to Japan Airlines

Personal frugality could not fix JAL’s underlying problems. By late 2009 the airline’s debts were enormous, reported in the aviation press at around US$16 billion, and the new government in Tokyo moved towards a court-supervised restructuring. Nishimatsu had said he would resign as part of that process.

On 19 January 2010 JAL filed for protection under Japan’s Corporate Rehabilitation Law, reportedly the largest bankruptcy of a non-financial company in Japanese history at the time. Kazuo Inamori, the 77-year-old founder of the electronics company Kyocera, came out of retirement at the government’s request to lead the airline. The restructuring that followed cut thousands of jobs and many routes. JAL returned to profit and was relisted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2012. Inamori died in 2022.

It is worth correcting one common misunderstanding. Social media posts years later often presented Nishimatsu as JAL’s current boss, but he had already left the airline in early 2010.

Lessons for leaders, and their limits

Nishimatsu’s example still appears in leadership courses and articles for good reasons:

Credibility. Asking staff to sacrifice is easier when the person asking visibly shares the burden.
Accessibility. Eating with staff and removing office walls lowers the barrier to bad news reaching the top, which is exactly what a struggling company needs.
Ownership. His stated goal was for employees to think and act for themselves rather than wait for instructions.

The limits matter too. One leader’s pay is a tiny share of a large company’s costs, and modest habits do not change a broken business model, unprofitable routes or crushing debt. JAL’s recovery came from deep structural change under new leadership. The most balanced reading is that humble leadership builds trust and morale, but it works best alongside hard strategic decisions, not as a substitute for them.

Why the story keeps coming back

Stories like Nishimatsu’s, or that of Uruguay’s former president José Mujica, keep circulating because many people feel that the gap between leaders and ordinary workers has grown too wide. In the United States, the ratio between chief executive pay and typical worker pay at large companies has been measured in the hundreds. A boss on the bus is a powerful image against that background.

The fairest way to remember him is as a manager who tried to lead from among his staff during a crisis he could not stop. That is a smaller claim than the viral version, and a more useful one.

Sources: CBS News: Japan Airline Boss Sets Exec Example, 28 January 2009; World of Aviation: New JAL CEO, 14 January 2010; Wikipedia: Kazuo Inamori; Wikipedia: Japan Airlines (Nishimatsu entry). The story was shared in 2015 by True Activist.

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