Japan may suffer from a drastic lack of oil, minerals and young people, but there is one natural resource that the country will never run out of: adoring, moist-eyed references to Mount Fuji.

The country’s tallest mountain, a 3,776 metre high volcano, is technically dormant but relentlessly productive. For the past 1,000 years it has been the snow-capped inspiration for proverbs, etchings, wood-block prints, haiku, aphorisms, metaphors, poetic symbolism, clichés and dramatic mise-en-scènes.

Stuart Chambers, even when perched on Fuji’s crest, can barely manage a limerick.

Posing ruggedly at the summit for a photo, the president of Nippon Sheet Glass (NSG), embarks bravely with the line: “A chief exec went to Mount Fuji . . .”, before it clicks that not a single word in the English language rhymes with the name of Japan’s iconic peak. His fellow mountaineers, including a JPMorgan fund manager and me, are too busy eating handfuls of sugar and gulping from a canister of oxygen to be of much help.

Attempts at a serious interview at 3,776 metres are mildly hampered by the combination of thin air and nausea. A question about the future financing requirements of NSG as it tackles the bleak reality of global downturn emerges as: “So ... Stuart ... [wheeze] ... are you [pant] ... going to ... [gasp] ... do a ... [puff] ... rights issue?”

His answer is the workmanlike response of someone who has recently scaled Kilimanjaro and will, exactly a week after his Fuji ascent, be joining his son for the “Three Peaks” endurance feat of climbing Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon all within one 24-hour period.

“Pounding headache? Tight chest? Lethargic? It’s the altitude. I know the signs. We’ve got to kill 600 metres, pronto,” he says, reaching for his Alpenstock. Mountain melodramas are also quickly cut short. Earlier, when I’d begun to fall about five minutes off the pace, a Captain Oates-style insistence that the others forge ahead elicited the Chambers managerial diktat: “Bollocks. We all get there together.”

Despite the majestic setting and his clear, grim-faced enjoyment of the experience, mountaineering is not Mr Chambers’s first love. A keen sailor, he hands over his mobile phone to show off pictures of a beloved 57ft yacht in which he is planning a transatlantic crossing this year.

Mr Chambers’s Fuji climb is about far more than a bit of weekend entertainment. It is fun, but it is competitive, aggressively hungry fun with a dollop of professional imperative in the mix. Subconsciously, he may have been following the advice of Miyamoto Musashi, the 16th-century swordsman, who said that “with your mind as high as Mount Fuji you can see all things clearly: all the forces that shape events; not just the things happening near to you”.

Climbing Fuji and seeing what all the fuss was about is one of many waystations in Mr Chambers’s quest to “get” a Japan whose business establishment he has parachuted into. If the Fuji summit post office had been open, and he had sent a postcard home, one feels the message might have been somewhere between “wish you were here” and “know the enemy”.

The Fuji climb schedule, which starts precisely 12 hours after NSG’s annual shareholders’ meeting and a week before the start of the climbing season, is charged with urgency and precision. It begins in Tokyo’s Roppongi district at 5am, where bedraggled partygoers are heading home. The official timetable then runs: minibus to Mount Fuji fifth station; breakfast; climb Yoshida course to summit in five hours; pose for pictures; descend in three; bathe in hot spring; minibus to Tokyo; steaks at the Oak Door restaurant; taxi to Legends sports bar; catch the second half of the British Lions against the Springboks; collapse.

On the way up, the conversation is limited by lung capacity. There is light banter (about Clint Eastwood), the occasional burst of song (Boney M, the Rolling Stones) and functional chatter (give me a swig of that). On the way down, Mr Chambers gets into his stride, talking enthusiastically about double glazing, electric cars, photovoltaic (solar) cells and the huge growth potential of all three. On the solar side, particularly, he allows himself expansive optimism despite the various miseries afflicting NSG’s main auto and construction glass businesses. He describes “massive, explosive growth coming down the track” and “a super opportunity for glass” over the next ten to fifteen years as China and India expand production of solar cells and companies such as NSG maintain their technical superiority in specialist glass production.

Having seen at first hand the many shortcomings of some aspects of Japanese work culture, and its destructive impact on family life, he is also clear that macro growth must come through broader changes. “Japan has got some big issues to deal with,” he says, “if they don’t want to go down the road of raising immigration — and that looks likely — then the country needs to produce more babies or find ways of really raising its productivity. If it doesn’t manage either of those, it’s doomed in the longer term.”

Another of the big issues facing corporate Japan — beyond its immediate ability to ride out the global slump — is the question of how high shareholders’ interests rank in the priority list for chief executives.

In the move between the London-listed Pilkington and the Tokyo-listed NSG – the latter bought and absorbed the former three years ago — Mr Chambers has been culturally forced to temper his emphasis on shareholders somewhat, but remains a way ahead of the rest of the Japanese pack. Crashing car sales around the world, combined with the housing slump in the United States, Europe and Japan, have maimed the NSG share price, leaving it 50 per cent lower than when he took over as president. Those circumstances, unfortunately, have prevented Mr Chambers from proving a point about virtuous circles and his belief that shareholder interests can be aligned ultimately with those of customers, employees and society.

Floating in the ether before the climb was Akio Toyoda’s unsettling debut speech as the president of Toyota the previous week. It comes up in conversation at about 3,100 metres. The problem, from a shareholder’s point of view — and for Mr Chambers, as an agent of change — was not the carmaker’s prediction that conditions would be tough for another two years, but his avowed goal of “returning to profit as early as possible so we can pay our taxes”.

Nice if you’re the Government, Mr Chambers says, but a bit unsettling for shareholders. “The wow factor when you come into a Japanese company is the obsession and concern with quality,” he adds. “If I could spray the rest of our operations with the commitment to quality that exists in Japan, that would move us forward. In some places like Brazil, we’re already there, but for a lot of places that is what we need to be doing. The downside is that they don’t give a hoot about shareholder value. Fine. Let’s bottle the good one and inject the other one.”

In his prescription for Japan, Mr Chambers suggests that his own experience and “the whole NSG-Pilkington story” of appointing a foreign chief executive might be a useful model if the country wants to get serious about international growth and a transition to greater productivity.

Mr Chambers is the third nonJapanese to be appointed chief executive of a large, listed Japanese company. The other two — Carlos Ghosn, of Nissan, and Sir Howard Stringer,of Sony — joined him four days before the climb for dinner and conversation that turned to the frustration of navigating Japanese corporate culture from the bridge.

They have taken diverse approaches to the challenge, in large part because of the very different natures of the businesses they run. For Mr Ghosn, it was about breaking the shackles of wretchedly inefficient supply chains arising from Japan’s invisible lattice of business relationships. For Sir Howard, it was about fighting natural Japanese insularity by coaxing entire business divisions out of their silos. For Mr Chambers, it is about getting practical, factory-floor realities throughout the new company to match the global ambitions that drove the Japanese group to buy Pilkington. Those ambitions, it is now apparent, were not well mapped out.

Exactly a year since becoming chief executive of NSG, the plan is becoming clearer. Glass, he explains, has a huge but underestimated role in the “greening” of the global economy and that is where the company can thrive. The widespread installation of low emittance (low-E) glass, he says, could make climate change commitments achievable at a stroke: the potential is especially exciting in China, where interest in glass as an energy-saving material has only just begun to gain traction. Japan’s failure to embrace that technology — double glazing is used in less than 1 per cent of its 47 million dwellings — is a source of visible frustration for Mr Chambers.

“Governments need to acknowledge that between 40 and 50 per cent of energy that is generated in a country — a developed country — ends up going into and flying out of buildings. So instead of putting a slab of glass in, you put low-e double glazing and you’re five times more effective at keeping energy in the building. If they sorted the fenestration of buildings out, the problem would be done.”

On electric cars, too, he paints a cheerful picture, highlighting the latent demand for lighter, stronger glass for windows as electric cars become a serious commercial proposition. But a more interesting business line may emerge from the batteries — specifically, the large number of glass separators needed as carmakers push the performance of batteries harder.

“Electric vehicles will go from nothing to ten million in 20 years,” Mr Chambers says. “It doesn’t sound very much, but if you have the lion’s share of the separators, you have a very nice business, thank you.”

The Fuji climb runs astonishingly close to the timetable, with the only weak spot being the five star marbled Australian sirloin back in Tokyo. That arrives slightly late, pushing the entire schedule back by about ten minutes and allowing him to watch only fifteen minutes of rugby. The icy summit of Japan’s tallest mountain was the moment for flighty thoughts, light-headed jollity and blue-sky thinking. In the beer and oxygen-rich tumult of the Oak Door, the British chief executive’s thoughts are comprehensively back at sea-level. “I can’t believe I’m missing a Lion’s game. Nobody at home would believe me,” he informs his steak.

CV

Born: May 25, 1956

Education: University College, London, BSc Applied Physics, 1977

Career: 1977-88: Shell; 1988-96: Mars Corporation (latterly vice-president, sales & marketing, Mars Electronics International); 1997-98: general manager, Pilkington UK; 1998-2000: president of Pilkington Building Products Worldwide; 2000-07: group chief executive Pilkington; June 2008: group chief executive Nippon Sheet Glass (NSG Group).

Non-executive directorships: Smiths Group (head of remuneration committee).

Family: married to Nicolette Horrocks, one son, two daughters

Other interests: Sailing, supporting Sale Sharks rugby club