Placing people in Japan
If you are sending
someone to Japan
Japan is one of the safest and most polite countries
you can send someone to. That is not the same
as it being easy to work in.
Placing people in Japan
Japan is one of the safest and most polite countries
you can send someone to. That is not the same
as it being easy to work in.
This page is about something that does not appear in market entry reports, and that nobody asks me about until it has already happened.
Last week I went into a ramen shop near my home, late at night. It was my first time there and I was fumbling with the ordering machine. The young man working there helped me out.
"Rice is over there. It's free."
"Toilet is that way."
He spoke Japanese, casually. He finished with the equivalent of "thanks!" and "take care!" — the friendly register, not the formal one. I thought he was good at his job. I found out later he is a student from Canada.
Then three drunk men came in. One asked him to break a note. When it was done, the young man handed it back with the same cheerful "take care!"
That was it.
That was the whole offence.
"That's not how you speak to people." "Who does he think he is." "Apologise." "Let me teach you some manners." His two friends tried to calm him down and one of them eventually apologised on his behalf. The man was not satisfied. When the ramen arrived he was still going, and by then he had moved on to the young man's appearance and to where he was from.
The young man kept working. When the friend apologised, he said "it's fine, really."
It was not fine. He said it anyway.
If it were, it would not be worth writing. Japan is not hostile to foreigners. This is not an everyday event, and two of those three men behaved perfectly reasonably.
I am writing it because almost every company I work with eventually puts a person in Japan — an engineer for an installation, a manager for a first store, someone to sit with a distributor for six months. And the briefing they are given covers visas, housing, tax and business card etiquette.
It does not cover this.
That young man broke no rule that any reasonable person would recognise. He was warm instead of formal. That was enough. Inside that sentence is most of what makes Japan difficult to work in.
How formal to be, with whom, in which situation. Almost no company documents this. Japanese new hires absorb it over months by watching the people around them. The same method is quietly expected of your person, who has fewer months and less context.
Narrower than a learner can perceive. In Japanese, "friendly" and "disrespectful" sit very close together grammatically. People who have studied the language often learn the casual forms first, because that is what friends use with them. They are not wrong. They are in the wrong setting.
This is the part that does real damage. Inside a company, a manager says "use the polite form here" and it is over in one sentence. In practice the correction comes from a customer, on the floor, in front of other people. It stops being instruction and becomes humiliation.
He said "it's fine, really." Not because of language. Because he judged that smoothing it over was his job. The shop manager probably never heard about it. And you will not hear about the equivalent from your own person.
One incident does not make anyone resign. Three or five, over a year, do. And when that person leaves, the reason recorded will be something like family circumstances, or a better offer at home.
So the real cause never enters your records, and the next placement fails the same way. You cannot fix a pattern you have never been shown.
This is why I am sceptical when a company tells me their Japan assignment failed because the market was difficult. Sometimes that is true. Often nobody asked the person what their week was actually like.
Not more cultural training. Most companies reach for training first, and it has limited effect, because the problem is not that nobody explained the rules. It is that what happens does not travel back up.
More etiquette briefings. A phrasebook. A welcome dinner. None of these are bad, but none of them prevent a customer from doing what that man did, and it is those moments that accumulate into a resignation.
A route for reporting, built before they arrive. Their instinct is to absorb it and say nothing, so "you can always tell me" is not enough. You have to ask, on a schedule, with a specific question.
Three things are usually sufficient.
Replacing the person costs more
than knowing why the last one left.
I had a bus to catch, so I left before it ended. On the way out I asked him in English where he was from, told him not to worry about it and that I had not minded at all. Then I walked home. That is the part of this story I am least comfortable with.
And it comes back to me. When I work abroad, I speak more casually than I would in Japanese. Nobody has ever said anything to me. That does not mean nobody felt it.
Respecting someone and imposing your own standard on them are not the same thing. If his tone genuinely bothered that man, one quiet sentence would have settled it.
If you are placing someone in Japan
I am based in Tokyo and work with overseas companies entering the Japanese market, including the part that happens after the contract is signed. If you are about to send someone here, I am happy to look at the briefing you are giving them.