In early June, Hideki Shono, a 36-year-old reporter at the Tokyo branch of Nishinippon Newspaper Co., a major regional paper based in Fukuoka, got a shock when he met his boss at a coffee shop near the Finance Ministry, his beat at the time.
Shono was told he would be sent to work for a while at Softbank Corp. as part of a personnel exchange program. He had thought his boss would be assigning him to his next beat.
Nishinippon Shimbun and Softbank, a major information communication company that holds Yahoo Japan Corp., a portal site, introduced an employee-exchange system last summer, an unusual move for firms in different industries without capital relations.