Like "gemutlich" (a German adjective describing fireside coziness), the Japanese word "omotenashi" is hard to define but easy to picture. It's a cashier greeting you nicely rather than chatting with colleagues and tossing your purchase across the counter — an all-encompassing focus on service and caring professionalism.

Long hailed as the epitome of Japanese quality, the concept is for the first time coming in for a beating. More and more Japanese are wondering whether human-scale omotenashi makes sense in an age when Alexa, Siri and Japan's own robotics are seeking to provide a frictionless experience through technology. I'd argue that the term belongs in our vocabulary and, in fact, offers a key to growth and prosperity.

Skeptics make a persuasive case. While the spirit of omotenashi contributes to high service quality, it requires higher labor intensity per output, fueling low productivity both in the service sector and in white-collar work overall. According to the Japan Productivity Center, the per-hour productivity of Japanese workers is only about two-thirds that of their American counterparts. Japan ranked 20th of 35 OECD countries in 2017 and has been stuck at the lowest level in the Group of Seven ever since the statistics became available in 1970.