Tokyo -- According to an old Japanese proverb, a nail that sticks up will always be beaten down.
"In Japan -- where most of us look and think alike -- to be different is not a good thing," says Masa Kajimoto. His life, however, suggests otherwise: Even though he was knocked down after failing his college entrance exams, he recovered and has become president of Kajimoto Concert Management Co., one of country's pre-eminent classical music promoters.
Kajimoto's latest triumph is taking an unknown orchestra named the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and turning its trip to Japan into the most successful tour of Japan by a foreign orchestra in more than a year.
Using marketing techniques he learned when he was a rock promoter, and the knowledge of Americans that he acquired from living in the United States for more than six years, Kajimoto made the BSO succeed where such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony and the Moscow State Symphony had failed.
"Masa's different than the other classical promoters in Japan," says Byron Gustafson, vice president for touring at ICM, the New York concert agency that helped arrange the BSO's tour of the Far East. "He drives around on a Harley-Davidson; the others ride around in stretch limousines."
He also has a different way of working.
"Some of his requests seem strange," says BSO executive director John Gidwitz. "He wanted the orchestra to make a video, he wanted to push for a telecast [to air on Maryland Public Television at 9 p.m. Nov. 25] and he wanted David [Zinman] to be prepared to do lots of interviews."
The reason for his unusual requests, Kajimoto says, "is that the chances of the tour succeeding were so slim. To the Japanese, Baltimore might as well have been on the other side of the moon. It was the advance promotion that made it work."
Kajimoto persuaded hotels, ticket outlets and record stores to play the BSO video. And he supplied so much information about Zinman to Japanese music writers that, the conductor says, "They knew more about me than American journalists ever do."
Unlike the United States, music magazines are big business in Japan, where they contain glossy ads for expensive products such as sports cars, lingerie and perfume.
VTC "There were loads of articles about Zinman-san," Kajimoto notes approvingly. His formal use of the suffix "san" is interesting. It has the approximate meaning of the honorific "Mr.," though it perhaps conveys more respect, and it is used even by Japanese who have known each other for years. But when Kajimoto speaks about Gidwitz, he uses the familiar "John," in the same vein of typically American informality that makes Gidwitz call Kajimoto "Masa."
"Sometimes I think my brain is half-Japanese and half-American," Kajimoto says.
The story of how Kajimoto came to receive his college education in the United States reveals some of the weaknesses in the much-vaunted Japanese system of public education.
"I am not an admirer of the Japanese system," says Kajimoto, adding that it rewards rote learning, discourages independent thinking and prepares students only to take competitive exams.
"I did not want to study merely to memorize," he says. "I didn't want to memorize when things happened, I wanted to learn why. But the teachers didn't have time for 'why' questions. I eventually began cutting classes, and when I took the entrance exams for college, of course I failed."
Kajimoto's father, Naoyasu, who wanted to be proud of his first-born son, was crushed. Kajimoto pere was the president and founder of Kajimoto Concert Agency, and it was his fondest wish to be succeeded, in traditional Japanese fashion, by his oldest son.
Now that seemed impossible.
"I was a family disgrace," Kajimoto says. His mother rescued him by sending the 17-year-old failure off to Geneva to live with family friends.
In Switzerland, Kajimoto had the chance encounter that changed his life: He was befriended by an elderly American couple, who suggested that he return with them to Massachusetts and attend Clark University in Worcester.
The next seven years were to be the most important of Kajimoto's life.
"I was on the point of becoming an American citizen" he says. "I loved the freedom of saying what I wanted to say. And I think that the American people, at their best, have a generosity and warmth unique in the world."
But Kajimoto's Japanese side made that impossible.
His younger brother, who was supposed to take over the family business, announced his intention to become a composer and renounced forever the world of the Kajimoto Concert Agency Co.
"As a first son I found it hard to resist my mother's desire for me to return home," Kajimoto says with a smile.
"Japanese mothers," he adds, "are very good at making you feel guilty."
Upon his return home, however, he did not work for his father. Instead, from 1976 to 1982 he worked as a manager for a company that organized rock tours.
Kajimoto managed tours for the likes of such American groups as Simon and Garfunkel, Boz Scaggs, the Eagles, Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross.
"I enjoyed myself, but eventually became bored by rock music," he says. "And while the classical music business can kill the idealism in you, I still like to think it's not as cutthroat as pop music."
Kajimoto changed the kind of music he promoted shortly after hearing Rudolf Serkin perform a Beethoven concerto in Japan.
"After he played, people refused to go home," he says. "Mr. Serkin had to give them an encore, and he played Schubert's A-flat Impromptu.
The one that goes like this . . ."
Kajimoto begins singing the angelically yearning piece with the intensity only true believers possess.
"After he played it, no hands clapped," Kajimoto says. "During that moment of silence I could see the tears on people's faces, and then I felt them on my own. I thought, 'My God, classical music might be a good field for me.' "
Before the year was over, he went to work for his father. Long before last year, when his father retired as president to assume ++ the ceremonial position of chairman, the younger Kajimoto was actually running the company.
"His achievement is that he has made it possible for the business he inherited to maintain its position as one of the controlling factors in Japanese classical music," says ICM's Gustafson.
"No one in this business can ever predict what the results will be, but -- as one can see from the Baltimore tour -- he's very astute in planning things."