I found this community by chance, and all the stories brought back memories of some of my craziest moments working in Japanese companies… so I thought I might share.
Background: I have lived and worked in Japan for over a decade. I speak/read/write the language quite well, and so mainly ended up working at Japanese companies, which is… quite an experience. Let’s go over the highlights reel:
I worked for several years for an online travel company. I was hired to start up operations for a specific market, and created booking pages for all the various products.
This place had some WEIRD rules. The first is that we all had to be in the office by 8:30 (usually starting time in Japan is 9:00), because one specific customer service team had to be there from 8:00 due to regional time differences. Apparently it would be “unfair” to them to be the only ones coming in early
What this actually meant is that the company got extra work out of everyone, since the ending time was closer to 18:00… although this being Japan, unpaid overtime of at least an hour a day was basically compulsory. You only got paid for overtime after you had accumulated at 20 hours of it per month.
The second crazy thing is that, despite being insanely busy, twice a month each department would have to get together and discuss a chapter of a “business” book the CEO loooooved Now, “business” is in quotes because it was a bunch of self-congratulatory bullshit by an old Japanese dude who LITERALLY admitted in his book to not paying his early employees health insurance or pensions, because “we were building something big”… gross.
I took to calling up my chattiest client right before each meeting and then giving a great performance of “oh no, I am on this important call, ya’ll go ahead and I will catch up later” fortunately we got a new COO who immediately stopped the stupid cult-y book report meetings (she was awesome)
Like a lot of Japanese companies, there was a huge focus of busy work over actual productivity. The greatest example of this (which still rankles, to be honest) is how the top brass decided that we just HAD to have the largest number of products based in Japan for an English speaking market.
This meant that my team of 2 and I spent an entire year creating page after page (literally thousands of booking pages) for things that people visiting Japan would have NO interest in. Random experiences in places that take several hours by car to reach, dozens of the same type of tea ceremony so that it is impossible to actually select one, and tons of experiences that did not offer English guidance. It was insanely dumb.
I spoke to them multiple times about quality over quantity, and how the sheer cost of creating all this would never be covered and would just put us in the red, but they were convinced this was the way forward
(Fast forward to after I left the company and COVID hit. They shut down the ENTIRE English side of the business, and once they reopened removed all those thousands of pages we had spent so long creating. Grrrr…)
Another glorious occasion is when they decided they wanted to expand, and so bought out a competitor. This was an international company, where no one spoke Japanese. None of the the top brass (except the awesome COO) spoke any English.
Cue me being suddenly promoted to “regional manager” and having to bridge between a stick-in-the-mud middle aged male Japanese manager and a young, European woman who was used to a much faster and flexible way of doing things. Things just… did not compute.
This led to a nasty case of burnout, and I was put on medical leave for a month. (I will say that medical benefits in Japan are pretty great, one of the reasons I stay).
But the craziest thing is that I soon realized that they had bought out this competitor without doing a stitch of due diligence! I am no mastermind, but before buying a multi-million dollar company, I would certainly check to make sure they were solvent, wouldn’t you?
Well it wasn’t, had in fact been in the red for many years. After spending a fortune trying to integrate the two systems, they eventually ran it into the ground and closed it, firing dozens of really awesome people, some of whom had literally built that company from the ground up.
At that point I knew I needed to get out. Fortunately I had started getting more side work in my actual desired field (entertainment related), so I saved like crazy for half a year, lined up a few freelance gigs to give me some extra income and then quit.
They were shocked and despite me making them literal millions for several years, the old dudes were basically like “yeah, see ya… bet you will come back when things don’t work out”. Charming.
Fast forward to 2023. I am now doing the thing I have trained my whole life to do, performing regularly all over the place. I also branched out into other entertainment related work (sorry can’t give details, as I do have a teensy, tiny bit of fame), and am making a really good living, with minimal stress, no more horrible rush hour train commutes (ugh ugh ugh) and lots of down time for my introvert brain. So lucky, much blessed.
Guess who calls me up? Why yes, it would indeed be the travel company!
You see, they let go all their multi-lingual staff during COVID and now need them back. Ha.
So my former manager calls me up, all forced smiles and fake concern. “Oh, you must be having such a hard time right now”. I briefly inform him that I am actually doing pretty good, which threw him for a loop.
He then proceeds to try and sell me on coming back to work for them, either part time or full time. I was ready to just gently decline until he said: “of course though, we couldn’t take you back at your original salary, since you have a blank of several years since the last time you worked with us”.
Oh sweet summer child… I have no intention of maintaining bridges with this company, so in highly formal Japanese (which is a way of basically shunning someone) I explained that I am currently earning double what I ever made when working there, in about half the hours (albeit that was 70 hours a week!) and that I was actually so busy with my own projects that I was looking to take on some help myself.
The sheer dopamine you guys… I lived off of it for a week.
Hope you enjoyed my tales of horror in the land of the rising sun. I do have more, so might share them at a later point