The former flight attendant who became the first female boss of Japan Airlines

Not only was Ms Tottori the carrier’s first female boss, she had also started her career as a cabin crew member.

The headlines ranged from “first woman” and “first former flight attendant” to “unusual” and “no way!”

One website even described her as “an alien molecule” or “a mutant,” a reference to her having worked at Japan Air System (JAS), a much smaller airline that JAL bought two decades ago.

“I didn’t know about an alien mutant,” laughs Ms Tottori, speaking to me from Tokyo.

In short, she was not from the elite group of businessmen that the carrier had usually appointed to its top job.

Of the last 10 men to hold the post, seven were educated at the country’s best university. Ms Tottori graduated from a far less prestigious all-women’s junior college.

With Ms Tottori’s appointment, JAL has joined the less than 1% of Japan’s top companies led by women.

“I don’t think of myself as the first woman or the first former flight attendant. I want to act as an individual, so I didn’t expect to get so much attention.”

“But I’m aware that the public or our employees don’t necessarily see me that way,” she adds.

Her appointment also came just two weeks after JAL flight attendants were hailed for the successful evacuation of passengers from a plane that collided with a Coast Guard aircraft during landing.

Japan Airlines Flight 516 burst into flames after the collision on the runway at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.

Five of the six crew on the Coast Guard plane died and the captain was injured. However, within minutes of the collision, all 379 people on board the Airbus A350-900 had escaped safely.

The rigorous training of the airline’s flight attendants was suddenly in the spotlight.

As a former flight attendant, Tottori learned the importance of aviation safety first hand.

Four months after she became a flight attendant in 1985, Japan Airlines was involved in the deadliest single-plane crash in aviation history, which killed 520 people at Mount Osutaka.

“Every member of staff at JAL will have the opportunity to climb Mount Osutaka and talk to those who remember the accident,” says Tottori.

“We also display aircraft debris at our safety promotion center, so instead of just reading about it in a book, we see with our own eyes and feel with our own skin to learn about the accident.”

While her appointment to the top job came as a surprise, JAL has changed rapidly since it went bankrupt in 2010 in what was the country’s biggest ever corporate failure outside the financial sector.

The airline managed to continue flying thanks to large government-backed financial support, and the company underwent a major restructuring with a new board and management.

Its savior was the then 77-year-old retiree and ordained Buddhist monk, Kazuo Inamori. Without his transformative influence, it is unlikely that someone like Ms Tottori could have become JAL’s leader.

I spoke to him in an interview in 2012. He didn’t mince words and said that JAL was an arrogant company that didn’t care about its customers.

Under Mr. Inamori’s leadership, the company promoted people from front-line operations, such as pilots and engineers, rather than from bureaucratic positions.

“I felt very uncomfortable because the company didn’t feel like a private company at all,” said Mr. Inamori, who died in 2022. “Many former officials used to get golden parachutes into the company.”

JAL has come a long way since then, and the attention its first female president is getting is not surprising.

The Japanese government has been trying for almost a decade to increase the number of female managers in the country.

“It’s not just about the mindset of business leaders, but it’s also important for women to have the confidence to become leaders,” says Tottori.

“I hope that my appointment would encourage other women to try things that they were afraid to try before.”