It must be five months since I wrote now. I’ve been through a lot of stress at work and have had an early mid-life crisis. I figured it would be better to spread my mid-life crisis out into a few minor crises and get one of them over with now. The stress was caused by trying to manage 3 areas, 2 of which were coming to peak work loads at the same time, and then having to find the time to train someone to take the more mundane tasks off my hands. The solution was to head home for 3 weeks, visiting old friends and forgetting about work entirely. It worked wonders – until I walked back into the office and found it all waiting for me again. To keep up my fitness and sanity, I’ve been letting the sun wake me up at 5am and using the additional hour to cycle up the mountain. It must be working because the cutover (from wired phones to wireless phones) was completed in record time this morning – 2500 phones in 1 hour. Yesterday I was told that I looked very relaxed compared to a couple of months ago, especially considering I was about to undertake an extremely sensitive cutover that would be a company first for sheer size. Now it’s all paid off and I can sit here babysitting for a few more days.
Thanks to everyone who put me up, took me out, or just took the time to catch up while I was in Oz. It was great to be back, despite the feeling that I was a tourist in my home town. The bike ride was definitely a highlight, though I found 2 weeks was a bit too long. At 9 days I was keen for more, but at 13 days and 917km, I was happy to catch a train back to Sydney and avoid the mud. Instead of pedalling the last 250km, I spent the 3 days stocking up on CDs and books and cleaning everything for the trip back – something I would otherwise have had to do on Sunday evening!! It was about as good a holiday as I could have hoped for. I intend to visit again sometime later next year, so I hope to catch up with anyone I missed then.
Anyway, back to life in Japan. I believe I was telling you about a normal day and had just arrived at work.
WINDOW SEATING..
My day here starts like that for anyone else in a corporation I guess. I share a smile with one of the pretty receptionists on duty before being challenged by a guard wanting to see my ID. I generally take a moment to stare back at the lobby, which is an impressive 11 stories tall, and check out the latest damage on the stock price while waiting for the lift. Once I reach my floor, I try to sneak past the Help Desk so they can’t bombard me with problems until I’ve had a chance to at least scan my mail. I’ve come down in the world and now have a seat at the window overlooking the river mall and beyond to Kobe. The scenery is spectacular, with mountains all around to keep it in place. Just in front of the mountains, the buildings look unobtrusively small and I can pretend the cranes are giraffes – well, they have four legs and a long neck!! Closer in, there is an expanse of water before getting to the island. Right below my window is the River Mall frothing and flowing out of sight towards all the greenery. Today as I look out, they are flying ‘koi nobori’, the carp kites signifying Children’s Day. The main obstruction to all this is a very tall pink and yellow apartment block which houses the top executives. I say ‘come down’ in the world because in a true Japanese company, where the team is all-important, a window seat signifies you are at the edge of the team. The target is to be right in with the boys in the middle. Someone in the sort of seat I’m in might expect to be forced out. They’d never fire a person in Japan. They just make it so uncomfortable that you want to leave yourself. This is usually done by never giving you any work to do. Bliss!!
A person who doesn’t have enough work to do, and wants to stay near the centre, will feign being busy until all hours of the evening to show that they are important.
LUNCHTIME
Quite often it will take me until lunchtime to finish my mail (what with staring out the window because I don’t have enough work to do), but that’s not so surprising when lunch generally starts from about 11:30. For many people in this company, that means just over one hours work before lunch. Especially now that we have flex time, it’s common to start work after 10am. Starting later allows you to leave later, and as I naively found out last year before my 11 hour days, leaving early is a sure invitation for more work. So these people work for an hour before lunch, then for 8 straight hours afterwards, though for some, work is just a pretence.
MEETINGS
After lunch, I’ll often find myself in meetings. These are particularly fun when it involves a vendor as they are, in most cases, from a Japanese company. After going through the ritual security procedure and hassle of finding an available room, you quickly get down to the fun of the Meishi Dance. As soon as you walk into the room, you can see the vendor choreographing this dance in his head. As the customer, this right should be mine, but they rightly don’t trust the task to a foreigner. With all the practise I’ve been doing for the Salsa, I’d probably mess up something as simple as the Meishi Dance. I’ll describe a simple version involving just two companies (mine and one other) as I have trouble just following the version with more. I end up feeling like the large lady at the back of the aerobics class who’s always a couple of steps behind the rest.
Members from each company line up in single file. The most known member, or the highest ranking member, or the one with the most expensive suit would take the front position, everyone else lined up accordingly, down to the new hire in the green overalls at the back. The two lines then approach each other head on. This is where it gets tricky because in the confined space of a meeting room, this must be done by flowing around a table. When the two prominent members meet, they bow to each other twice. Each time they bow, one of them mumbles a few words and hands the other an object, for which the recipient looks eternally grateful. To the trained ear, the words are a greeting and self introduction. The object is of course a meishi, or name card. This first step complete, each line takes a half step forward so that there are now two couples doing the dance. This continues on until everyone has met everyone else, at which time you sit down and arrange the cards neatly in front of you so you can admire them all over again.
Traditionally, meishi is sacred and should never be carried in the back pocket, written on, thrown away, and should be carried at all times. To be caught without a meishi is to insult the other person by saying that they are not worthy to receive your gift. In practice though, I’m not the only one who regularly forgets their meishi, and I’ve seen people write directly on the meishi rather than using the more appropriate post-it. And if you’ve worked for more than a year, you must cull about 90% of the meishi you’ve received to be able to shut your drawer.
DOOR SEAT
Back to the importance of seating. I glossed over the fact that there is a ritual involved in choosing where to sit. I glossed over it because I didn’t know it existed until late last year. I blush with shame to think of all the times I’ve insulted my guests by giving them the view. I first recognised there was something strange going on when I was visiting one of my vendors. I was shown in and offered the 3 seater lounge. My account manager then took the lounge chair opposite, while his offsider, who does most of the work, pulled up a wooden chair. I decided to play it cool, acting as though I wasn’t at all aware that anything was out of the ordinary – which was just as well, because there wasn’t. Later, when the GM and company president came in to meet me, they took the two lounge chairs opposite me, one of which had been vacated by my lowly account manager (who’s about 60) in favour of another wooden chair. There was still another lounge chair to my side, and I had a spare seat either side of me on the full lounge. This showed me how much rank had to do with seating.
Taking more notice then, I went to the effort of giving my guests the best seat in the room for meetings. They would graciously accept the seat facing the full length windows, while I squeezed through the gap between the table and wall, then stepped over the cables piled up on the floor to take the seat facing the door. Eventually, when I’d done this a few times, a colleague who had come to a meeting with me early stopped me from placing my notebook in the far position. ‘You should always give the guest the honour of facing the door’, she told me. ‘No one has said anything so far, because it would be rude to complain, and they understand that being a gaijin you don’t know the protocol, but it embarrasses me every time you take that seat.’ I was lucky the vendor was late because it was a few minutes before I could speak again.
LEAVING
On some days, this will take me right through to home time. As I said earlier, I used to leave early, but I soon realised the folly of that. I usually try and push through working until at least one other person has left and now I count myself lucky if I get away at 6:30, whether I start at 9am, 8am or even 7am. In a true Japanese company, it would be the boss who leaves first and everyone else has to look busy until they do. Your immediate boss of course, wouldn’t leave until his boss did, and so on up the chain. That new hire in the green overalls may not get out until midnight. P&G seems to work the other way around. My manager often stays until 9pm, while everyone else is out the door at 8pm. Then everyone heads for their respective homes. In a Japanese company, most employees would head out for ‘team building’, an activity largely consisting of sake and singing.
CUSTOMER FOCUS
I left one strange situation out because it generally doesn’t occur on a normal work day. I often have to work over the holidays making major system changes. Actually, I just sit around and wait while my vendor does the work. The other day I had to let my NTT account manager carry a piece of heavy equipment out to her car because she couldn’t let me, the customer, get dirty. Never mind that she was wearing a suit while I was in jeans and t-shirt. I even have difficulty going to check on the status of the work because everyone stops to pay attention to the customer. What this customer really wants, of course, is to see everyone working and to get a quick update from one person. It’s taken me a long time to train my vendors into relaxing when I’m around, but it’s much more efficient that way. One of the funny ideas the Japanese have on customer service is that more people means better work. I’ve heard of cases where a part breaks down on some equipment and when the maintenance provider is called in to fix it, they send 6 technicians. Five of them stand around watching the 6th do the work. The customer then feels better knowing that lots of experts are on hand to ensure the problem is fixed. Of course, the customer ends up paying for 5 people to stand around, but the Japanese are used to this. The high prices here must in part be due to the salaries of the people who stand in the doorways of department stores saying ‘welcome’.
Rah Rah
It seems that Rah! Rah! is part of everyday life. There’re the exercises in the morning that most companies do, like a school assembly with puff. No one does this in my building, though it’s done at the plants, but our IT contractors practice a toned down version each week. Each Help Desk manager gathers his staff around on Monday mornings to motivate them for the week ahead. I got pulled into this situation one day recently. I had 3 vendors on site for a cutover that required a lot of coordination between them. Before it all started, I called the project managers from each vendor out into the corridor for a quick run through of the day’s activities to ensure everyone was aligned and no one would inadvertently cut the phones to the fax lines taking orders. Pretty soon, everyone from every vendor had gathered round and was looking at me expectantly. I think I finished up with a lame ‘gambarimashou’ (let’s do our best), but there was a loud ‘hai’ of approval before they all turned to get started on their tasks.
Phew! That was longer than I thought. I don’t have time to cut it back so you’ll just have to take it as it is. Hope you are all well, and enjoying the cool climes down there. I’m enjoying the early Spring weather which usually only lasts a week. This is the fourth beautiful week so far.