I was flipping through the channels last night and came across this program where a few celebrities went behind the scenes of several of Japan's most popular employers, including Google, Oriental Land (aka Tokyo Disneyland), Panasonic, JR East, Meiji Confectionery and NTT DoCoMo.

ANA came out #1 in the overall ranking. Google is apparently most popular among lateral hires, but ANA is far more popular among new graduates--surprising for a place where everyone is taking pay cuts.

TV Tokyo sent their announcer Miho Ohashi to HND to do a tour of some of ANA's facilities there. Fun highlights:

• HND flight operations control center (inside T2). Ohashi met with ANA's flight ops director who has final authority to decide whether any given flight can fly. She asked whether he can override the CEO, to which he responded "Well, the CEO doesn't get involved with this stuff." Everyone ooh-ed and aah-ed.
• Ground staff training center (on the other side of HND). They have built complete working mockups of check-in counters and a boarding gate in order to train new ground staff. The training program apparently takes three weeks, full time, and trainees are expected to study the standard scripts for a few hours a day at home. They also get severely critiqued on their delivery: the TV Tokyo lady tried doing a standard pre-boarding announcement and got chided by the trainer for "sounding like a newscaster," with a comment to the effect that "nobody wants to hear you talk like that at 6 AM."
• Cabin attendant ready room (inside T2 again). Surprisingly spacious and airy in comparison to what little I've seen of break rooms at US airports. Most amusing part was seeing a few hundred identical rollaboards parked in a wide space on the floor inside the entrance; it looked like a luggage store.
• Much was made of the employee compliment system, which seems sort of like the "Going The Extra Mile" cards on UA, except that employees get the cards and use them to compliment each other.

Anyway, I hope this gets replayed at some point soon -- it was pretty good for a Japanese variety show.