Comment by brigandish
3 years ago
So that's a no.
From [1]:
> Fear of Decisions
> Decisions are the first step to failure, and nobody wants to fail. But decisions must be made. How does this dichotomy resolve itself? Meetings. Endless meetings and emails, planning documents, pre-planning documents, post-planning documents, meeting documents, and endless discussion of all the things by all the people all the time. The thinking goes, if everyone is involved in the decision-making process, then when something inevitably goes wrong, there’s no individual person to blame! Problem solved.
Also from [1]:
> Crowdthinking
> If you are in a group of Japanese people and ask a question, you will sometimes witness the following sequence of events: > > Everybody looks around at other people > One person begins to suggest something slightly > Slight or emphatic agreement in a domino-effect across the group > > The need to protect social harmony is so deeply ingrained in society that sometimes even in friendly events this will happen, not just at work. This often works well for social questions, but anything work-related will probably best be asked 1:1.
From [2]:
> “It’s not only about the etiquette,” says Yuko Morimoto, a consultant with Japan Intercultural Consulting, a Japan-focused firm that helps foreign companies work effectively with each other. What’s really important is understanding the different styles of communication that different cultures have. Like American’s reputation for being direct. And the Japanese’ predilection for what Morimoto says is just the opposite. The Japanese, say Morimoto, often say no to saying no.
> “They feel hesitant to say I don’t like your product,” Morimoto says. “So they say something like, ‘Oh that’s a good idea. Let us think about it.'”
> “Yes” in Japan doesn’t mean the same thing as “yes” in English. Instead, notes Morimoto, it could mean, “We just met, and I don’t think it’s polite for me to say no right away.”
> “Or they say, ‘Yes, yes.’ But yes means, ‘Yes, I’m hearing you.’ It doesn’t necessarily mean, ‘Yes, I like it,’” she says. “It can be yes-yes, or it can an iffy-yes, or it can be a no-yes.”
> To decipher what’s really being said, you need more information, Morimoto says. Was another meeting scheduled? Was a price agreed on? Was a contract signed? The Japanese, she notes, are more risk-averse than Americans. They want consensus. So you can expect that a Japanese company will take its time making decisions and making sure everyone is on board with them.
Finally, because I think I've helped you enough, every Thursday this[3] Reddit sub publishes a complaint thread. You can learn an awful lot about Japanese work culture from it, and from the regular posts about strange work behaviour, without ever having to leave your home.
[1] https://xevix.medium.com/gaijin-engineer-in-tokyo-aaa9be8919...
[2] https://www.marketplace.org/2015/08/11/world/etiquette-and-r...
That's a lot sources and I appreciate the effort, but also r/japanlife is a cesspool of people who basically have difficulties to adapt to a foreign culture. It's not a phenomenon specific to Japan, in any country there will be a pool of foreigners staying within their community and sharing/taking advices internally instead of participating in native communities.
Tales of the NHK guy coming for subscription is a good example of that spirit. Every soul in Japan gets NHK visits, just tell it to your friends. Why does that need to end on reddit.
On the "gaijin in Tokyo" experience, I was in an US firm and fucking meeting hell with 20 people in the room and no decision taking within weeks was par for the course. That guy came to Japan for a startup gig, did he even work in the same kind of setups in his origin country ?
I had a look at the rest of the blog, and that's just basic culture shock. Sometimes I feel we should stick a name to it, like we did for the "Paris Syndrome"
From your intercultural consultant quote:
> What’s really important is understanding the different styles of communication that different cultures have.
PS: I kinda love the view from the other side, where accepting foreign workers is basically a long road of training them to fit not just in the company, but in society in general
https://www.yume-tec.co.jp/column/その他/863
> That's a lot sources and I appreciate the effort, but also r/japanlife is a cesspool of people who basically have difficulties to adapt to a foreign culture. It's not a phenomenon specific to Japan, in any country there will be a pool of foreigners staying within their community and sharing/taking advices internally instead of participating in native communities.
That may be true but that would be to underplay the difficulty of integration in Japan specifically, especially compared to other places. The vast majority of foreigners leave within 2 years and very few settle long term, that is not a phenomena I've seen so starkly in other places I've lived in Asia.
> On the "gaijin in Tokyo" experience, I was in an US firm and fucking meeting hell with 20 people in the room and no decision taking within weeks was par for the course.
Again, that may be true, but that doesn't mean that:
a) it's representative of US work culture
b) it's not representative of Japanese work culture
I'm British and I've worked in places that certainly have too many meetings, not enough decision making or responsibility taken, but that is nothing compared to Japan. It's simply on another level here and no amount of saying "it happened to me too elsewhere" is going to change that.
> The vast majority of foreigners leave within 2 years and very few settle long term, that is not a phenomena I've seen so starkly in other places I've lived in Asia.
I'm looking at the OECD stats here: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=MIG
Looking at a before pandemic year (2018), that's 519 683 of migrants. Korea has 495 079, and that's basically on par with the UK and twice as much as France (provided France is twice as small in many metrics).
I don't give too much credit to the exact numbers, but Japan has a nonetheless a serious amount of foreigners, mostly from other Asian countries. They blend in much more than western foreigners so it's harder to tell from the look of it. To note there still is a culture shock and I had Chinese coworkers pretty heated up about many aspects, but they were pretty fast to understand how to make things work out.
I don't know your life, but if you traveled enough and got invited to work in a Japanese company, I'd assume you have a relatively high profile and the company inviting you wasn't some small scrappy business.
Big enough businesses are also traditionally slow and cumbersome, they have no incentive for speed and boldness, and if you touch any of the bigger companies making significant change just requires a ton of politics. I really believe that's basically the same everywhere. People might feel it's less static in Europe or USA because of more flashy colors, diversity and more buzz, but try looking at any company of the same size as Panasonic and look at what they're actually doing, and it's usually "not much more" (Think about Ford splitting out a separate EV division from the mother structure because nothing would happen otherwise)
On the people who stay long term, I think it's extremely difficult to judge depending on your position. In particular if you joined "expats" groups and made friends there, the probability a bunch of them leave after a while is usually higher.
I only sporadically met a few foreigners here and there, but 20 years later most of them have families and built a career. But they were not the type to spend their week-end in Roppongi bars either.
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