Introduction
I regard myself very lucky to have landed this job – a rare opportunity which came perhaps a little too easily, I fear, though one I am not about to squander in haste. I’ve been working my mouse-hand to the bone in a slightly-larger-than-boutique studio in Tokyo, Japan, for Japanese clients playing their cards in the international game of Consumer and Professional Electronics. Toys. The fact that shopping for toys are a markedly large number of foreigners, i.e. Non-Japanese, seems feasible as to why I, a foreigner in Japan, was offered the position ahead of a handful of native applicants. English as a mother tongue plus experience in the industry abroad apparently appealed to a group of Directors looking to expand their company’s horizons and keep up with Globalisation, as it were, on behalf of their clients. As I endure the Visa Renewal process, the Letter of Reason for my employment at the company required by the Japanese Government states exactly that – somewhat diplomatic, I like to think.
Without any Japanese communicative ability at all, I would have been hard pressed to pass the interview stage without a lot of hand gestures and balderdash. That being said, my Japanese is still a formidable distance from fluent (there were on my part several rather embarrassing misunderstandings during the interview) and has only now, as I work with a team of Japanese speakers on a daily basis, started to show signs of improvement toward any level which might be acknowledged as possessing any resemblance akin to proficiency. I realise I have been magnificently lazy when it comes to actually sitting and studying the language itself, hence continued efforts to cradle my conscience and convince myself that I am absorbing the language via the pores along with all the many facets of Japanese culture as I sustain a life here. Language, of course, is an integral part of culture and I have therefore managed to affirm a basic level of communication, albeit positively clumsy and undignified in delivery. It was such that when I received a phone call from the Senior Director a few days after the interview, I misunderstood and quite reasonably assumed that I was being bid good luck in my job-hunt, as it was to continue, when in fact he had remarked he thought it good luck on their part that I should have found them and was asking if I would like to start next month.
The crew has been extremely patient and good-natured regarding my apparent foreignness and blundering Japanese, making a superb effort to communicate with what precious English they remember studying at school or have subsequently picked up since. High-school was a relatively long time ago for some and others will remain old dogs, yet most are impressively helpful and still a few see it as a perfect opportunity to iterate their English. I delight in returning this show of kindness when I can lend a hand to a colleague struggling to navigate their way through an English-only website, or make sense of an email from the Australian office.
It is this nature of the studio and the crew that leads me to question the authenticity of this particular Japanese company, what with the eerie absence of dark-suited robotic creatures and cute, scantily-clad Office Ladies. I definitely wouldn’t have minded if there were one or many cute, scantily-clad OLs, or even a dark-suited robotic creature buzzing round the office for the sake of novelty. I’m sure they survive, I think I might catch the train with some of them in the morning. Alas, almost all previous notions of stereotypical Japanese company ethic I had held before entering the company either seem very reluctant to surface or, simply put, do not exist. I liken this to many stereotypical notions I have experienced before and after the fact. Why, then, do we not just do away with stereotypes altogether? They seem merely to confuse matters.
There are of course diverse cultural differences between myself and many Japanese people which will at times influence the dynamic of the workplace, differences which I intermittently feel the Japanese would prefer to safeguard amongst themselves. There is also one, rather poignant, Japanese company ethic which does endure as an uncompromising reality within this company – that is the long, the very, very long, arduous hours.
- 
